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I've just been having a quick amble around the double stars in Orion now that my ED120 refractor has cooled down. The seeing seems to be absolutely top notch here currently Text book high power star images. A real pleasure to observe Rigel, Alnitak, E & F Trapezium, etc, etc. Really clean split of 52 Orionis at 360x !!!! - 2.5mm setting with the 2mm-4mm Nagler zoom. Steady as well - wafer thin dark thread between the airy disks. Dawes limit for the scope is .97 arc second and I believe 52 Orionis is around 1 arc second in separation so no complaints at all here

As most have already stated first run of clear nights ..only to have a full moon hampering all the little faint fuzzies up there .. So I thought I'd try my newly acquired narrowband filters on a easy to capture target ...the rosette nebula. Gear and image details are as follows.. Altair Wave 102mm + plano star. 79 reducer Sxvr-h694 and filterwheel Baader narrowband ha , oiii and sii Heq5 pro mount. 16 x 300s ha 12 x 300s oiii 5 x 300s sii Had a few issues at the beginning of the imagine session were the mount did a meridian flip and you can s

2 Hours on the Horse and Flame in H-alpha (Astronomik 6nm) with the QHY 268M on the TS apo. Huge amount of moon. I still have to get all the calibration frames I need so this is just the 600 sec lights, Sigma Average, DDP and Unsharp Mask. I think the Unsharp Mask has left some halos but this is just a quick first run that will be added to the red channel when, if, I do a full HaRGB image. Worried too about the huge diffraction around Alnitak.

Got the little blighter ! First time I've managed it with the ED120. Quite hard and I repeated the observation about 10 times with 2 different eyepieces to make sure. The "Pup" star was not consistently visible but was positively there during periods of the steadiest seeing. I was motivated to sketch the view with the 3.5mm Pentax XW eyepiece at 257x (refractor plus mirror diagonal view):

I confess I’ve always wanted one of these since they came out. When one came up for sale recently I was quick to act! Such an epic looking camera!

Here is the wide-field rig in action

My head said no, but my heart said yes. It's well packed with partitions between the major parts. And here it is And here again, with a tripod, scope and Nexus.

Nice to have a clear night in East London last night imaging under a full moon made easier with an Altair triband and L-pro filters. Here are my pictures of the Monkey Head nebula with my Altair Hypercam 294c and M51 with my GPcam3 290c. The telescope was my TEC140 with a 0.8 reducer for the Monkey Head and 0.33 reducer for M51. Monkey Head was 2 hours of 1 minute exposures and M51 3 and half hours of 20 second exposures. Thanks for looking. Monkey Head Nebula M51

I was out observing from 8.30pm to 9.50pm and again from 11.45pm to 00.30am. I had a break to wait for a little more of M Orientale to become illuminated. Many people have problems observing M Orientale because it is difficult to know what you are looking at, unless you are very familiar with the area. Of course, it also requires a large and exceptional libration to the S/SW. The best chart I have seen is section 68 of the Cambridge Photographic Moon Atlas, published in 2012. Alas this was a short print run and it is very hard to find. If you have one, hang on to it, you want bel

It seems that every scope I have ever had, I acquired in the middle of the dreaded Canadian winter, this either means non stop cloud cover or, temperatures far south of freeezing. Over the past month or so I have managed two short sessions, the first came a few days ago during a waxing crescent moon and, the second was this night for an hour. The night of my moon observation it was even colder than today, around minus 10 but, weather app said it would feel like minus 20. Chilly indeed but, the sky was clear and the burning urge to try my scope was too much. After letting the scope sit outside

New "Alpine Innovations Bino Bandit" arrived today, courtesy of Auntie Flo''s usual prompt service.. Such a neat, simple idea. Easy to fit on my Orion 9x63 mini giant binoculars and daytime testing looks very promising. Regarding fitting, the material stretches well, and you just need to push them back or pull them forward on each eyepiece until you get to the point where you only see the view of the object and all around in every direction is just really dark. Operating with a 7mm exit pupil, I'm hoping that night use with these will help my eyes get the best possible dilatio

Miraculously it is a another clear night - second in a row. Imaging rig set up for more Ha imaging on the Rosette nebula, I have a coffee and a chocolate brownie, and some great views of the moon in my other scope.

