David Smith

Nicely done Charl. Good to see you back posting images again.

Might seem an odd question, I'll explain. My southern horizon is full of trees obscuring the big planets from view from anywhere in my garden. I'm not keen to cart my kit off to some field to do planetary observing / imaging but really miss the big planets. So I thought maybe could just observe from an open bedroom window? We have a south facing bedroom window and Jupiter and Saturn clear the tree line around 10pm now. The only mount I have at the moment is my CG-4 which is not very practical to cart upstairs and setup but I do have a Manfrotto 190XPRO4 which I use for photography and could deploy as an alternative given a suitable head. For visual I could put the Skymax 127 on an AZ5 but would like to try my hand at some imaging which would really necessitate a driven mount. So my plan would be to pick up an AZ GTi, mount it on the Manfrotto, add the Skymax 127 and away we go. The bit I'm unsure of is if I can get a basic alignment from the bedroom window. As I understand it you can do a one star align with this mount but I cannot find a list of available stars to choose from? Any assistance gratefully received. Thanks David

Nice work Roger. My few minutes visual today were spent with the Quark.

Yep, me too.

Good shot. I managed to see it visually with the Quark about lunch time but then had to pack up quick when the rain started again!

Good captures. Interesting comparing the two, the PST BF appears to show some flaring around the spot whereas the Lunt shows "more detail" in the surrounding areas.

Very much enjoying your Ca-K animations. Must have a go myself!

Sorry Paul, only just seen your reply. Hope your Quark adventure is going well!

The Holy Trinity Nicely done

Great set Steve

Mixture of imaging and visual today. My first opportunity to image with the Quark attached to the Evostar but I also spent a lot of the session just experimenting with the config; barlows, aperture masks, quark settings, flats, etc. All the images below were taken with the aperture stopped down to 100mm and a 1.5x barlow in place. This seemed to give reasonable balance between contrast and focal length. Looks like I need to order a tilt adaptor to deal with the Newtons Rings, not unexpected. Ca-K is much simpler..... Nothing going on in WL today so rather than grab a full disk I just went for some granulation.

Nice image John. If it's any consolation it's not just you she is hiding from!

Early session today. After a few weeks break from Ca-K and WL whilst playing with the new Quark, I decided to get back to these today. Unfortunately by the time I got to H Alpha the seeing had gone off quite badly and I didn't manage to image anything. Nothing doing in white light but some detail on show in Ca-K including some nice proms.

Dumb question of the day but how does stacking 2 filters with the same band pass result in a narrower overall band pass

Great prom capture.

Good result given the meteorological and physical obstacles.

Just needs a red light...

Sunny skies (between the clouds) today but very windy so limited to imaging with the Bresser. Managed to grab white light and Ca-K full disks as well as getting my first images with the the Quark. A monster prom visible in Ca-K, shame I couldn't get the Evostar on it as it would have been quite spectacular.

Exactly

Wow, awesome set Marty. You certainly made the most of the break in the weather.

Just seen this on social media, thought it would be appreciated here.

Thanks Pete. Lots of sunshine all week whilst at work but of course with it being the weekend now the weather has taken a dramatic turn for the worst and the rain is bashing down out there today! Fingers crossed for some time on sol tomorrow.

Love the green disk

Oh, an SMIII Is that a new addition Brian?

The usual top drawer imagery Steve 👌