Ratlet

Wanted a sky atlas but saw this second hand for £15 and thought it would be rude not to.

Older edition, but hopefully the sky won't have changed too much. 

Also picked up a decent wee sketching book and pencils.  It's nice thick paper so it won't tear at night when it's dewy

I'm quite happy with my GEM28, but less so about having to cart it outside.  I was thinking about storing it in my shed (which is quite secure)

At the moment it breaks down into really useful brand storage boxes.

My only concern is condensation but I'm thinking of using those cheap disposable dehumidifiers as they should need changed out too often due to the small volume they'll be dehumidifying.

Does this seem reasonable?  Has anyone else used the cheap calcium chloride based ones or is it only silica gel ones people are using?

7 hours ago, Mr Spock said:

 

One of my own. The chart has 21 doubles in the range of my 102mm. That's a separation greater than 1.14" and a secondary brighter than 10.75.

Is there a way to work out what should be visible for a given scope in theory or is it through experience?

I work rotation and was up at 0400 for a 12 hour shift.  It was starting to get light by 0430 when I dragged the 127slt out with the svbony zoom.  The seeing was not great, but I like widerfield views so all good there and largely left it at 24mm

Didnt get much time viewing and no cool down time but slapped my eyes on Jupiter, always a worthwhile.  Not a huge amount of detail, but everyone often the seeing improved enough to make out some banding.  Not a huge amount of contrast but very nice.

I love watching the moon's.  Poor Ganymede felt like it was being left behind whilst Europa, io and calysto ran on ahead.  Is it my imagination or can you sort of see the position change relative to each other?

I then slapped eyes on Mars.  It was orange.

Edit:. Should be clear again tomorrow so I'm going to just break out the binocs.  They're 10*50 and have a nip of fungus, but I think they might be nice for a change.  Not done binocular astronomy yet

Just now, AstroNebulee said:

Yep I thought I'd try siril before everything else and did help me more. I used it for background extraction, photometric colour, a histogram stretch and just on this one a median filter. Then save and move onto starnett and then ps. 

Lee 

Photometric colour Callibration, or as I like to call it: The 'I win button'.

With siril you can run the gradient extraction on the individual subs as well which can be very effective if the gradient moves about.  This is a pretty good workflow:

https://siril.org/tutorials/tuto-manual/

Cheers folks.  I really appreciate the feedback.

Sounds like rotating the sky atlas is the way forward.  I'll get CdC downloads and have a look at it.

I think I'm going to get both JPA and IsDSA and hope the wife doesn't feel the same way about astronomy books as she does about the gear.

Practically I think the JPA will be a good starting point for me, but the IsDSA will potentially have more use for planning and is also aesthetically really nice.

Perfect cheers guys.

I've got a Rigel quick finder on the newt and an rdf on a 127slt.  You are right they are phenomenal.  The small circle is almost exactly what I see though my 32mm Plossl on my 130pds.

Once my brain is firing on more than one cylinder and it is daylight I'll have a look at the 2 charts and see which looks better.  I do use stellarium which has a simulated fov.  I'll take a look at CdS and check that at work.  I'll also use their printer to print out the star hopping stuff.

So far when observing I've basically been using stellarium and a red dot finder/telrad which is okay but not great as it doesn't tell you what will look good, just what you can look at. I'm also struggling with star hoping with my newt. So I've got a couple questions:

1.  How does a Newtonian flip the image and how can I use a sky atlas with my newt?  Ive seen a few different suggestions that its flipped or rotated or inverted but I couldn't figure it out.  I'm 90% certain that up is down through the eyepiece and that about it!  If I get a sky atlas how do I navigate the newt with it?  I've read that you just need to look at the atlas upside down but I'm not sure if that is true.

2.  What sky atlas would you recommend.  The jumbo sky atlas and interstellarium look good, but does anyone have suggestions.  Ideally I'd like ring bound.

3. Light:. Red or amber.  I struggle to read with red but I've heard good things about amber.

4.  My wife has a cricutandnhas suggested making 'rings' cut to scale that will roughly show the view through the eyepiece when placed on the starchart.  Does this seem a reasonable aid to a newbie or are we overthinking things?

