Chris

Cheers Craig!

Awh thanks Jeremy, I'm really pleased you like it!

Hello, I managed to image this event over a couple of clear nights, so I've animated the images together to show the relative movement. This is shown towards the end of the video. below. I hope you like it.

It's a beautiful thing at an ugly time!

Messed up focus so needed to go back out and try again. Still happy to captured a special moment.

Celestron products are made in the same Synta factory as Skywatcher and Vixen, and they seem thin on the ground at the moment.

Thinking about it, if you're on a budget something like the Skywatcher 150p f8 skyliner might be a good shout? £200 for 6" of aperture, light weight ish, and reasonably quick cooling. Also because it's a slow f/8 it comes with a very small central obstruction which gives better contrast than a lot of the f/5 Newtonians out there. I have the optical tube on a Pillar mount......really not grab n go like this though!

Thinking back through all the scopes I've owned in the past (maybe 40+) I think the most exciting grab n go scopes to use are the moderate sized ED refractors. Short achromats are just horrible in comparison, but I'm not knocking long achromats which have a lot going for them if you can mount them. Something like an ED80 f7.5 or ED100 f9 by Skywatcher would be a lot of fun (I've owned more than one of both)

I made this back on 2013 out of an old cupboard door and a pine shelf. Having stumbled across the pictures some years later I thought I would put together a brief step by step guide based on the images I have to hand.

Cheers Steve. I need to buy a whole setup - mount, scope and possibly camera. Which? I've been trying to decide for weeks! lol With current events I've decided you only live once!

Do you have any CEM25's, Steve? I'm in the market for a goto mount and it's on my short list

Hey Steve, Tough times in so many ways, but as long as people stay safe, that's the main thing. Thanks for your transparency and integrity. Stay safe guys!

Well done FLO, you're all troopers!

Thanks, I think it's good to know the tracking performance of a mount before you buy it. Of course this is just a sample of one mount but it's something

For a bit of light relief from current events I decided to see how well the iOptron SkyGuider Pro performs when tracking the night sky.

It's everyone's responsibility to help reduce the spread and I'm glad to see FLO taken sensible precautions

Those ED80 are no slouch's. Looks great with it's matching Porta mount

Agreed!

That was so brilliant to read, I'm really happy for you

This is the thing, this is all reasoning and theory, but how do you design an experiment to prove it?...it's beyond me .

Hey! that reflector looks exactly like my 150pl on it's pedestal mount lol

" The greater depth of focus may also have some truth in it, but here comes another spanner. If depth of focus is the problem, then how can a short focal length apo nearly always deliver an image with better definition? Ive no idea, just thinking out loud. Here's another thought. If a primary mirror needs to be at least 4X more accurate on its surface than anyone of the at least four lens elements of a refractor, if a secondary flat isn't also four times better than the combined lens accuracy, has it compromised the system?? It's enough to make my brain hurt!" Just when you think you have it figured out

I think so, but as discussed there is a school of thought that you're collecting photons through a more localised area with a smaller aperture scope, so you're taking a smaller 'cookie cutter' to an area of turbulence with a small scope. (and small scopes cool quicker, so people are less likely to confuse bad seeing with tube currents) It's probably a bit of all these, but I like to believe the main reason is depth of focus. You should have seen how steady the views were through my old 60mm f16.7!

This is similar to my way of thinking i.e. a large depth of focus gets around fluctuations in seeing conditions, as turbulence effectively changes the focal point slightly.

Same issue here. Needed to convert the .RAF files into Tiff to get them to stack in DSS. I used a program called PhotoScape X (free to download) and this seemed to recognise the .RAF files so I could save them as something else. It was a pain having to convert the files one at a time though. Does Adobe converter batch convert all your files in one go?