RobertI

Well done for being brave enough to share this Chris, why shouldn't we share the failures as well as the successes, perfection can get boring (not that I would know!).

Poor seeing, a bright sky, breezy with some cloud - not an ideal recipe for a good session but I did bag a few interesting doubles with the 150P; Iota Cancri - a lovely wide double with a bright yellow primary and fainter blue/white scecondary; HR4028 - two members of 4 and 6.5 separated by 1.5", only just achievable in the poor conditions. The highlight though was two doubles in the same FOV - at 60x I could see both Kappa and Iota Bootis - a lovely sight and worth seeking out even in the smallest of scopes! Kappa comprised a creamy yellow primary and grey/white secondary separated by 13". Iota comprised a bright white primary faint secondary separated by 38". Rough sketch below. I searched for some interesting open clusters but there is precious little about in the spring*. Time to put the 150P away and break out the C8 for some galaxy observing or a bit of EAA I think? Rob * Edit - I can only see the eastern half of the sky so can no longer see most of the winter constellations by the time I get out.

Well done on seeing the pup John, I've just had a similar slightly diappointing session which yielded a couple of good things, will try and write up.

Nice report, glad you are enjoying your observing so much. Nice phone shots too!

Well, I obviously can't rely on my memory - looking back on a report from 2017, it appears I did pick up the F component in my venerable C8. It obviously wasnt that memorable at the time!

Nice early morning session and a very lucky alignment of objects, must have looked wonderful.

Another interesting EAA object to add to your book

Nice work Martin, I love your capture of NGC2017, worthy of the imaging forum! An interesting looking cluster, I'll try and track this down. I'm mostly doing visual at the moment with a newly acquired 150PL which is fun, especially on doubles. But I shall return to EAA soon, probably when the council fixes the nearby streelight and my garden is illuminated once more - thank heavens for EAA! That's really gutting Mike, so sorry to hear that. Could you recover some images from your posts on SGL?

I don’t like to overuse the word ‘wow’ .......but WOW! Impressive stuff, this is motivation for me to develop my observing skills and have more patience at the eyepiece.

Thanks for the reminder about the benefits of dark skies - I often forget the huge difference this makes. Like you i often take my smaller scopes on trips to Cornwall and France and am amazed at what they show, but I should make more of an effort to take the C8 to really go deep.

Blown away, not by the views, but by the wind! Extremely windy tonight with scudding clouds, but I thought....what the hell......I'll have a go, and just to add to the challenge, I'll use my longest scope - my new 150PL. Not surprisingly the seeing was pretty awful, just to find out how awful, I put a high power eyepiece in and aimed at Polaris - it was not good, I estimated 3 to 4 on the Pickering Scale though I think it improved somewhat an hour later. I had a brief look at some better know doubles (often waiting for clouds to dissipate) but, the views were disappointing so I decided lower power was the way and after failing to find M97 or M108 in UMa, or any of the brighter galaxies in Leo (I didn't try very hard!), I ended up having a nice twenty minutes on M44, observing the very subtle colour differences of some of its members and attempting a sketch. Surpisingly the scope was really steady in the high winds, I think the Skytee on the heavy 2" tripod at its lowest setting provides a very solid base, although I did sometimes worry whether the very gusty high wind was capable of blowing the whole lot over!

I've been going through the same process - I have a 150PL (F8) and a 5mm BST giving 240x, but feel I could go to higher mags for some doubles. The 4mm NIrvana was top of my list, but then I thought that another option is to replace my 5mm BST with a 5mm Hyperion. With the fine tuning rings (which I already have) I could get 5mm, 4mm, 3.2mm and 2.6mm, all from one eyepiece. To be honest, I would only use the 2.6mm on my other shorter FL scopes, but it does give the option of a range of focal lengths with which to experiment. I know Hyperions are not brilliant on F5 scopes (edge distortion), but they are very good on my F8 scope (sharp to the edges) and from memory work fine on my F6 scope (I'm sure others can also advise).

Interesting captures Martin, NGC is reminiscent of the Coathanger Cluster to me, but on a smaller scale of course. The blue/white stars are really striking against the background of redder stars.

Some great observations and fascinating background - I'm glad you did the inverted images and ringed the clusters, I really couldn't make out Berkeley 26 without it.

Looked beautiful over Manningtree a few minutes ago...