Astronomist

I left my DSLR recording a 600 minute exposure next to a woodburning stove with ash in it, not sure if the proximity of the woodburner made any difference at all to the results though. Got some promising looking streaks: I found it easier to spot the streaks in B&W, hence the lack of colour. do you reckon this really is a gamma ray / muon streak, or just conveniently placed noise?

This could be an interesting prospect for outreach as in my experience most non-astronomers struggle to see planetary detail past saturn's rings, especially Jupiter as the contrast is quite low. I should be getting a planetary camera after christmas so I am excited to try this out!

Not particularly, especially if you use a laser collimator. If you don't bash the scope around or drop it it probably won't need collimating very often. I doubt an 8 yr old would manage it though. Especially with a laser adult assistance would definitely be required.

Cloudy here at the moment, but last night the seeing was excellent, with quite a few meteors.

Would that be the 127mm Maksutov like this one? if so it is a very capable scope. I would look at some nice plossl eyepieces such as the Celestron Omni range, they are solid performers at a very reasonable price.

Wow that is quite a mount! The question is, if it is that advanced in its development why hasn't skywatcher made it officially public yet? We heard about the cq350 months in advanceof its release.

Hello and welcome!

Ok problem solved! It turns out in order to edit an album there must be images in it, otherwise the only option is to report the album. I still haven't figured out how to delete them though.

As far as I can tell the only thing wrong with the image itself is the focus is slightly soft. Trying to focus a scope based on a wobbly image on a screen is very challenging, when i image it often takes me 10 minutes to satisfy myself that the focus is right ( I'm also using a DSLR , which really isn't very well suited to my scope at all). As Altocumulus says above, you really need to sharpen the stacked result to bring out all the detail, I use wavelets in registax.

One thing I shall soon be doing on my 10" dob is fitting a digital level to the tube. This narrows down the search for objects too faint to be seen in a finder or naked eye, as you only need to manually search in azimuth, not altitude. There are 'push-to' kits available, which tell you exactly where to point the scope, but they are fairly expensive and don't fit all models of telescope. Another thing you could try is using a planetarium software on a laptop or phone (with a dim red screen filter) to help you star hop. I find Stellarium to be much more intuitive and easy to use than a paper atlas. Assuming your sky isn't terribly light polluted that little dob ought to show you quite a few of the brighter deep sky objects. Enjoy!

Welcome to SGL!

Hi everyone Wasn't sure where to put this, so figured the astro lounge was a safe bet I would like to either edit the title/description, or delete, an album in the gallery. I am sure there must be an easy way of doing this but for the life of me I cannot find it. Please can someone explain how this is done. Thanks in advance

RTL has a Fairly comprehensive guide on their website on how to tell the difference between a real and a fake v3, however on the page it does say that scammers use photographs of the real thing, so the only way to be sure is to order via either their store or one of the approved resellers listed on their website.

I was careful to buy mine from the rtl website, there are some very realistic looking fakes out there, especially on ebay and amazon. I think they are just using RTL's photos in their listings.

I found the RTL-SDR v3 worked well for the hydrogen line, although i haven't ever used a more expensive one to compare it too.

I'm in Salisbury.