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Plenty of imagers go as well - they tend to stay nearer their tents rather than setting up on The Common.

Interesting. When I was a student, QT was a way of particles crossing a higher potential barrier between two low potential domains. This isn't what applies across the Event Horizon of a BH. so I'll need to reconsider my understanding. Thanks

Thanks for that. It led me to look for a better explanation, and I think this may be one. http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Hawking_radiation#The_origin_of_Hawking_radiation I'll need to read (and re-read) a lot to make sense of it. 🤯

The process for Hawking Radiation is not via Quantum Tunnelling, but you're right that the timescales are enormous, and the larger the BH the longer the time needed.

We're missing it this year, but it's a great, fun event. If the weather's good, it'll be a weekend for attempting a Messier Marathon I gather - aiming to see all of them in one night. We are hoping to be at the autumn Astrocamp in September though. Having The Common as a shared space for setting up scopes is a great idea, as it means you can wander around and see what others are looking at. Don't be put off if everyone seems to know each other, you'll be very welcome to join in, and taking a camp chair (and a few beers) down to join in the conversations under the gazebos is recommended. ETA: If you're on Facebook, there's an Astrocamp Facebook group, this is very useful for sharing info before and (particularly) over the weekend.

Have you given location permission to both apps?

Thanks will try that. Edit to add - Yes, that worked - used TCP no 10001

With the wi-fi option, is it possible for Stellarium to control the mount via SynScan? As far as I can see, Stellarium needs a Com Port number through which to send the commands. But with wi-fi?

At the very least, plenty of practice mounting and dismounting in the daylight will give you muscle memory. Personally, I'd be more concerned about dismounting it at the end of a session when you're cold and tired. But maybe that's just me

As you're probably aware, Stellarium Plus is the 'mobile' version that allows integration with Synscan.

Are you OK with Synscan controlling the scope by itself? Have you disabled battery optimisation for Synscan on the tablet? (looking back at your earlier posts, I can see you have particular issues - not just a simple one )

The tweets from Mark McCaughrean are saying that those two were moved separately because it was identified that they had defective sensors (each mirror has two sensors, but for these two mirrors only one was working). They'd known this for a long time, but they had tested the mirror movement many times and knew there wasn't a problem, but they wanted to keep their movement separate to the others. Interesting that sending it up with known defective sensors was considered preferable to replacing them.

Personal imports can be made up to £390 I think, so if your UK customer was to take delivery of them while on holiday, or if you were to be visiting UK and posted them over here, the goods could get across the border with no additional expense.

Personally, I always remove the scope from the mount, as I don't want to leave the tripod in a 'top heavy' state.

By definition, light cannot be leaving the BH. There are two far more plausible explanations for those flashes, neither of which breaks the laws of physics. Infalling matter producing short lived accretion discs outside the EH which heat up and produce emissions Gravitational lensing of light from stars that are moving behind the BH - as they pass behind it, the light can be brought round to momentarily be concentrated in our direction. By the way, Dark Matter can't directly produce light, as it is not susceptible to the EM force.

Can you tell whether the incorrect tracking is in RA or Declination?. 'Normal' Sidereal tracking is in RA only, as the Declination of 'fixed stars' is - well, fixed. However, for proper Lunar tracking, I assume that there needs to be some element of tracking in Declination (in addition to the slightly reduced rate of movement of the RA axis). To be honest, it seems unlikely - but it might be worth checking.

At the last Astrocamp, we arranged to arrive the evening before it officially started, but were aware that there may be others who had set up early. So, when arriving at the campsite entrance, we thought it would be considerate if MrsG got out of the campervan at the top of the drive, and I would drive down on sidelight, guided by her. Unfortunately when getting out of the van, we found that we had stopped on the cattle grid, and MrsG fell into the gap. Luckily, she didn't break any bones; though her mobility was severely limited for the weekend. So - if an organised event, try to avoid arriving when it's seriously dark; and reduce your impact as best you can. To be honest, the way that interior lights turn on when you open your car door or boot is as almost much of a problem as people driving on and off the site.

Checking what is on G-Play isn't easy if you already have the app installed - I had to open the App page in an Incognito Browser to see what's currently on offer. It could be a backwards compatibility problem - maybe Google insist on some level of support for earlier versions, and it sounds as though Android 11 introduced something that meant it couldn't also work with earlier versions - but I'm just guessing. I'm more disappointed that SynScanInit 2 has fallen off G-Play, that that's such a valuable app for simplifying set up of location and date/time entries

I'm not sure about that. The version on Google Play seems to be 1.17.0 and the description says it doesn't work with Android 11, with a reference to go to the Skywatcher website to get the latest one, 1.19.x

What's particularly good is that the launch on the ESA Ariane 5 was so precise that they estimate they'll have enough propellant left for maybe 20 years of science - twice the original estimate. I think I read that there are still >70 single points of failure to go between now and full deployment in orbit around L2 though - so fingers crossed still.

Again, this doesn't seem to be available via Google Play - but can be downloaded as an APK.

As you may be aware, the battery optimisation may need to be disabled against the Synscan App - otherwise it stops controlling the mount when you swap from using Synscan to Stellarium.

I read somewhere that SS6 Pro had about 1.9Gb of data to download, and it has to go in main storage (it can't download to an SD card). I have SS6 Plus, and this seems to be about half the size of Pro - but it can also be used to control Synscan devices. An alternative app for this is Stellarium Plus, but I think I prefer SS6+

A friend managed 10 min unguided exposures with a 400mm scope and dSLR combo using the original SA. He was very good at polar alignment - but 2 min exposures should be feasible with your set-up.

If you paid using a Credit Card you'll be able to claim back from them.