LukeTheNuke

My results are always a disaster when I try holding the phone to the eyepiece. Do you rest it right on the eyepiece or have a bit of a gap?

What a belter! Lovely colours!

Oooh, that's quite arty farty. Lovely! Would look good on the wall.

Very nice! Oh, Photoshop user. Very posh! Erm, where do I find this feature in GIMP?

Off to a great start! Very nice! They look sharp. I especially like the close-up. It looks a bit more contrasty to me. So your camera is a DSLR? Did you convert the shots to mono in processing or set the camera to mono? (at least, I don't think I see any colour? I like shooting in mono myself, I'm just wondering why).

Very nice, Steve. I should never have doubted your resolve to snap the golden orb.

Very nice! I used to image the sun every clear day too. Five times a year.

Beautiful shots, Rob! I especially love the colour one.

Thanks, Louis, that looks nice, though I'm looking for something in the UK.

Hmmm. I think a scope that might work for me, if I could find one at the right price, is an Obsession 18 inch. What do you think, folks? Although I wanted something that won't give me a hernia, I am now cool with the idea of it being quite easy to set up for two people - Sarah can help me. And it's a fairly big bonus if it can be taken to star parties.

It would be nice if it felt like an upgrade of sorts on our lovely old Skywatcher 400P Goto. So I'm wondering if the Obsession 18 would be a winner on all of those counts?

There is one for sale, and I could just about squeeze in the £4,750 asking price. But is this a good price for one? I have no idea. Looks like it was made in 2010. Any issue with that age? Does it affect value much?

https://ensoptical.co.uk/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=14915

Does the fringe report look good?:

Thanks for any thoughts.

PS the funds are due very shortly, touch wood. Budget is £5K at a push for the right scope, though £3K is more comfortable.

Very nice! Sharp and contrasty, I like it!

The Edge 8 is a cracking little light bucket. Congrats on the purchase! I'm hoping to get back to some lunar imaging with the Edge 8 myself. With your phone, did you have some kind of holder for it? (other than your hand! - I can never get anything decent just hand-held, and your shot is so sharp!)

Very nice, David, thanks for the view, with Mr Ward having a lie-in today. 😃

I suppose the (former?) monster is turning up tomorrow, as we have rain and thunder forecast for Sunday our way!

6 minutes ago, Steve Ward said:

The advice was to pay more attention to the histogam and make my 'whites' white ... wink.gif

Ah, thanks. The Persil technique.

Looking good! What did you do differently re: levels?

On 19/05/2024 at 18:38, kev said:

I like that middle image! 

Yeah, snap. That one stood out to me, too!

Lovely shots! Some nice depth, especially on those inverted ones!

Hmmm, interesting. Good point about animations over a long period of time.

12 minutes ago, John said:

I think the 13mm T6 Nagler is my favourite Nagler 🙂

Such a lot of performance in such a compact package !

I regret selling mine! Sold because my wife Sarah didn't like it. So compact, like you say, and a cracking eyepiece. Though the other week, Sarah was saying she doesn't mind if I get one again just for me. I think the price might have gone up a bit since I bought it, though! 😃

I see the angry unicorn!

Nice bit of background info about Carrington. I was reading about it the other day, as the whole country has gone aurora-mad. I was wondering if this monster AR and massive flaring means we probably are close to solar maximum. In which case, perhaps I shouldn't get a new solar filter, as it's all downhill from here, LOL!

I have this silly idea that one day I could be out observing the sun, going "Wow! Wow!!!! WOWWW!!! Oh no!!!!" And Kaboom, we're all gone. But what a way to go! But I think, perhaps I'd rather it doesn't put on too much of a show just yet.

Well done, far better than my phone efforts! (I'm too embarrassed to post them here). And thanks for showing the setup, that's interesting to see. I'm surprised to see the gap between the phone and the eyepiece. With my efforts, I've manually held the phone right up to the eyepiece. It didn't even occur to me to have some distance between the phone and eyepiece.

