RobertI

Sounds like an awful injury Alan, made my eyes water just reading it! Really super image.

Hi and welcome to SGL! 🙂 For visual observing I would say you have a great selection of gear there and I wouldn’t be inclined to rush out and change anything until you have done a lot more observing and decided what you really love looking at. For imaging the 80mm plus AVX would be great but sounds like you are after a lighter weight mount? I will leave others to comment on this as I am not an imager, and I expect there may be lots more questions coming your way about what you want to achieve!

Agreed, and there are so many new technologies in advanced stages of development, I seriously doubt this will get off the ground (excuse the pun) in the short term. Never say never, but not soon.

This thing will be 6km long!! And it’s helix shaped so a part of it will always be reflecting the sun. And it’s in geostationary orbit over the UK so it will always be visible. Quick calculation, I reckon it will appear 35” in diameter in the sky, which is about half the size of the ISS. So I think we can expect it to look like a bright star of around magnitude -2 or -3 permanently in the night sky in the UK and surrounds.

Yes I know what you mean. My 102ED rides on an AZ4 which is an awful lot lighter than my Skytee, but still no lightweight, so need to lug out scope and mount separately. Plus I need a chair when observing, so takes a little while to get sorted. My 66mm frac on a mini-giro plus photo tripod is ‘one hand’ portable, but again needs a chair and doesn’t really cut it on DSOs for me unless it is very dark, so sometimes limited. My best G&G setup is my Heritage 130P on the mini-giro. Plenty of light gathering, pick up with one hand and you can observe standing up, so no chair required! Stored in garage, no cooling needed. It’s not got the build quality of my fracs, but sometimes I get a good feeling from seeing challenging DSOs with such a budget setup. 🙂

Fascinating. Look forward to seeing the results. 👍

Yes it makes sense, I know that there is no logical reason that a filter should help with galaxies unless there is filterable sky glow, and in theory a filter would actually remove the fainter galaxy detail. I was viewing M33 with various filters last night to try and find NGC952 (I couldn’t). It did darken the sky and improve the aesthetics of the Galaxy as a whole, but I cannot say it made a difference to the discernible detail, which is what you would expect I guess. The UHCE was the best and it did make me think that perhaps a CLS would be worth a try, but also the Skyglow might help on certain nights. I think there is a bit of psychology going on here too, when you have experienced how well narrowband filters work with some emission targets you can’t help thinking you are seeing the same result on all faint fuzzies, but clearly you don’t. All of this reinforced that the best way to reduce sky brightness without affecting the target is to go to a dark site. 🙂

I’ll have to track this one down. 🙂

I’m using 1.25” filters. So far it’s working well, it’s nice to have the filters ready to try and the filter wheel sits permanently on the diagonal, but gets removed when I use BVs for planets/ lunar. The filter wheel is very well made.

Yes I think you’re right about the LED lighting. The only other thing is that I believe sky glow emits in a fairly narrow band, which might be filterable, but I don’t know how much of my intermittent bright skies is due to sky glow and how much is just high level mist/murk. Since posting the above I have been thinking that perhaps the Hb might be worth a go…..

Not sure where to post this - hopefully this section is ok. I recently treated myself to a ZWO manual 5 position filter wheel to allow me to switch between filters when viewing DSOs. It's actually quite a lot of fun switching between the filters for certain objects. Currently I have installed the following filters (see also graph screenshots): Astronomik UHC - Good all purpose narrowband filter for emission nebulae Astronomik OIII - 'Line' filter, great for certain emission nebulae and for "blinking" to find those elusive planetaries Astronomik UHCE - Designed for smaller apertures, higher transmission, getting closer to a 'broadband' LPR filter, good for comet ion tails due to carbon line (apparently) I'm primarily using it with the 102ED at the moment but could easily switch to the C8. I leave one slot empty for normal viewing, so the question is what filter could I put in the fifth slot? I have thought about a blue filter for planets or a neutral density filter for the moon, but most of my lunar/planetary is done with bino-viewers and I'm pretty happy with the unfiltered views (plus wouldn't reach focus with filter wheel), so I'm thinking of possibly a really good light pollution / skyglow filter for DSOs. Most of my light pollution is LED these days so not sure what would work. Is there anything that might make a difference for galaxies and reflection nebs? I suspect not. Would a Neodymium do anything more than my existing filters? Any thoughts/advice appreciated. EDIT: I tried the UHCE on M33 the other day under fairly bright skies - it darkened the background and made the view a bit more appealing, but didn't reveal anything extra, but also didn't seem to lose anything.

