John

I'll give Delta Cygni a try with my stopped down ED53mm F/17 when I'm next out. It's been very cloudy here tonight. I can split it with my 70mm.

It's just cloudy here tonight. We often get nice sunsets here but that was clouded out as well. Last time we had a saharan sand influx here I took this snap of the sun at mid morning. The cars did pick up a fine coating of pink dust on that occasion. If I cropped the tree branches out it could have been taken on Mars 😁

Nice work ! Lambda Cyg is a sub arc second separation currently. I can get it with my 130 and 120 refractors and get a touching pair / snowman with my 100. No joy in anything smaller though, for me. Well, maybe some elongation of the airy disk in the right direction !

I've seen those for sale in the past. I might have owned one at some point. I'm sure it's a WO dielectric. I would probably just leave the "Dura Bright" bit out of the advert ?

I have a 1950's pair of Habicht 8x30w's. Externally rather tatty but optically sound and excellent performers. Picked them up from a charity shop a few years back for a few quid. My favourite birding binoculars I think 🙂 I seem to accumulate binoculars even though I don't use them much other than for birding 🙄

I've seen a similar effect caused by observing something that is not far from the edge of a roof or building as well. It's easy to loose track of your local issues when concentrating on the view through the eyepiece. My experience of out of collimation newtonians is that the symptoms are a lack sharpness / resolution and contrast which are all improved when the collimation is more accurate. I can't say that I have seen stars turned into streaks though collimation errors

With any moon around or other significant light pollution a small core is all that can be seen of M31 even with larger scopes. UHC and O-III filters improve the contrast of nebulae to various degrees. An O-III can mean seeing something whereas without a filter nothing is visible. A UHC is less dramatic but works with a wider range of nebulae. For galaxies and clusters dark skies are the key. Filters don't help with those.

I take your point about not making it into a "sport" John 🙂 I like to stretch my eye, scope and observing conditions out of curiosity and often the slight thrill of seeing something far off and "exotic" with relatively modest equipment. It feels like you have "beaten the system" in some odd way when you get something like this even if it is the faintest point of light or vaguest puff of nebulosity 😁

Great report Peter 🙂 Far too murky down here in North Somerset to see DSO's like the Veil but it's great that you got your first views of it up in Glos and with a 72mm aperture as well. I agree with you 100% regarding the O-III filter's impact on the Veil Nebula and, unfortunately, on the Baader Aspheric. Generally I like the Baader stuff but I think the Aspheric 36 just does not do well. The one I had was not that great even in an F/10 scope.

And thanks for that Arizona memory as well Steve 😃

Saturn was nice and the moonrise was worth watching. Jupiter is behind a large tree now for a couple of hours so that will have to wait for me until it's rising earlier. I'm not an "early bird" I'm afraid 🙄

Was this really 18 years ago ? Saturn is starting to show quite well along with it's retinue of moons including the brightest, Titan. I thought that it was timely to remind myself of one of the most impressive robotic feats of space exploration - the soft landing of the ESA Huygens probe on the surface of that distant moon. Not only was that accomplished successfully but movie footage was taken during the descent as well as memorable stills of the surface itself. What an amazing achievement that was 👍 Here is a short movie from NASA JPL of the Titan Touchdown:

A bit murky out there tonight. Very warm too. I can just see a handfull of the brightest constellation stars. I have my 100mm scope out and I'll take a look at Saturn shortly. Somehow I think Enceladus will not be viable tonight - I'll be lucky if I can see Titan !

There wasn't a cable of some sort crossing the aperture of your scope somewhere above the top of your scope by any chance ? I've accidently observed stars when telephone wires have happened to be in their direction and have seen long diffraction lines caused by the wires.

I saw Triton fairly regularly with my 12 inch dob and I have seen it a couple of times with my 130mm refractor. I caught the two brightest Uranian moons a couple of times with the 12 inch but, so far, I've not seen them with anything smaller. Lots of magnification helps. I didn't have any joy with Phobos and Deimos during the last martian opposition even with my 12 inch.

I've been using the Svbony zoom (kindly loaned by @bomberbaz) and my Nagler 2-4 zoom, along with other options. The Svbony is very sharp but shows a little more light scatter around a bright targets at the 4mm and 3mm settings than the Nagler does. Given the cost of the Nagler is 3x the Svbony that is perhaps not entirely surprising though. The Svbony is remarkably good for what it costs to be honest with you, spans a lot of focal lengths and has a 56 degree AFoV compared to 50 for the Nagler. Both are pretty much par focal through their zoom range just needing a very small tweak now and then as you move through the focal lengths.

As I have been comparing a number of different short FL eyepieces over the past couple of nights, it has been the extent of the glare / scatter of light around Saturn that has been the main thing that varied in their performance. None were notably bad in this respect but I noticed that the abbe orthos and, a little surprisingly, the 6mm and 4.7mm Ethos that consistently showed the least. I've found glare / scatter control has been a significant factor in being able to see faint planetary moons close to their parent planets disks and also cracking challenges like spotting the "Pup" star, Sirius B. I'm looking forward to having a look at Neptune's moon Triton and trying to spot Uranus's brightest 4 moons when those planets are better positioned from my back yard.

That 4mm 80 looks rather similar to my Ethos 4.7mm 110 with the 2 inch adapter removed 🙂 "turkey legs" as some rather unkindly refer to them 🙄

Great observations and drawing Mike I had similar views with my 130mm refractor. I have not heard of the effect called Terby's White Spot before. I will look out for it when I'm next observing the ringed planet. Those glimpses of the crepe ring are hard to get with the rings at the angle they currently are.

I saw Tethys last night but it was close in by the rings so not easy. Dione was even closer to the ring system and I only got a couple of glimpses of that one with the 130mm refractor.

I think that is the thing about Taks and, to be fair, the other top brands such as LZOS, Astro Physics, CFF, TEC and a couple of others. You can be confident that the instrument you are using has the potential to perform right to the very limits that the specification will allow. The competition is not far behind though and pressing closer all the time !

I spent most of my session with my 130mm refractor looking at Saturn. Once it had risen a little way above the roofline 200x and 250x were the optimum observing magnifications tonight. My views were very similar to this outstanding sketch from @mikeDnight: Saturn's equatorial zone seemed bright, as in Mike's drawing and I could make out 2 cloud belts in the northern hemisphere of the planet and suggestions of one south of the ring system. Note: north is at the bottom in Mike's drawing. Elsewhere, I had some very nice views of the Blue Snowball and Little Dumbbell planetary nebulae even after the moon had risen. Really warm out there - shorts and T-shirt stuff ! 🙂

The William Optics Megrez 90 was a nice, light, compact 90mm ED doublet. It's new price exceeded the budget stated but on the pre-owned market you might be able to hit it for that. If they made it with FPL-51 glass the retail price may well have been something like $499 but at F/5.9 the small amount of CA that would show might annoy some. There are scopes of that type about but they all seem to have much higher prices eg: the Tele Vue 85, AP Stowaway, Baader 95mm etc, etc. Burgess Optical made a cemented 91mm ED doublet for a while I recall. I don't know how they were priced though ?

Fingers crossed 🤞

Some great reports from last night Another good one to come tonight perhaps ?😁