Two nights ago I catured these photos with my 16" Dob and Asi 120mm camera.

Well, it's going to be clear, and the scope is out, so why not point a camera at it

First light for the WO ZS73 and Canon 60D. FLO replaced my faulty 73R F/R but sadly the replacement is also faulty so field was not very flat hence the severe crop. I managed 78 good 60sec subs till clouds rolled in. No guiding as I wanted to see how the new Ioptron CEM 26 performed, sadly not to well and 60sec was the best I could get, shame as I used to get double that on my old CG5.

Thought I'd use the bright moon to highlight a characterful subject and make the most of the clear skies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burrow_Mump

This is 20 frames shot handheld with the D7000 and Tamron 150-600. Aligned, stacked, Deconvolution applied. Then time to play in Photoshop. Mono RGB RGB Saturated Mono Inverted RGB Inverted Pseudo geological map

What do you do if your thing is deep sky imaging and the first decent run of clear nights in nearly 5 months occurs under a full moon ? And what do you do if all this happens when you have a new camera to try out ? You go for the only object likely to shine through the glare - good old Orion Nebula ! Started imaging as soon as it was reasonably dark and used a dual band filter to hopefully get better results. Vital stats are as follows :- 16" F/4.5 Reflector ZWO 6200 MC Pro full Frame OSC Optolong L-enhance Dual Band Filter 20 x 30sec at gain 414 20

After reading the threads on here about this scope, and having read my own white light reports from a few years back, I decided that along with lunar and planetary observing, I should also add the sun to that list. So, I thought about what I needed to do that. It had to be Ha, and it had to be light weight. As far as I can tell, the Daystar is the most affordable way in to Ha observing, so I put my order in. I teamed that up with the Skywatcher Solarquest mount which seems pretty popular, and put that on a Three-Legged-Thing carbon tripod. I carried the whole lot in one hand easily into t

Hey everyone I'm new to all this again and I luckily came across someone from Edinburgh selling a 10 inch dob for £300 only used 4 times and I jumped at that price took 3 hours to get there and back but it was worth the trip lol. her new names big Betty I'm looking for help on what eyepieces are best suited to these telescope because it's alot bigger than my first one when I was younger and it's mighty powerful lol my son is into Jupiter and Saturn has anyone any ideas on what filters to get aswell thanks for taking the time in reading this book lol clear skies everyone I've added a wee pict

This time last year whilst on a dark sky skiing holiday I remember looking at the Rosette thinking how amazing it was and that I'd need to image it again. Ive had to settle for roughly 2hrs on each channel as the weather gods haven't been kind recently! Thanks for looking, Ken

First go of 2021, can only get better hopefully. Dave

First session of the year as the Sun is out of reach from early November to end of January. Add in a busy work schedule, DIY projects and other interests and all of a sudden its March! First session after Winter is always a bit of an adventure, mount has been sat unused for 3 months+ and I've apparently forgotten everything I ever knew about solar imaging (didn't amount to a lot to start with). The mount needed a good clean up and the declination axis attending to as it was very stiff and had developed a heap of backlash. Still managed to cobble together a few images below, far from my finest

For the first time with my new Rumak I've had a decent session on the moon. I've been waiting for my new iOptron 1.25" diagonal to arrive. The 1.25" I'd been using had been lying around for years and was really murky to look through; the iOptron is very impressive by comparison with an exceptionally clean, bright image. I also gave the Celestron 80ED an outing - I only usually use that for wide field but it's a more capable lunar scope than you might think. The seeing conditions were what I expect for my location; wobbly at best with some fine detail visible. Decent enough at x144, but ju

