Bugdozer

Hello there, welcome! I am interested to see what you have found!

I managed to get out under clear skies for the first time this month last night. Due to a combination of the lateness of the hour and having the tree surgeon visit this week, I had a nice view of Orion and its surroundings from my garden, which had previously been hidden behind my birch tree. I concentrated on just the region around Orion and Monoceros, which I hadn't been able to get much of a look at this year. Appropriately for the season, I started with the Christmas Tree cluster, which was a beautiful glittering sight. Panning around a little from there, my attention was caught by something that looked a bit like a tiny comet. I was pretty sure it wasn't and figured it might be a nebula of some kind. It looked too asymmetrical to be a galaxy. With the facility of "reverse goto" on my telescope, it informed me I was looking at NGC2261, a variable reflection nebula. I don't recall having seen any reflection nebulae before (even the Pleiades nebula has never shown up for me visually) so that was a treat. I then put my UHC filter on and had a look at the Orion Nebula and its surroundings. It's always impressive and the filter showed up some lovely detail. The sky from my garden is OK, but there's significantly more sky glow than at the darker site I often travel to, so the filter is really beneficial. I tried to have a look at the Rosette nebula, another object I have never seen, but I think the combination of a slightly brighter sky and the long focal length of my scope with this large object made it difficult to see any signs of nebulosity. The cluster at the centre was much brighter than I had expected and at least indicated I was in the right place. For me, no observing session is complete without crossing a new Messier object off my list! Tonight's target, just a short hop from the Rosette, was M78, thus bagging me two reflection nebulae in one night. I could have happily stayed out for hours longer but I had to get up reasonably early this morning, so packed away and went to bed.

Yes, it can be done. But it isn't the ideal method for doing that, is it?

I totally agree. I think many of the "experienced old timers" on here have forgotten just how difficult it can be for a newbie to try and locate an object which is below naked eye visibility. This is why I think automatically recommending Dobsonian telescopes simply because you get the most optics for your budget is something that isn't always the best solution. There are many objects I was never able to see until I started using a goto scope, simply because I couldn't find them by entirely manual guiding. Of course that was back before the days of apps like Astrohopper and Stellarium etc. on phones, but I don't think the potential impact of "location frustration" should be disregarded entirely. I know Spile has said that he likes that Dobsonian scopes don't have the need for a time consuming synchronisation with the sky - however, my experience is that the time taken to hunt around for objects before being able to observe them has always far exceeded the time it takes to sync a goto scope, or even perform a polar alignment.

Except imaging.

My point is that if this is correct, then the "no telescope is good for everything" mantra cannot be. As the great Mark Knopfler once said: two men say they're Jesus, one of them must be wrong. 😉

Great pictures, welcome!

I can't help but notice how often the phrase "no telescope is ideal for everything" gets said on these forums, yet whenever anyone ever asks what telescope they should get, you always get several people saying "6 or 8 inch Dobsonian" regardless of whether the interest is planetary, deep sky, lunar, whatever.

Welcome, it sounds like you are good with the mechanical side of things!

Sounds like a great night and some lovely pictures. Your mention of forest creatures reminds me - there's a fox that regularly comes and sits just a few metres away from us when we go out to our dark site, I'm sure it's the same one each time. It's quite fearless.

I take a screenshot from Stellarium before I go out observing so I know what to look for in the eyepiece. Here's an example I used to spot Neptune: It's set up for the eyepiece field of view and scope that I have.

What are those straight white lines?

I was outside for about 20 minutes looking for these at around 7.30pm yesterday and didn't see a single meteor.

Your scope is similar specs to mine, so should be able to show reasonable detail. You will be able to see the GRS, shadows of the moons transiting the disc, some features within the cloud belts. But I agree with Dweller25, you will benefit from a higher magnification eyepiece. I think you probably just need to spend some time getting used to the brightness of Jupiter and you will begin to pick out more detail.

One thing to bear in mind - Jupiter looks a lot paler to the eye than you see in photos, and the contrast between the cloud bands is lower. It takes some getting used to but the more you observe it, the more detail you will be able to see. In particular the Great Red Spot is actually quite a pallid salmon pink these days, not the huge dark blob of a few decades ago.

Welcome, you will find good advice here.

Welcome!

Great picture, that's very impressive!

Thanks to a local astronomy Facebook group, I was alerted to Europa's transit across Jupiter last night. I have only observed one shadow transit before, which was by accident as I didn't know it was happening until I saw it. So I was keen to see this one, and set up the scope in plenty of time and watched an episode of classic Dr Who while waiting for it to cool. It had been windy earlier in the evening so I was concerned about seeing, but by the time the shadow began creeping across Jupiter, the air was really still and clear, and seeing was excellent. A good opportunity to use my Barlow with my 9.7mm eyepiece to get a clear view at around 255x magnification. I was pleasantly surprised at how sharp the shadow looked, like someone had made a pinhole in the planet. I couldn't see Europa itself in front of Jupiter though. After daughter and I had spent some time watching it, we had a look at the waning moon, with the area around Mare Crisium looking absolutely spectacular and pin sharp with the moon's high altitude. Daughter photographed some good views of lunar mountains with her phone at the eyepiece (or as she called them, "some bumps"!) Then we switched back to Jupiter again, just in time to watch Europa emerging off the front of the disc. I tried to estimate the exact time I could see Europa separated completely from Jupiter, and recorded it as 23:23, which was only about 30 seconds out when I checked the exact time in Stellarium afterwards. I was pretty pleased to have estimated it so close in a 5" scope. It was a really lucky night with the air conditions, which undoubtedly made a difference to how sharply things could be seen. I was a block of ice by the time I came in though.

I have Lightroom, so I will have to investigate trying that. I discovered why I was getting artefacts when stacking. The poor seeing was causing distortions between images. In one frame a crater would be a perfect circle, in another it would be slightly squashed vertically, in another it would be slightly squashed horizontally. The stacking seemed to be able to correct for this in a small area but across the whole image it doesn't seem to be possible - getting one bit lined up means another bit looks out of position. I don't see how I can correct for this unless the software can somehow "warp" the image to compensate.

This can involve other senses than just vision. I once started up my car, thought I had put it in gear, and pressed the accelerator to move forward. However, the car wasn't actually in gear, so it didn't move at all. But the interesting thing was because I was expecting to feel acceleration as I pressed the pedal, but didn't actually feel it, my body interpreted that as a completely inverse acceleration, i.e. I physically felt as if I was rolling backwards for a second, despite no visual change. It was freaky. Returning to what Olly saw, certain medications can cause this type of visual effect in some people. One I was on caused point sources like stars to actually leave trails at times.

Thanks Roy, that is a lot of frames! But your effort pays off I really need to work out how to stack lunar images I think.

One other thing Kostas - I assume this involved some kind of automated guiding and you weren't just pushing the telescope! It's an incredible picture.

Here are some pictures I took with my Nikon D90 and Nexstar 5SE, going through a 2x Barlow. I haven't really got any idea how to join multiple views together so I have just treated it as a triptych! These are all single exposures, around 1/30s at ISO 500. I tried stacking frames in Siril but they ended up with weird artefacts where it didn't align them properly. If anyone knows how to avoid that, please let me know! I then tried stacking in Astrosurface but although I have used that for video quite successfully, I couldn't figure out how to stack up raw camera files. So again, any info on that would be welcome.

These are fantastic, Roy! Can I ask what scope/camera/processing technique you are using?