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Yes, same here in terms of conditions. Totally right in terms of the visual views being so much better. Visually in Ha there was plenty of fine flux lines arcing around the AR, bright plage areas which were so much brighter in reality. Well worth looking into, the views can be amazing.

Great image! With regard to your lens group now turning, this happened to me and I was advised not to disturb the corrector plate housing, but instead remove the primary mirror cell and put my hand up the tube to hold the secondary assembly so it could be tightened back up. This was all carried out successfully. Having said that, I note you have a RASA11 as opposed to my RASA8, so it could be a question of if your arms are long enough to reach up inside the tube.

Those are spectacular!

Good to see you caught it ... 😀 I always bung my captures through PIPP before letting AS!3 loose on them , it'll stabilise the AVI by tracking a region of your choosing and crop the frames to a size of your choosing , as well as sorting the frames by quality and reordering them to make things a lot quicker i the stacking phase I find. If I have multiple videos to play with I PIPP one while AS!3 stacks one and so on.

Imaged with my Askar 120 APO and ASI 585MC (uncooled) with a x1 flattener fitted and an Astronomic L2 UV/IR cut filter. Guider via a TS Optics 80mm guide scope and an ASI120MM guide cam. NINA used for capture. PHD2 for guiding. M57: 24x 240 second subs (gain 252 with an offset of 25) M64: 12x 240 S and 14x 120s (from March) gain and offset as above. Processing in PI. Correct only with RC Astro software with noise reduction to finish off.

I use the reducer I have - an SCT f6.3 reducer. It seems to work OK... I just got the RC, it's been great on the little targets (and there's a lot of them ).

I have a much better Western horizon than usual. I had a reasonable view of a 1.3 day old Moon last night. I was able to see the craters Humboldt, Hecataeus and Neper. I think I also got a glimpse of Mare Marginis. Cheers Ian

if you come up with any bright ideas on the last bit then let me know - i'm not sure i need to (i haven't had 1st light on my SCT yet) but if i need to then i want to try and do it without sticking anything to the OTA itself... mmmh.

Thanks. For planetary imaging I use the drift method but for this particular capture I tried to move the dob or at least keep the sunspot in the middle of the sensor as I couldn't otherwise stabilise it in as!4. For this image I had an 8,000 frame capture and stacked the best 5%. The passing clouds were not playing ball to get more captures.

M40. That's very much all l could manage this morning - but even more hazy. 😊

Hi Francis, can you say what eyepieces you already have please?

Not sure how I missed this thread until now. Sorry for all the reactions to old posts. It was hard to not like every photo. Here is my small collection:

Lots of detail! A manual dob? Are you moving the scope at all during capture or letting the sun drift over the chip? How many frames are you getting to stack?

Congrats! I don't expect to ever part with my Equinox 120. Great scope! And it's saved me a lot of money because it's already quite big and tells me that perhaps my frequent wish to get a 150 mm doesn't need to come true! The scope looks in good nick, I quite like that case too. Enjoy!

Different apps use different forecast models. In the Windy.com app you can see some of these models. Here is the cloud forecast for mid-night tonight in my region for 3 different models. It’s no surprise that they show different cloud cover. However, if the weather is more predictable then they can generally agree.

I've been having a play with my new ZWO ASI533MC camera, and I paid my annual visit to Kuiper Belt objects Makemake and Haumea, capturing them on the nights of 8th and 9th May. I always like to look for Pluto too, but thats very low down in Capricorn and will only visible in a narrow window for me in July/August. 250mm f/4.8 Newtonian, ZWO ASI533MC camera, 14 frames @ 30 second exposures. Field of view about 30 x 30 arc minutes. This is 136472 Makemake, which is currently in Coma Berenices at magnitude 17.1. It's the second brightest Kuiper Belt object after Pluto, and with a diameter about 2/3 of Pluto but was only discovered in 2005. This is a closeup animation of its movement over the 24 hour period. The wee galaxy above it is PGC1662663, apparently 2 billion light years away and receding from us at about 10.7% of light speed! And this is 136108 Haumea, currently in Bootes, discovered in 2004/05, with some dispute about who saw it first (google it!). Apparently it has a very fast rotation of 3.9 hours. This is a closeup animation of its movement over the 24 hour period.

Yes, it's just that M13 was the best I had ever seen it. I'm going to put the insulation on this weekend whilst it's cloudy. I'm just thinking of how I'm going to insulate the rear of the scope 🤔.

I had a great time in Texas, even though the day of the eclipse was a bit touch and go with the clouds. I was tracking weather patterns setting off from Austin and ended up at a ranch near Gatesville. Just a dozen of people around me. Fortunately I had already watched a cloudless eclipse in '17, so in a sense this one behind clouds gave me something different. The most obvious thing was a refraction/rainbow effect, which, as I found out is called "corona" (yes, just like the sun's atmosphere) and caused by water droplets in the clouds. So most of my photos featured 2 different coronas... So here's for example how my diamond ring shots look like: About half of my ~200 shots (automated with Eclipse Orchestrator) were not useful. Most of my brackets were very cloudy so couldn't really be HDR-merged, but here is what I could get out of the least cloudy bracket: If you are curious about more details and photos, I put them up a blog post.

And the proms are better seen not through cloud! 😀 I recall now that thin cloud can zap proms. I'd just forgotten. The prom looked plenty bright to me at F7 and F9 yesterday. I'm used to trying to see spiral structure in faint galaxies, so proms aren't much of a challenge for me usually! I remember reading up the technical details on the Quark and fussing over optimal focal ratio. But having used scopes from F6 to F9 (F6, F7, F7.5, F9) hundreds of times, swapping over white light and h-alpha sometimes (obviously with the scopes capped and pointing away from the sun!) I found them in practice all perfectly usable, for proms and solar disc. My favourite scope for visual with the Quark is the F9 100 mm, even though the F7.5 120 mm has more aperture as well. My wife agrees.

Had to give todays sunspot a go even though there is a layer of cloud And zoomed in.....

Very nice details on the closeup and it has changed a bit since yesterday.

I find Clearoutside overestimates the various cloud levels. I suspect Scopenights gets their data from the Met office which only counts thicker cloud. Sat24 shows what's actually up there!

Hello could anyone recommend an eyepiece for DSO’s, for a skywatcher 6” Dob? I am in an area with moderate light pollution. Long eye relief would be welcome. Price range about £100. Thanks! Francis

Crawled out of bed to catch the early blue ... 🌞 Even got to play up close for a change ...

Nice, I've also got a RC6. I've just changed the original focuser for a Baader Diamond Steeltrack and Sesto Senso focus motor. I use mine at 1370mm, which reducer are you using? I managed a Ring nebula and a Tulip nebula last year but haven't done anything this year, partly due to the weather and a long Astro trip to Portugal. Did a few galaxies early last year. Anne