Neil_104

Couldn't see Mercury myself but did have a look at Venus and also took a tour round Cancer with my 60mm refractor. M44 very nice in the ES68/24mm, filled the view. M67 very faint in the same EP but could just make it out. Bumping up the magnification (to a whopping 51x!) with my 7mm DeLite made it more clear but still faint. Double star Iota Cancri looked great with the 12.5mm Morph, really strong colours of golden yellow for the primary and light blue for the secondary. Just can't beat the sharp focus and clarity of a refractor for doubles 🙂 Also took advantage of the Moon to do some maintenance on my C6 and calibrate it a little better, that scope is becoming mainly used for imaging these days and I'm trying to get rid of some slight coma stars that show in just one corner....we shall see the next time I do some imaging! M88 is next on my list.

I bet Jupiter & Saturn are gonna look sweet through that 10 inch Meade - something to look forward to for sure! I'm going the other direction and looking for a good 5 inch refractor in time 🙂

Nice image! Few imaging opportunities - tell me about it! I've not been out since Feb and then when I do finally get a clear night, big Moon 🤷‍♂️

Wow. Fantastic images. I can positively feel the heat coming off my monitor screen looking at the H-alpha pseudo-colour image 🔥

Yep, keen to try a Delos at some stage and looking into the 17.3mm, but I'd also like the Morph 17.5mm knowing how much I like my 12.5mm. Besides, I think Paz's needs are greater - binoviewing with a Delos must be a good experience!

I've never used either - so please disregard anything I say from here on! For me I need long eye relief, not due to wearing glasses but due to pesky long eyelashes. The 13mm Nagler was an eyepiece I had on my list, until I realised its short eye relief (I need at least 15mm I reckon, more like 20mm). So just wanted to mention this in case you have the same eye relief requirements. I've also read that due to the small-ish eye lens of the 13mm Nagler it doesn't quite give such an immersive view as something like a Morpheus would (which I do own, and I really enjoy using due to its long eye relief and that "wrap around" effect once you get close enough to the lens). I found this lack of immersion with an 11mm ES 82 degree. It was sharp as anything, but just too uncomfortable for me to get anywhere near close enough to enjoy an immersive view. HTH in some small way....

I bet! Good detail considering 👍

Fantastic detail and a very dramatic colour palette 👍

It really does! Ever seen the film Event Horizon? 😱 Great pic Olly

That's fascinating, never seen that before. Really gives a sense of movement

Very nice "soft look" to your pic, and I like the framing as well. So important if you ask me.

10x50s are certainly the most common size when it comes to astro binoculars and this is what I use. Anything too much larger is probably going to cause you to tire more quickly when observing if just hand-holding them. In terms of whether you'll see a massive difference between 10x42 and 10x50, I'm not too sure. If you currently had 8x42s then I'd say yes since you're getting an increase in mag and aperture. But just an extra 8mm alone, well, it must make an improvement I guess since we all know aperture rules! Perhaps if your current binos have inferior coatings and the new 10x50s have better coatings then this could certainly make a difference. Not sure if any of this helped much? 🙂 As for my next pair of binos, I'm keen to try the 3D SpaceWalker binos by Russ Lederman which are 8x42s and give a depth of field effect due to a special optical array in one of the eyepieces.

That's the thing. Even if I could just get a pixel or two that I consider to be the ring, that would be going in my photo album for the year 🙂

😂 Great idea to try for the jet, and hats off to your effort. Similar to Xilman's thoughts, I love doing this sort of thing when imaging. Give me something like this rather than M42 -again- any day. I was totally enthralled as I read your post 👍 How about trying for the Cosmic Horseshoe? I'm going to try that this season, not that I think I'll even get close it showing it with my current equipment, but just because it feels like a bit of an adventure.

Similar to the OP, I'm interested to know what works well on black paper as well (pastel pencils I think I've heard?), or perhaps just drawing on white paper and producing a negative is the way to go. Really nice drawings Mike 👍 Inking in the stars is a good idea - I'll add them to my shopping list 🙂

I may need to use a smaller font for some of these more obscure objects 😂

Thank you Vlaiv and Stu for confirming it is in fact a galaxy 👍

My bad, pic visible now 🙂

Great image, very dramatic looking in fact!

So to find the various other objects scattered around my images, I usually trawl through numerous annotated Astrobin images until I fill in all the blanks. But there's a mystery object in my image of M100 that I've not been able to identify yet. It definitely looks non-stellar to me. Does anyone know what this is at the end of the red arrow?? 🤔

Wow - incredible image. I really like these unfamiliar views of familiar objects

Excellent images! I love the way the ion tail splits those two galaxies!

Some really nice detail captured there! It's been a while since I've looked at Mars, clear gibbous phase now.

My first target would be a pretty bl**dy good guiding solution at that FL! But jokes aside, I'd aim for smaller targets so I could frame them nicely with some background space/stars. With a smaller sensor that could only just cover the object, it could also be fun really zooming in on some well-known objects like, say M13, and would give some unusual and new perspectives of familiar objects.

That's not a bad interpretation of the name! But yeah I agree - some names do leave a lot to the imagination. Although of course some of the names can be explained as they come from early observations, such as M1 being the "crab nebula".