Tomjo59

Looking at the forecast, looks like I’m not going to be playing for at least a fortnight! Jet stream forecast offers no hope either.

Brilliant picture; did you take that through the Dob? (Only joking!)

Brilliant image, great resolution. Congratulations!

Nice clear images Stephen. Sky and Telescope magazine have two very good free apps you can download, one for Jupiter and one for Saturn, showing the positions of the moons.

It would be a pity indeed if visual observing declined, but as other posters have pointed out, it may be due to circumstances, particularly light pollution. I used to occasionally attend a get together of amateurs for a night’s observing here in the New Forest. At first, it used to be almost all visual, with people chatting, and wandering around looking through each other’s scopes; it was very ‘social’. As time went on though, more and more would bring along imaging kit, and most of them would spend the evening hunched over laptops, and not engaging very much with ‘non-imagers’. a pity, I thought.

Located Neptune without too much trouble over the last three nights, though the seeing here in South Wiltshire was poor last night compared to the previous two; weather is definitely on the change. A question I would like to ask though, is has anybody on here managed to glimpse Triton on anything smaller than a 10” reflector, or equivalent? There seems to be a view that a 10” is the minimum required to achieve this, so am I wasting my time trying with an 8” Newt?

Bet this produced a meteorite. Probably at the bottom of the English Channel now though!

Starting to (re)appreciate just how pleasurable to use a good pair of binoculars are. So hoping to buy a pair of Helios LightQuest-HR 80mm Binoculars soon, with a pistol-grip tripod head. This following the advice given on Steve Tonkin’s excellent Binocular Sky website.

Lovely looking ‘scope. Hope you enjoy using it! That ‘wheelbarrow’ arrangement for moving it around is a nifty idea.

Exceptionally clear here in south Wiltshire last night. Grabbed a met office map for midnight. I believe this situation, between two anticyclones and two low pressure areas is called a ‘col’. I don’t know if this is generally regarded as favourable for good observing conditions?

For the astrophysics of stars specifically, I recommend ‘Starlight’ by Keith Robinson. This is published by Springer, and is in the ‘Patrick Moore’s Practical Astronomy Series’. An excellent introduction to stellar physics, with clear explanations.

I think it’s called ‘dumbing down’. Seems to afflict most of the media these days. Not sure there are any real journalists, who actually investigate stories anymore. They seem to cut and paste each others opinions.

Has anybody noticed that the forecast on the BBC Weather site changes virtually by the hour? Almost as if they stick their heads out of the window, and think ‘we got it wrong, better change the forecast quick’. Very unreliable beyond the current day.

Yes, I’ve seen those, and theories such as the ‘Grand Tack’ seem very speculative (some might even say contrived), and are not without their problems (see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_tack_hypothesis, for example). I suppose that is how science progresses though. I suspect that the uncertainty and complexity of the theory is why Cox didn’t really mention the mechanism by which the migrations took place.

Looks fantastic. They should make it permanent, if it is only temporary.