5 hours ago, Astro_Dad said:

2011! Time flies. 
https://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/buckyball-traps-single-water-molecu-11-08-04/

Science is ace.

9 hours ago, Elp said:

Here's another quick one done:

 

You're a one man argument against telling people to go for a heq5!  You get a phenomenal amount of bang out of the az-gti. 

I'm just starting out and went for a 200 & 300mm lens.  Shorter focal length being more forgiving.  My glass is nowhere near as fancy as what you are looking at though.  But the focal length is excellent for a whole range of objects up there.

I'm using a mini pc with NINA and it works well.  Really well.  Once you get used to it and iron out the links.  It's not that hard, but watch cuiv the lazy geek on youtube to get an idea for the setup.

ELP has kind of highlighted the important part though is the attitude to it.  Astrophotography is more than just taking pretty pictures.  There is loads to do and that will go wrong.  But if you approach it with the same mindset as ELP seems to you'll get great joy from it.  You're looking at learning a whole new skill and each new bit of info or understanding will contribute to make it better.

There is so much to learn, but there are shed loads of people willing to share and help

Another night where I got some good unaided observations of an array of error messages on Remote Desktop Connection.  Good visibility, but not very impressed.  Fortunately that was mostly before we got some good darkness.

Constellations - I'm possibly enjoying this as much as looking through the scope right now.  It's like learning a language only easier. 

M31 & M13 - Could be my imagination, but I think even with the full moon being in a different part of the sky it wasn't as good as the other night.  Found it a lot quicker though.

Lyra - I could just about make out Lyra last night naked eye.  The moon is a pest when you're not looking at it.  Tried to split the double double but I'm not even sure I found it.  I should really plan these things better.

Jupiter - I broke out the Mak 127 for this.  You weren't kidding when you said maks are great on planets.  Much, much better than the newt.  Both the 32mm and the 8mm gave excellent views.  Very clear banding visible.  The 8mm BST was very satisfying.

Saturn - This was the standout for me.  Very clean and crisp.  Beautiful straw colour.  Fairly nips accross the sky.  I tried to barlow up for this, but it was moving too fast and by the time I got the barlow in, I'd lost it.

The Moon - Popped up beside my house so decided to have a look.  Must have left the polarising fitler in the house though but had a gander.  Not my greatest decision as 127mm of aperture rendered it a 'bit' bright.

I had a trial run of my Tair 3/T3i/Gem28 setup last night.  So far it's an incremental process familiarizing myself with the kit and NINA and I wasn't really aiming to gather any data last night, but I managed to get 12 minutes of data on M31 (12 x 60 second exposures).  I'm not entirely convinced by the focus though.  I know that some older glass is best focused manually and trying to minimize the halo from chromatic aberration rather than using a bahtinov mask.  Is the Tair 3 one of these?  I manually focused last night on Vega and attempted to minimize the size of the star during focusing.  Looking at the data, it appears I was slightly out, with some slight redness around the stars.

I've attached the stacked data I managed to get.  I used a constant bias of 2048 and there are no flats or darks applied (working on it).  The image was not dithered, but I was using guiding.  I did plan on trying dithering but unfortunately the wifi crapped out and Jupiter and Saturn popped their heads out so just rigged down.  There is some flaring on the stars.  I'm not sure if it is a tracking issue as it appears constant in each individual frame.  I'm unsure if this is due to not being in focus, or if it is due to me using the lens wide open at F4.5.  I've attached a very roughly processed image from my 12 minutes of data (It is my first 'proper' astrophoto.

So, any tips for focusing with a Tair 3?

Is the flaring on the stars due to tracking or is it focus or the lens wide open?

Waiting for twilight.  I think I've got the Nina kinks worked out.  Time will tell I guess.

From Russia with Love...

 @alacant is full of praise for these lenses and after seeing some battered copies on ebay for months this one popped up which looks like it might be new old stock.  It's a beauty and looks very nice with a matt black finish and the optics are spotless with an integrated sliding lens hood.  The focus is pretty stiff, but that will probably be a plus overall.

Only downside is that every time I take the lens cap off, it starts to play the Hymn to Red October.  All in all I think £45 was a very good price.

