RobertI

Thank you. Yes I am planning on going to the Clacton Club as they were very supportive and inspiring when I was a teenager. Time to pay back I think. 🙂

Superb, stay out as long as you can!

Yes, that’s correct, I do this in addition to the night mode in SS - I think it’s set up in Accessibility options and activated with a triple click of the on/off button. It’s necessary as the iPhone has a bright white bar which sometimes appears at the bottom of the screen which needs reddening, and as you say, for using other apps.

For Celestron mounts you can buy the SkyFi Portal dongle and use the Sky Portal app or SkySafari to do the initial alignment, find objects, slew and nudge. So I think you would have everything you need. You can set the display to night mode and dim it, and it doesn’t affect night vision too much. I’ve never tried in a really dark sky site though. I am guessing for Skywatcher there is a similar wireless dingle solution.

Lovely report, very poetic!

That’s the beauty of SkySafari, it makes it all so easy! But I understand it might be too much for many folk 🙂

Good question, the main reason is that I have a whole load of observing lists in SS that I have acquired over time (best NGCs, Herschel 400, coloured doubles, etc) and I want to be able to use these. I also enter observing reports for objects into SS sometimes. It’s my main observing planner, so being able to use it with Starsense was a godsend.

Ah, I think I have just solved my problem, I had still SkySafari set to the location of my recent holiday destination in Turkey, so the time and lat/long would have been wrong and possibly confused the Starsense. I’ll check next time I’m out but 99% sure this is the issue.

I don’t know if anyone else has experienced this issue. I’ve been successfully using Starsense on my iPhone 12 for a few weeks. Recently I enabled Starsense in SkySafari 7 Pro and it worked well, but the last two times out it has been failing to find objects with the message “failed to find telescope position”. It aligns fine to start with and shows an image of the sky, but then in use, it fails with the above message. When switching over to the Starsense App it works fine, but then back to SkySafari, and it fails. I’ve tried removing all apps in memory apart from SS, but same problem. Anyone any ideas? I know in theory it’s the same code for both apps so both should work or both should fail. Any thoughts appreciated.

There is actually a campaign in progress and the local council have started an enforcement “process” as it looks like planning laws have been broken, so that’s good news, but it won’t be quick.

Sorry, I know this thread is covering a lot of different ground, but just illustrate the above I took a picture of the station last night, and compare below with what it looks like during the day. If planning laws can allow this to happen in a rural setting, then there is little hope. 🫤

That is great to hear. Of course it’s not just roads - Network Rail have created a new car park near me with completely over the top lighting in an AONB…..

I know the Astrotrac 360 has been available for around three years now, but there seems to be very little discussion on the mount and there is virtually no stock available from the major astro retailers. Plus the Astrotrac website is showing all the signs of not being maintained anymore. I wonder what’s going on?

Interesting to see it with the 102ED, makes me realise that it’s quite a beefy mount. Could be something to replace the AZ4 one day.

Another interesting video. He seemed to be more focussed on using it for full blown astrophotography than EAA, although I get that many of the buyers of this product will end up using it primarily for long integration astrophotography (you’ve only got to look at the posts on Unistellar Facebook page to see this). Personally I would be more interested in seeing the images build up over 4 or 5 minutes as that is usually the maximum I go to when I am doing EAA, not the 60 minutes plus he was showing. From what I could see from pausing the ‘accelerated’ image capture video of the Pacman, you can see it starting to emerge after the first capture and it looks ok after 5 minutes, but pretty dim. I would be interested to see how much of Stephan’s Quintent is visible after 5 minutes. I imagine without a full moon, things would have been better. I think Cuiv’s short images of the Dumbell and M13 from central Tokyo were more useful in showing its capabilities for EAA.

Excellent job, you’re on your way!

Although we had a cloudless sky at sunset, it did not have that vivid cyan colour that indicates good transparency and the horizon seemed to be a dirty grey colour. Sure enough I can see very few stars in murky darkness now - it ain’t good out there.

Nice report of a nice session Peter. Regarding your last comment about not being able to check what your supposed to be seeing via Stellarium, I can throughly recommend the Starsense App and gizmo, which not only guides you to the object manually, but also gives you everything you need to know, including black and white DSS images which are close to what a typical EAA setup might show (in fact virtually identical to my EAA setup). As for the strengths and weaknesses of EAA v Visual, I agree with you, except that it’s hard to beat the pinpoint diamond look of stars visually, especially binaries and open clusters. EAA is a clear winner for Nebulae and galaxies though. 👍

Yes, what’s more it’s right next to the building where I ran a business for seven years. Stranger and stranger. 😲

I’m in the process of taking an extended break from working to rest and recuperate from years of stress. One of the many things I am planning to do is spend more time on astronomy, possibly even doing some volunteering. There are no planetariums or astro organisations around here, so I wasn’t sure what I could do. Imagine my surprise when I drove into a local industrial estate, to see one of the buildings with a spaceman and rocket outside and a sign on the building saying “It’s rocket science”. I went in to investigate and it turns out that it’s a science and astronomy education and outreach centre! What’s more they are after volunteers and also offering paid work. Of all the weird coincidences I have experienced, this is one of the strangest. I shall be keeping in contact. https://itsrocketscience.co.uk/

That’s a wonderful thing that you’ve done. Looks like the universe had decided that the scope and mirror should come together. I hope the new owner was suitably gratefully and promised to let you look through it when assembled?

Nice! 🙂 I suspect 99% of the audience didn’t know the answers either.

Fascinating stuff. 👍

Thanks that’s really interesting to hear. I am taking my Starwave 102EDR to Kelling in a few weeks, and in the unlikely event of some clear skies, I’m hoping to try some challenging emission nebulae and push it to its (and my) limits. Talking of wide field, I do have a 38mm Panaview eyepiece which fits in the whole of the Veil with the 102EDR, but the circular shape of the nebula means the interesting bits sit on the periphery of the FOV where there is significant image distortion, due to field curvature I am guessing. I could just try refocusing so that the edge is in focus I guess, never considered that……

Nice compact setup. 👍