Bugdozer

Beautiful work of art!

Hastings reports solid overcast 😒

Hello there. How did you destroy your camera? 😳

Well it looks like a fairly conclusive vote for Baader film! Thanks for the info.

Welcome, have fun!

Welcome!

I am interested in trying solar observing with my Celestron Nexstar 5SE. However, I am a complete newbie to solar observing. I have looked through scopes with white light solar filters before, and with hydrogen alpha filters too, but in terms of which white light filters are recommended I have no clue. Celestron do make one which is specifically designed to fit my scope, but it's not so cheap, whereas others are cheaper but appear to be made of cardboard. In terms of what offers the best visual quality, I have no clue. I am happy to pay a bit more for good quality visuals.

I went out last night with our local Sussex Sidewalk Astronomers group to a nearby dark site, with a bracing below zero temperature and a slight breeze adding to the chill. There were several scopes out and my little 5 inch SCT felt dwarfed next to a 10 inch Skywatcher dob! The good thing about being with a knowledgeable group is that they can recommend targets in real time and advise on finding them. I ticked off four open clusters I had not observed before - M36, M37, M38 and M41. All beautiful objects through my 32mm eyepiece. M37 is probably the densest open cluster I have seen, like a spray of glitter on a black cloth. I tried to have a look at Jupiter, as the GRS was right in the middle, but at high magnification the wind made it a bit futile. I had some requests from some of the group to look at M82 and M81, which made a nice pair in one field of view, and the Crab M1, which one chap had never seen before and I was proud to be able to demonstrate just how disappointing a smudge it is. Although I didn't have my UHC filter, which would have improved the view slightly, it was so bitingly cold I wouldn't have trusted myself to screw it on without dropping it. The chap with the 10" dob had his camera hooked up and showed a fantastic view of the trapezium at the heart of the Orion Nebula, really showing the resolution of a bigger scope. Eventually some clouds started blowing in here and there, and I realised that if I got any colder then my tauntaun would freeze before I reached the first marker, so I packed up and came home for some hot fruit tea.

Gold star for Ricochet! I believe this is a thermal effect. I got the scope all set up and ready to go indoors and then took it out and pointed it at Rigel as quickly as I could, before it had any opportunity to cool down significantly. The image both sides of focus was a perfect circle. I tried with and without the diagonal, and it made no difference, so fortunately its death plunge into the pot did no damage. I might still try relieving some of the screw pressure to see if that minimises the contraction pressure. Still, good to know it isn't something that's gone permanently wonky.

Welcome, have fun!

Ha ha, I wish! No, it just suddenly slid out while I was in the middle of changing eyepieces, probably because of slight contraction in the cold - fortunately I had just taken out the eyepiece and was holding it. The diagonal bounced off a tripod leg and the plant pot saved it from hitting concrete. Unfortunately I did have to clean out some mud from inside it, and the chance of it being knocked askew from either the impact or my cleaning is certainly a possibility. I'm going to test the diagonal first because it's the easiest thing to check, if no joy with that then I will try the retaining screws as Peter suggested. If that doesn't work then I will wait until we get warmer weather later in the year and see if it goes away naturally - it's not so bad that it's ruining my views. If none of these things work, then I guess I will have to get it looked at by a professional. The strange thing, if it's due to tight screws or cold weather, is that I had never been aware of it before. Still, I suppose things can shift a bit over time.

I have that Astro Essentials eyepiece and it's very good with my scope. However I notice your 15mm eyepiece is right in the middle of the range covered by your zoom - if you're on a budget, do you really need both?

All good suggestions, I will see if I can track down any of these as the culprit. Interesting that I have only begun to notice it as it's got colder, but also since my diagonal fell off the scope into a plant pot.

I am not sure if this has always been there in my telescope, or whether it's new, but I think it hasn't always been there and it doesn't quite make sense to me. In my Celestron Nexstar 5SE, when I am inside of focus, the "doughnut disc" appears slightly elliptical. It's only very slight, but it's definitely there. When I adjust to be outside of focus, it also appears elliptical by the same amount - but with the long axis of the ellipse at 90 degrees to how it was when inside of focus. Give how SCTs work, the whole optical system should have radial symmetry, surely? And before anyone immediately accuses collimation, this doesn't look like a collimation effect - the black centre of the doughnut is exactly in the middle, symmetrical in every direction. Because it's smaller, it's hard to tell if the black centre is itself slightly squished, but I think it is. When I am as close to perfect focus at high magnification on a bright star, the diffraction rings aren't offset from the Airy disc as would be seen with a collimation problem. However, the diffraction rings seem stronger in a sort of cross pattern, like you would get from spider vanes but more subtle, rather than being an even circle around the disc. Can anyone explain this?

In the summer, I would add in M13, a globular cluster in Hercules, which is very easy to find manually.

Can anyone who has a Powertank Lithium explain how the hanging strap is supposed to be attached? The little plastic carabiners on the strap seem to be too chunky to properly fit without bending the plastic, and I will damage something if I try to force them into place.

This should make seeing in the dark easier and cut down on AA battery consumption. And keep my house warmer because I won't need to run a cable out of the back door!

I use a UHC filter for viewing nebulae, and I have 2mm less aperture than you. It makes a real difference.

Daughter alerted me to the patchy clouds having cleared around 11.20pm last night, so we quickly set up in the garden. The sky was darker than it often is from our house, I don't know whether some of the streetlights had gone off or something, but I wasn't complaining. Daughter was campaigning to look at Jupiter but it was directly above next door's chimney which had visible smoke coming out! So instead we had a look at some features in Orion, spotting Rigel's companion, checking out the fantastic colour of Betelgeuse (once again, it failed to explode. I am starting to get impatient with it) and then M42, which I was viewing through my new 32mm eyepiece for the first time. Then we turned to the Pleiades, and I wasn't sure if I could actually see some nebulosity around Merope and Alcyone. So for an objective test, I got daughter to look at the view and without telling her what I thought I saw, I asked her what she could see. Likewise, she said there's "glowing bits around the stars" so hurrah, I wasn't imagining it. We had a quick look at M82, which wasn't well seen as it lay in the direction of a local streetlight. We finished off with a view of the Beehive, which was beautiful though the 32mm eyepiece.

My money's on a 4mm eyepiece.

There's a website somewhere that constantly accumulates UK weather data and then crosschecks it against the forecast from 24 hours before (I think). It shows that forecasts are accurate around 30% of the time, which is pathetic, really. You might as well just guess.

Fair enough if you are starting from scratch each time. Also, those three bolts that hold the mount onto the tripod base require around three billion turns each.

If it's taking you 15 minutes to set up a Nexstar, unless you have the whole thing completely disassembled, you're doing something wrong somewhere.

In my experience, this will work. I have the 5SE (SCT rather than Mak, but same mount) and an elderly Nikon D90 SLR. Here's an example image of the moon from a single exposure:

I think Mars currently being less than half the angular size of Mercury right now really puts how small it will look into perspective.