Wowsers, that's officially amazeballs. Well done! 

PS I zoomed in on one of the white background pixels and did a bit of deconvolution (Lucy-Richardson) and came up with this:

1 hour ago, Dave Smith said:

All my white light pictures are with the 90mm frac (Megrez 90) The camera I use is the ZWO ASI 178MM which unfortunately doesn't quite cover the whole disc so have to take two and stitch them using Microsoft ICE (free).

I did use the 174 but very much lost out on resolution. I normally take 2000 frames with FireCapture and stack with AS!4. For the processing I mainly use Solar Toolbox in PixInsight.

Good luck.

Dave

That's interesting that you use the 178 over the 174. Cracking solar images with a £300 camera? I take it you need a tilt adapter for the 178? What kind of FPS do you get at full resolution? (fast enough, it sounds like, if you are getting 2000 frames...)

Oh actually, doesn't Nigella use one as well? Hmmm.

18 minutes ago, Roy Foreman said:

The 183mm is a superb camera. Tiny pixels and a relatively large sensor mean very high quality results, but there is a downside - huge file sizes. I can easily use up half a terabyte on an imaging run, and each file takes 40min to stack, even on a high end PC.  I've had no problems with my camera but I only use it for lunar.

And yes I too am guilty of spending my money in my head before I've even earned it !

Cheers and good luck.

Thanks for the info on the camera. It's certainly singing for you on lunar! (some folks seem fine with it for h-alpha, others not - I don't know the full story there). It's a slippery old slope. I start off at under £300, then if I spend a bit more, I can get a ... And before I know it, cameras costing around the £1K mark no longer look bananas, LOL! Or do I get one that can do a bit of deep sky as well as lunar and h-alpha?

I wonder if the stacking software uses the GPU? Also on my shopping list is a powerful desktop PC and a midrange lappy, unrelated to the astro, but that make getting back into astro imaging that bit more tempting. Gosh, I'll need to do a re-mortgage at this rate. I might as well buy an Edge 14 as well, LOL!

25 minutes ago, Roy Foreman said:

That's what you get when using a 20Mpx camera !

I had a look at the ZWO cameras the other day (I sold my cameras a few years ago, alas, and it's tempting to get back to it, with the help of a windfall due soon, with any luck). There are so many to choose from! So you have the ZWO ASI 183MM.  19 FPS at 5496 x 3672. Hmmm. Seems like some folks had problems with it for solar h-alpha, some not. I might want to get back to solar h-alpha if my windfall stretches to a new solar filter as well. Gosh, I think I have the windfall spent five times over already!

Good luck for tonight! Lots of rain here today so far. I wouldn't mind a peek at the moon tonight.

Wow, fabulous shots again! The mosaic is epic! Well done!

No idea about the funny stripes and squares. The original looks sweet to me, can't see why it would cause that banding, other than it's a huge image (8221 x 12332, 56 MB). It scales just fine in GIMP.

I just tried a little test to see if compressing it would help - I tried 70% compression (6.5 MB, down from 56 MB), but it had the same banding issue viewed on SGL.

re: aperture and seeing conditions, for a while I would image the moon with either a 120 mm frac, or 8 inch Edge SCT. Most nights, it felt like the 8 inch SCT had no advantage in resolution. I don't think my sky at home is very good for high res planetary. Perhaps because we're surrounded by rooftops in every direction? The best view I've ever had of Jupiter by far was at a star party (Kelling Heath), with a 12 inch dob. I've never had anything close to the detail at Kelling from home, even with a 16 inch dob. So I wonder if location matters as well for the close-up stuff?

Well done on your first mosaic! And nice to wave goodbye again to that lovely AR! Or should I say, "Au revoir".

I didn't notice any join (though it must be said, I'm not the most observant - my wife sent me out onto the drive a few times to try to spot what was different one time - I didn't notice that she had car in a different colour...)