Finally got the result i knew this little 4.5 F8 Newt could produce. Been improving collimation. No wind. Seeing wasnt too bad. Was struggling with the EQ2 and the economy motor drive though. slop in the mount makes the drifting even worse. A quick process (3 or 4 hours) Will do a more careful process later. The QHY 462C camera is pretty good in my opinion. Very sensitive red and IR for a single shot colour camera The texture looks almost sandy. But with no noise. stacking about 900 frames each per the 13 panes used out of around 4000 being captured. 75%

Almost full Snow Moon last night from Yeovil in Somerset. Too misty here this morning for the actual Full Moon. Canon EOS 2000D with 300mm lens and a quick touch up in Photoshop.

You've all been so helpful, I thought I'd let you know what I saw last night using my first instrument – a pair of binoculars, sold to me by @Tiny Clanger for a song. Wow! Binoculars! Saw the full moon as a sphere in space with what I guess are small mountain ranges or ridges along the bottom edge. Found Polaris, Sirius, Orion (of course) and a few other bright stars whose names I forget. Realised how red Mars is. And then ... up to the Pleiades! What a thrill being able to see something through the binoculars that you can't see with the naked eye. The moon was actually so bright tha

This is a two panel mosaic where I used one of the panels from my recent mosaic, containing Barnard 14 (with IC2087), and added a new panel (the bottom half of the image) dominated by Barnard 18. These nebulae belong to the Taurus Molecular Cloud. 12 hours of total integration time with the RASA 8 at f/2 brings out quite a lot of light and colour even in dark nebulosity. Imaged 10 - 14 Feb with the RASA 8 and ASI2600MC (gain 100) without filter. 180 x 4 min. Stacked in PI and processed in PS and PI. I also post an annotatded low-resolution version grabbed from Astrobin. Fro

Although the full moon is not considered the best time to observe the lunar surface, clear nights are few and far between, so I thought I would have a look anyway. I'm glad I did as I was rewarded with some great views and at x57 I was able to take in the whole globe in the FOV. Observations made with the 102ED-R and Binoviewers. The most obvious features were the crater 'rays', with Tycho, Copernicus, Kepler and Aristarchus being the most prominent. The rays from Tycho were spectacular, stretching across one third of the lunar diameter - what an impact that must have been! It happened 10

had a little play with new scope and cameras this evening- getting to grips with the very basics. It was quite hazy but not too cold which was nice. Good news is Sharpcap polar alignment is pretty great- its easy and seems to work! And the Bahtinov mask is a genius thing! It works too I synchronised the focus of the main camera with the asi120 on the oag so i can use the little Asi which has a much faster frame rate to focus them both- seems to work quite well. Mark

I've had this scope since December last year, and its had a fair amount of starlight now, albeit under generally poor/average seeing conditions. Still, long enough for me to have come to some conclusions. My skies are suburban, but pointing towards central York. Apparently I'm in Bortle 6, but I'd say closer to 7 (right on the edge according to the maps I've seen). In a nutshell, its a 6" (150mm) ED (glass unspecified) with a focal length of 1200mm (f8), with a price well under £2k. FLO currently have it for £1799 - I was lucky enough to buy mine for £1520, before the recent price rises

...aka a 16:9 crop of the Heart as I cut off a bit of a ventricle. First use of IDAS NBZ filter. What black magic is this!!! Was a full moon, like daylight! 48 x 180s subs, RASA8 and ASI2600MC Pro. DSS and PS. Cheers, Paul.

My contribution, again in the 4" class. Tonight I'll be using this Skylight 100mm F13 (based on a Carton lens), mounted on an AZ-EQ 6GT in eq mode. Beautiful to use, and really punches through poor seeing. Great for doubles.

