Hobbes

Back from Kelling after 3 nights - Friday - Sun. I missed the exciting weather on Thursday this year due to family commitments. Friday night was clear but with poor seeing and a fair bit of wind, I got in about 5 hours of observing. Saturday night had much better seeing but a fair bit of fast moving cloud and was still windy. There was a lovely Io transit with conditions good enough the see the face of Io that was the highlight of the night for me. Sunday night was predicted to be cloudy but in the end was clear however there was a fine haze in the air which knocked the visibility right back and really accentuated the light domes over Holt and Cromer so spent a few hours looking at the brighter objects before hitting the hay around 1am. This was my 10th year at Kelling and I was reflecting on the changes over the years. Light pollution is getting worse there and while it's still much better than Surrey it's not a patch on what it was. There is also a lot of attendees walking around with bright red head torches on and several imagers operating outside with unfiltered screens. When I originally started attending this would not have been tolerated as it now seems to be. There was also an attendee who decided it was perfectly fine to drive onto Red Field late on Friday night with full headlights on park up and leave his lights on for a minute or two and then resented being told to turn them off. This kind of thoughtless behaviour, while not typical of the majority of attendees is on the increase and spoils the event for me. I still remember being schooled on acceptable headtorch light levels by Andrew Robertson with his "sergeant major" voice that could be heard from one end of the red field to the other on my first Kelling trip and I kind of miss that. It's still great to go and meet up with friends and spend a long weekend dedicated to stargazing though.

Heading up to Kelling tomorrow. The weather forecast is looking interesting and not in a good way. Force 8-9 winds and some sleet! I am I mad?

If you have the right kind of phone and tablet cases you could consider getting a sheet or two of Rubylith - available on Ebay. This will not "cling" to your phone and tablet screen but cut to size and slipped into a suitable case it will give good filtering but will still allow your touch screen to work. I used this solution for a couple of years before Apple introduced colour filtering in iOS10. Unfortunately android haven't got the same facility. One other though is to try Rubylith with a spray-on repositionable adhesive - same stuff they use on post-it notes although I've not tried this so cant comment on its effectiveness.

Thanks for the guide Steep. Just used it to resurrect my Baader zoom eyepiece which has been unusable for the last few months.

The true measure of any retailer is not how they perform when things right but how they react when things go wrong. I ordered an AZ-EQ6 mount from FLO. The mount was delivered within 24 hours. As it was an anniversary present from my wife I held off opening the boxes for a couple of days. When the fateful date arrived I assembled the mount and fairly quickly noticed that there was quite a bit of movement between the mount head and tripod, even with everything tightened up. 5 mins with a vernier gauge the next morning revealed that the cylinder on the bottom of the mount head had been over milled by 1mm when compared with my old NEQ6. This translates into enough movement to shift a star completely out of the FOV of my widest angle eyepiece. Emailed FLO the next morning - response was rapid. Steve asked me to test a few things which I did. He then arranged to have the mount and tripod picked up and sent to the Skywatcher engineer. I asked if the mount could be returned this week as I wanted to take it on a camping trip over the bank holiday weekend. He has now emailed to say that as the engineer has gone off sick and is unable to look at the mount today he will be sending a new mount out to ensure I have it for the weekend. Great service! 1 Happy customer. I would highly recommend FLO. Oh yes - he was also very tolerant of my complaints about a "faulty" Rigel Quikfinder in the same order. - It works much better if you look through it right way round!

You may be right - that Meade 5000 30mm (which I only got last week) has kind of tipped me over the edge. It's a beast of an eyepiece but gives great views. Markarians Chain was spectacular thorugh it and I cannot wait for the summer milky way views.

Thank you Michael. The acquisition of a fast newtonian earlier this year has started me on an upgrade binge and I've developed a bad Black and Green habit!

Just got a new Maplins Large High Impact Case while they were on offer and have finished arranging my eyepieces in it. I'm thinking about not doing cutouts for the larger bits of kit but I think I will need to for the Orthoscopics and the Hyperion zoom barlow. I might try to squeeze some filters in there as well.