Yes EAA is fabulous for galaxies - I tend to think of spring as my "EAA season"! It is amazing though what a dark sky can do to enhance galaxies visually - M33 was incredibly luminous from the dark skies of Kelling Heath one year.

That sounds like a wonderful visual setup Olly. 👍

Horrible. Just horrible. It must have been horrific to see (and hear) your beloved scope mangled and bent. What a sad end to a wonderful instrument. Thanks for sharing your story and glad that at least you are getting a payout and can replace it. I suppose you could argue that it was better that it was “written off” than just a bit scratched or dented. I had an apo fall five feet into carpet - it seemed ok, but I never had confidence in the scope after that, I was always looking for signs of misalignment or damage.

Thanks for the heads up. I saw Mars and M1 (Crab Nebula) in the same field of view recently, which was a nice surprise an unusual juxtaposition. I’ll look out for the Saturns.

Yes I find observing has a similar effect on me. I was out very briefly last night, conditions were not great but it was very relaxing - the peace and quiet, my own space, no demands or complications, just me and Jupiter. 🙂 In fact when it finally clouded over I just sat there in the darkness with a cuppa enjoying the peace and quiet. 😂

Awesome scope, congratulations. 🙂

I would personally stick with Newtonians or mirror scopes for EAA, although I know ED scopes are very capable. I have used an RC6 aggressively reduced to F4.5 to F5 and have had really nice results going very deep and nicely framing smaller galaxies with my Lodestar. Obviously collimation is needed but I don’t need do it very often in my RC6. I have been seriously considering a Skywatcher 150PDS F5 which wouldn’t need reducing or a 150P F4 and I think either would make great portable EAA scopes. I use a CG5 equatorial (EQ5 class) which seems to work fine for focal lengths of 700mm and can do up to a minute if needed (accepting the occasional trailing sub). I think a really nice setup would be a 150PDS on a Celestron AVX mount. You can use Celestron’s ‘Sky Align’ feature which allows aligning on any three bright stars - makes that part easier I think. It also provides support for polar alignment I believe. You also get an upgrade path to a Starsense for auto aligning in future. Plenty of folk use plate solving but I’m not there yet. I guess you’d need a coma corrector with your bigger chip? The Celestron NexStar 6SE is a good alternative for EAA with different strengths and weaknesses - no polar alignment hassle, but tracking not in the same league as the AVX I would say and scope is trickier to get reduced down to F5 effectively for your large chip. As an aside I have been experimenting with a 66mm F4.8 refractor on a Sky Prodigy altaz mount for quick wide field views, and to give me my EAA ‘fix’. It works for exposures of up to 15 seconds, and is good for widefield, but I wouldn’t call it a ‘serious’ EAA setup, especially the mount.

Thanks Stephan, that’s really useful, I didn’t know about Ally’s Braid either! One of my problems is I think I have developed some age related ‘haze’ in my eyes so every bright star shows some haze, so what I need is to be able to see something definitive - you’re description plus the ‘trapezoidal’ shape might just do it. I also found the sketch below made by someone with modest refractors and ok skies - is this a reasonable expectation do you think?

Now that Taurus is coming into view, I thought it would be a good little project to try and see the Merope nebula. My previous half-hearted attempts have revealed nothing conclusive, and when we’ve I think I’ve seen some nebulosity I realise that I am seeing the same thing with all bright stars. I’ve done a little research and looked at a couple of sketches (there aren’t many) and it seems like it can be seen in a small scope but only from a dark site. Some say a minimum of 10” and some say a 4” is fine. Filters won’t work as it is a reflection nebula, although there is some debate on that. So what’s the best way to see the nebula and how do you know you’ve seen it? Is it irregularly shaped or just a circular haze? What’s peoples’ experience?

Oh dear, sorry about that. 😟Mind you, I didn’t promise he would be polite!

Awesome. That must have been an experience - a 16” scope under a dark sky. 🙂 Did you see any colour in the triffid, is it even possible?

Nice session. Those 5” reflectors are under-rated as good grab and go instruments and sit really nicely on lightweight mounts. 👍

Well, I’ve just been out for another very quick view and I reviewed the edge of field aberration on the Morpheus - I was very surprised to find that the stars were sharp right to the very edge in all directions, and any lack of sharpness was resolved by adjusting focus. So I am now very confused as to why I saw V shaped stars yesterday. The only thing I can realistically think of is that I was sometimes holding one eyepiece while I tested the other, and perhaps heat generated caused an issue, but seems a bit of a stretch. But it’s good news, the eyepiece is even better and really does live up to its “sharp to the edges” claim. 👍

Thanks Dave. 🙂