Just one more; tonight's shift. I got rid of the Edge and replaced it with an FSQ106. Sorry about the messy observatory - and the pink Dyson hoover :)

Just experimenting today with the big gun, C11. Used the white light filter and baader k-Line filter. I did image too with the Lunt 60DS and 80ED baader K-Line scopes but not processed these images yet. The C11 is experimental. Seeing wasn't great and sun going down towards my hedge. I think it has potential as a big gun solar L-Line scope for the summer.

After yesterday’s poor seeing, I gave it another go today with much better results. AR12804 is looking very nice, surrounded by faculae, a trail of smaller pores and spots and good petal like structure in the penumbra. AR12805 could be seen as a lovely area of faculae, and even 12803 was detectable as one very small spot which seems to get a little easier to see as the morning progressed. The seeing has actually improved here since 9am, and the granulation is quite striking at times, not the best I’ve seen it but quite clear. Whilst taking the smartphone shot and some video, I switch

HaHaHaHa! No, really! Ha, as in Hydrogen-alpha! The postman brought me a nice new diagonal, a solarquest mount, a Three-Legged-Thing punky tripod.....and a Daystar SolarScout 60mm Ha telescope. Bits and bobs arrived during the week, had first light this morning. I'm seriously impressed!

How hard is it to get a nice handle for your scope? Let alone one that's affordable. After spending way too long searching, I pulled something together myself. It's not what I'd design if I had the money to make a short run, but it's not bad for a bunch of bits off ebay and amazon.

I have to admit that I knew little about Astronomy Now until @ollypenrice asked me if he could use my Squid image to illustrate the possibilities of the new generation OSC CMOS cameras (ASI2600MC in my case) in the January issue. One bonus for me was that the magazine sent me a free issue and I liked it a lot. I also noticed that they had a gallery section, so I though why not give it a try. Apparently they liked my image so it is now in the March issue and they gave me a 15 pound voucher. I have now spent that and a bit more on a yearly subscription (after Swedish customs have ensured me that

Well , i had a much better night ... Skies were clear ALL evening ( i've marked the date and day in my diary to celebrate it every year lol) . Despite the moon being full ( i really have no problem with that as there is ALWAYS something to see in the sky ) . I did swing to the beehive which ( admittedly faint due to moonlight ) is still one of my favs . I started with the EVO 120 and a zoom EP that i bought off a fellow SGL member 8-24 mm , i have to say i was a touch disappointed . The Moon was hidden behind the house at this time . The EVO is a lovely scope but its a bit of a cannon , so ou

Flame and Horsehead with Canon 80D sigma 150-600mm @ 400mm ...... f5.6 .... iso 400 ..... Skywatcher AZ-GTI in AZ mode ... Bortle class 5. 60 x 30sec images 25 Darks 30 Bias Photoshop 2021.

Actually I've been tempted out with the Tak 100 by a dodgy man from Oakworth

Felicity’s turn tonight; after a fun play in the sun earlier, a quick change of diagonal and we are ready for the Moon.

Steps for collimating your laser collimator begin at 2 minutes in:

Some daytime shots. Brackets were £15 on Amazon, carbon tube £12 on ebay.

John, I'm really delighted you've achieved a lunar 1st. I'm pretty sure I've never seen it so well, mainly because like yourself I probably never had such a good guide as the Cambridge Atlas. I have the 21st Century Atlas, I'll check it out - and also the link you sent, so thanks for that.

In the process of shooting Melotte 15 in Ha. First real light for this setup (actually first light was last night but had serious differential flexure issues) subs are looking good tonight so fingers crossed for a full 4 hours data

My Skywatcher 200P Dob (8") in moon action tonight with the DSLR on prime focus. I wish it was a moonless night for some proper seeing of DSOs. I hope everybody is having a nice evening.

Thank you. No burgers today though. T-Bones

But there were! Here is what I captured with my Lunt LS80THA at 11:19am UTC: Here seeing was not terrific either, but still managed a few nice shots (more to come). Nicolàs