Chris

Saturn and Jupiter were positions above the 'big gap' to the front of our house about midnight, so having just bought a ZWO385mc I was keen to try it out for planetary imaging. I looked at my scopes all sitting in the corner and picked out the Heritage 150p as my best hope. It has the relatively big 6" mirror and no chromatic aberration to worry about, so I fitted the 150p optical tube to my motor driven Starquest mount and all seemed well until!... I could not get focus! Not even with the Barlow lens! I was then faced with two options, switch the Heritage 150p for the Meg72 or my the really wild card, my 102mm f/5 achromat. I very nearly went for the meg72 but decided on the short f/5 Achromat in full knowledge that I was using a low power wide field scope to try and image the planets. My expectations were low, especially as the seeing was quite poor. However, I was quite surprised by the stacked images after processing. The 2.5x Barlow really helped.

hahaha it's definitely veiled Rob I think focus might have slipped then. Yeah some people make it look easy but it really isn't.

Go out side for starters, focus on a bright star. I suggest Polaris as it wont move. Get it in the centre if the eyepiece then de focus it until it looks like a dougnut shape. If the doughnut shape is symmetrical then your scope is collimated. The 10mm eye piece that comes with these scope (the Super 10) is a very crude modified achromat design and it's gives a soft image. The 25mm is ok though. You may want to upgrade to something like a cheap 15mm Plossl eyepiece and a 2x Barlow lens. This will then give you a range of magnifications 25mm 15mm, 12.5mm, and 7.5mm. At 7.5mm you'll be at around 87x mag which will get you a little closer to the action and you'll be able to see the rings of Saturn a bit easier plus the cloud belts of Jupiter. You could probably get a 12mm and Barlow for even higher planetary views only the eye relief starts to get tight with Plossls around 10-12mm First of all test go outside, let the scope cool, and test collimation plus the supplied eyepieces. Have fun

Thanks Robert, yes one tail is the dust tail and then there is the harder to capture Ion tail. I had to stretch the data within an inch of it's life at just 3 second exposures as you can imagine but the Ion tail is there which I'm pleased about

On a budget the nifty fifty - Canon 50mm 1.8 STM prime lens. they are around £100

Me too, but I've already taken shots between 28mm and 70mm with foreground interest, so thought I'd try and close up.

I wanted to try and catch both tails of comet Neowise but without owning a startracker I thought I would try 60 x 3 second exposures on a fixed tripod, and it kind of worked. I'm pretty sure I'm seeing both tails! Fuji XT100 with a vintage 135mm Super Takumar lens @ ISO 6400 Processed almost entirely in DSS. The stars are a bit rubbish and there's some noise but hey ho.

Thanks Andrew

lol I guess it's no surprise that the new way of doing things has brought it's own set of social anxieties to worry about

Thanks Jeremy, I wasn't too bad thankfully, I got bed about 2am and I'm fairly used to doing night shifts. Well spotted! My wife had to juggle work and the kids whilst I was at work she did well to sort the kitchen out.

I'm not sure how many people have the pro version of windows? If most people have W10 Home? I'm guessing you would need to pay to upgrade to Pro to make use of that. I did down load a free time lapse program a while ago which worked well, I can't remember what it was called but I only deleted it to make room on my tiny hard drive. I really want to upgrade my laptop, I only have a Ryzen 3, 4GB of Ram, and 128GB SSD. It's very slow going for video/photo editing but probably remarkable that it can do it at all.

That's cool to know, I didn't realise the Pro version had more video features. I use Movavi

I felt like a was going to be attacked by a badger at any moment it was so rural

Hi, I've been lucky enough to have imaged the comet on a couple of occasions and I honestly think it would be tricky to image at 650mm focal length and especially with a planetary camera having a narrow field of view. Do you have a DLSR camera plus lens, and a tripod? This would be the weapon of choice. I've got some pretty nice shots with focal lengths between 28mm and 70mm with a large full frame sensor. This is why you best visual views are with the binos you see. The comet is a large extended object so looks better with low power wide angle instruments. A camera and lens is the photographic version of your binoculars

Ah thanks Rob, very kind! I've got a terrible sense of direction, especially in the dark lol, but I was in a field somewhere between Otley and Framlingham, Suffolk. I could make out the milky way which was really nice to see, so it was pretty dark....and a little scary with creatures rustling around near by lol

Not content imaging Neowise from my garden, I hit the road late Friday night after work in search of darker skies in deepest darkest Suffolk.

Brilliant hearing David talk. I'm not even half way through yet and I feel like I've learnt so much about meteorites.

Thank you Rob I think this comet has boosted a lot of peoples astronomy mojo's, mine included. I really hope you get to see it Rob. I know tonight is a right off, but keep peaking out them curtains!

Thanks Jeremy I'm itching to go out somewhere picturesque to capture it again, but it's of course wall to wall cloud at the moment. I hope it's still burning strong for the next clear night. Fingers crossed.

Hiya, for this instalment of my regular astronomy videos I talk about the hot topic which is comet Neowise.

Cheers Jeremy! I'm super happy with it, though I'm greedily hoping I get another chance to try and improve upon it with a more interesting location than my back garden

This is one of the frames I used for my time lapse - 6 Seconds at ISO3200 with a Sony A7 mk1 and kit lens at 70mm f5.6

I was out snapping away for some time last night whilst simultaneously gawping at comet Neowise. This is a load of 6 second exposures taken at ISO3200 with a 70mm kit lens @ f/5.6 and Sony A7 mk1 camera. I then condensed it into a 4K movie using Movavi. NeowiseTLfast.mp4

Didn't manage to nail focus but hopefully a few more chances to come.

Superb shots. I really love the refection in the water.