John

Another thumbs up for the quality 4 inch refractor from me. I seem to have collected a couple of them over the years and both get well used.

I've had a nice 45 minute session watching the Great Red Spot traverse Jupiter's meridian. Lovely details around the spot and within the N and S equatorial belts. The GRS hollow in the SEB seemed to have a dark "eyebrow" type feature framing the leading side of the spot in the direction it was traversing the jovian disk. Just to the south of the GRS was a truncated portion of the South Temperate Belt. The STB gave the appearance of being "towed" across the disk by the GRS. An illusion of course but nice anyway 🙂 Lots of cloud about so views were grabbed as they popped through gaps in the cloud layers. The scope used was my Tak FC100 and 150x seemed to do the trick, magnification-wise.

I don't find filters help much with planetary observing. I have tried quite a few and still do now and then but I quite quickly gravitate back to a filterless view and allowing the eye to get used to the contrast of the planetary features. Amazing how a relatively bland Jupiter can come to life with extra detail after around 30 minutes or so observing. Assuming the clouds give you that long that is ! 🙄 For nebulae at star parties I often use a decent UHC filter to help increase the contrast for the inexperienced observers. M42, M27 and a number of other "showpieces" seem to jump out a bit more with a UHC. An O-III filter can make even more of an impact on receptive targets such as the Veil and Owl nebulae but those can be challenging for the novice observer even with such a filter. For clusters and galaxies (eg: M31, M45 etc) it's back to as dark a sky as possible and the well dark-adapted eye to get the best from those.

Same going on here @Stu 😃 GRS is well on the disk now. FC100-DL with the rather good Svbony 3-8 zoom on setting 6 so 150x. Straight from the house and steady viewing. Nice 🙂

Lovely ! 2003 must have been the last year they produced the ED102S and the ED102SS ? Then I think they pulled them to move to a new eco-glass leading eventually to the ED103 F/7.7

The maksutov design that I've used that has produced the nearest to "refractor-like" views of double stars was a maksutov-newtonian. These have a smaller secondary size compared to the maksutov-cassegrain although the tube length is longer. The cool down time on that (a 152mm aperture) was quite long compared with a refractor though.

I know which one would win the "shows the whole of the Veil nebula ?" category 🙂

Epsilon Lyrae has separations of 2.2 and 2.8 arc seconds between the two pairs. Theoretically an 80mm scope should be able to resolve to around 1.5 arc seconds but this does assume perfect optics and conditions. In reality neither are encountered that often ! I'm sure that I have read of folks splitting the double double with ST80's but the optical quality of these fast F/5 achromats can vary. Were other folks with similar apertures getting the split at that time ? Seeing conditions can make things tough and scrub a lot off the theoretical optical performance.

I have a sense of deja vue about this one because I managed to spot a previous dropped ISS toolbag back in 2009, with binoculars. But we get another chance it seems !: Astronauts dropped a tool bag during a spacewalk, and you can see it | Space It won't stay in orbit for long so time is of the essence !

Tak switched to the blue with the 2nd run of the FC100-DL's. Mine is from the 1st run so it's black. Personally I prefer the black but I guess I am biased 🙄

I'm guessing that the scope is your 100mm F/5.8. Comet Lemmon should be visible if your skies are dark enough. It is currently listed as magnitude 6.2 and has just moved into Aquila. Early evening is best, as soon as it's dark.

A 10 inch scope is a superb choice for the autumn and winter skies 👍 When Virgo is well placed, have a look at the Markarian's Chain of galaxies on a dark, transparent night. Working through them, several at a time, with a good aperture at low magnification is a joy 😁

I'm not an imager but I love that shot 🙂 Galaxies are huge but space is huger still. Really nice sense of perspective 👍

I don't think I've ever pursued a specific scope 🤔 I tend more towards having an idea in the back of my mind of the sort of thing that I might like to try and some desirable examples, get the funds lined up then jump in when something along those lines, that looks good, comes up. I have searched for specific eyepieces in the past though and generally this meant that, almost magically, there were none at all to be seen for sale, for months on end 🙄

It didn't stop William Optics having a go 😲

No. There should be a very small gap between the lens surfaces. The optical layout looks like this:

My tak focuser and finder stalk is black. The tube clamp is tak green though. And the tube is white of course.

Those views are so far advanced from the non-EAA views (even through large scopes) 😲 Makes you wonder why the rest of us non-EAA observers bother to turn out 🙄

I'd like to find one of those for the tripod - it's lovely 😁

Iota Cassiopeia is often my first target when out. Tonight it is the Tak FC100 DL's turn and, as usual, straight out of the house the triple star was beautifully split from 112.5x to 300x - the full range of the Svbony 3-8 zoom. Great scope and a very useful eyepiece 🙂 Looking at the forecast and the cloud bands out there I doubt that it will be a much of a session but we gratefully take what we can get 🙂 Saturn looked sharp at 180x but thin cloud meant that Titan was only just visible so faint moon spotting is probably not on the cards from here tonight. Jupiter might be OK though, if things don't get worse. Just got to wait for the planet to clear the tree line.

I've often had the job of showing folks the famous Crab Nebula at outreach events with my astro society. To be honest it is probably the least enjoyable target to try and share because you knew, despite it's fame, that folks were either not going to be able to see it or would be rather underwhelmed if they could see that faint "S" shaped smudge and that was even when I was using my 12 inch dob ! I've never managed to see the Crab with binoculars, so far at least. I do observe it fairly regularly with my scopes during the appropriate season but it's more of a visit for old times sake than with any expectation of a spectacular view. That is sometimes the problem when you have a largish scope at an outreach event - you tend to get assigned the fainter targets. My "antidote" to a faint, vague thing like the Crab is to find a nice bright globular cluster and get the magnification up to 150x - 200x. That usually makes more of an impression 🙂

The Tele Vue 40mm plossls are not par-focal with all the others in the series by some distance. They don't show any more sky than the 32mm plossls though. The Delite 18.2mm is par-focal with the 32mm TV plossl so should come to focus at the same point.

I've had some great views of Jupiter with my ED120. More and more clouds have now piled in so I've decided to pack up now.

Great report Steve 🙂 Since you kindly loaned me the APM and Svbony 3-8 zoom I have acquired my own 3-8 which I am really enjoying.

I got it with 11x70's about 4 hours back. It's dimmer than M27 but about the same apparent size through the binoculars.