Gfamily

Of course it's only instantaneously accurate. Next year, it'll be a different star.

I feel very cheapskate, but it works for me. Eyepieces in the caddy tray, other accessories below.

MrsG uses a second hand Manfrotto 222 'joystick' head on her binoculars but they're not great when used for high targets. A reclining chair and a monopod (to give a fixed point) may be a better option. The gold standard for binoculars at high altitude is a parallelogram mount with a counterweight as that allows you to stand underneath the binoculars without the tripod getting in the way. But that's £££ and faff.

If you do get one, be warned that cheap ones (I'm my experience) need you to be an octopus so that your can hold it steady in two planes while tightening the screws. On this basis I bought a Celestron NeXYZ, which has slow motion screws that make it easier to make fine adjustments while the phone is mounted in place. I'd say it's ok for the moon and some planets, but still needs care to get good results.

If you already have a dSLR, then that's a good option - particularly if it's a Canon with live-view and moreso if it has a flip out screen. If you don't, it might be worth considering a mirrorless camera as they are significantly lighter (my Sony A5000 body is about 1/3 the weight of my Pentax K5 body). NB I'm not specifically recommending the A5000, as it has specific problems with its algorithms; but it was only £100 second hand, and it's now my walk-around camera because it's at least as good at photos as I am.

Don't do what I did, and think that getting a pair of single vision spectacles for astronomy purposes would be a good idea (one of our leading chains usually does 'second pair free' deals). It might help for the first year or so, but after a couple more years of further deterioration in your "close up" focus ability, you'll find that you can't read the buttons on the handset/phone with your single vision glasses, and your problem is reversed! A lot of people use spectacle chains, so that they can just remove their glasses when going to the eyepiece. Mrs G does this with her binoculars - of course, it means that if I'm looking through her binoculars, or she's looking through my telescope, we need to re-focus. ETA - ooops, I see DaveS says the opposite - all I can say is, it was only a short term measure for me

Getting colour into an astro image is also tricky - the surface brightness of most extended objects is pretty low, and everything tends to come out as shades of grey. Usually colour images are produced by putting filters in the way, and then balancing the colours in the image as it's processed. With your scope set up, you might find it more rewarding (at this time of year) to try and image the Orion Nebula. You may even get some colour out of it. If that goes well, try the Flame Nebula (also in Orion, next to Alnitak - the leftmost star in Orion's belt) - by coincidence, that's the avatar for SamAndrew whose post is just above this one.

A nice image there Marvin, and interesting to see the comet next to NGC 1647 - a quick look at Wikipedia shows it's a relatively young Open Cluster with many hot bright stars, but that is significantly reddened because it's behind the Taurus Dark Cloud complex. For some reason Stellarium calls it the "Pirate Moon Cluster", I don't know why - I sometimes wish we didn't have these arbitrary names for things.

You also have the planet Mars.

Since I was out this evening... 5x eyepieces 2x Barlow lenses Crosshair eyepiece Atmospheric Dispersion Corrector Field Flattener Intervalometer IR remote Etc, etc.

I'm very cheapskate, so I carry mine around in a toolbag = easlily takes the OTA, and external pockets carry spare batteries, mounting plate, 12v power cable (from when I used a car battery for power) etc. A bit like this Eyepieces and things like go in another toolbox with caddy

The Liverpool Astronomical Society meet in the city centre every month, and (more specifically) at their observatory in North Widnes every Wednesday, so if you were to take it out there, people would be very happy to help with any questions. https://liverpoolas.org/

As predicted

Here it is passing Mars

Worth noting it'll be photobombing Mars this evening, with a separation of less than 1½ degrees.

Although we'd seen the comet through binoculars at home, neither the weather nor the local sky quality made it worthwhile to attempt any imaging. But we're over at Astrofarm France for a few days (run by a friend, and offers holidays with astro gear to amateurs), and last night the moon was up late enough to be worth spending a couple of hours out. My intention to use my new planetary camera and ADC was thwarted by the notebook laptop having run out of charge, so I attached my Sony A5000 mirrorless to my 72mm frac and took 30 images at 13s each. Stacked in DSS and fine tuned in Affinity Photo -I'm pretty pleased with this.

If you are using Desktop Stellarium, you can take a series of images to capture the horizon from your viewing spot, and with this create a custom Landscape (accessible under the F4 Sky and Viewing Options pop-up) How to: here

Ha!, that's the one I was hoping for, having managed to bag it for last Autumn Astrocamp. I could see that someone was holding it when I tried to book it, but had to settle for Pitch 28. But that's fine. Will be good to meet up again.

Fingers crossed for your travels. We've just booked as well, not quite in the pitch we'd have preferred, but we're close enough. For those that haven't been, it's got a great atmosphere, is very well organised, and (so far) we've had at least one night of excellent observing each time (though my memory may be playing up). https://www.astrocamp.awesomeastronomy.com/

I'm sorry, it's just me 😂

Not "1 part in 100,000" matters

I'm not really trying to be picky, but it's a personal bugbear of mine, but if you are "assuming approximate distances..."why are you putting the distance accurate to 1mm over 100+ metres? Being less picky (and anyone can feel free to be picky about me in turn ) I have an online calculator that allows the Solar System to be scaled as you wish. There are two separate scalings involved (not directly related to each other) but if you choose the size you want for the Sun or any planet) it'll give you the approximate size for the other components of the Solar System Similarly, if you give it a scale distance for any planet from the Sun, it'll give you the scale distances of all the others, I made this up when I was making a scale solar system for a Cub Scout group we were visiting. I tend to reset it to a 10cm size Jupiter (the largest polystyrene ball we could easily get) at a distance of 2.5 metres (we have a 15metre tape measure which is enough to include Neptune) https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1GoGmffEo6rH0E4C0O5qQ-nLCOocw3P8YzHN6r1oW3RQ/edit?usp=sharing

It's just an indicator that it's the Velocity in each direction v_RA is velocity in RA (seconds per day) v_Dec is velocity in Declination (" per day)

Ahem, Herschel, Herschel, Herschel ( but only because you've been picky in your turn )

Well, there were three of them doing it.