Tonight was mostly learning for me.  Did some playing around with NINA for a couple of hours but gave up in the end as I managed to connect the computer to a different wifi and lost remote desktop.  All good though as I managed to get everything working and talking.  Now it's just a case of figure out how to work the bloody thing.  Fortunately since I had a goto mount setup I swapped out the imaging rig for the 130 Newt and had a quick look at Andromeda and M13.  I tried out the SVBONY 8-24mm zoom again and it worked beautifully.  Its a fun little eyepiece.  Very much recommend it.  I swung over to Albireo and the colour rendition was beautiful.  But it was getting cold by this point and I decided to call it a night.

That being said as I headed in I spotted a VERY bright star.  Turned out, it wasn't a star but Jupiter.  Got lined up and dropped in the 8mm BST for x80 and nearly blew the back of my head clean off.  I had no idea it would be so bright!  It was almost dazzling.   I could easily make out 4 of the moons and with a bit of perseverance could discern some banding in the clouds.  I tried the 2x  barlow but it was almost to bright?  I went back to the 8mm and just watched and practiced tracking and called it a night again.

Only I spotted another suspiciously bright star...  I didn't even bother checking this time and pointed the scope at Saturn.  MARVELOUS.  The wings were fantastic (couldn't see the Cassini division) and again went for the barlow.  This was much better.  Tracking was a lot easier here since it was nipping across horizontally.  Titan was following close behind along with a star which gave the appearance of a second moon.  The first time I've looked at Saturn in 20 years and it's much the same effect.  You can really feel the distance in your bones.

I'll have to dig out the Mak for tomorrow night and leave it cooling.

On 07/08/2022 at 18:13, Ratlet said:

Nah mate, 130pds so 650mm focal length.  Svbony 8-24mm was giving fairly ratty looking stars, swapped to the 32mm Plossl and it was pinpoint. Only tried it the once though so it's possible there was some condensation on the lens or maybe not seated properly.  Still got to do some more testing once I get some clear skies again.  Will test it on the mak127 too.

Think the svbony 8-24mm is a different design possibly to the astromania one.  Certainly looks that way and wouldn't describe it as light lol.  

I'm just going to post a follow up to my earlier criticism.  The 8-24mm works fine.  It's really nice to use, although a little stiff.   I'm pretty certain the rubbish SW extension had inducsed an amount of tilt into things and caused the problems.

22 minutes ago, Dave scutt said:

DHL turned up with a delivery from flo.

The fun looks surprised to find itself in your kitchen

When I got my 130PDS I bought a 2" compression fitting to go on the focus tube but I noticed whilst collimating that it is unable to hold the provided Skywatcher Extension tube reliably and it will incredibly easily tilt (The bit it gips onto is very short and has a bevel).  This probably explains why I had a bad first experience of the SVBONY 8-24mm zoom as the eyepiece is heavy and would have induced tilt.

I'm looking to a replacement but I'm unsure if I should just get a 2" 50mm compression extension or if I should get an M54 40mm extension to screw onto the focus tube.  Gut feeling is that the M54 will get everything to be tighter and still provide enough travel to achieve focus.  I'm just a bit cautious with buying bits now so would like some others experience if possible.

I have to agree.  We need to address the naming of some nebula.

I think that the Thor's Helmet nebula looks more like a rabbit eating.

Head on the right with its ears pointing up and to the right.  It's even got a bright eye (burning like fire...)

2 hours ago, Nyctimene said:

I'm assuming, your 8" Dob has a focal length of 1000 mm (focal ratio F = 5) or, more probably, 1200 mm (focal ratio F=6). My Seben Zoom 8-24 mmf (seems to be absolutely identical with the Astromania zoom pictured above - even the slightly out-of-time plastic package!) works quite well with both of my F=5 Dobs (5.1" and 12"). It's lightweight and gets into focus with both scopes; good for grab-and go- situations. Add a Baader Turret Barlow 2.25x, and keep your 30 mmf, that's all you need.

Stephan

Nah mate, 130pds so 650mm focal length.  Svbony 8-24mm was giving fairly ratty looking stars, swapped to the 32mm Plossl and it was pinpoint. Only tried it the once though so it's possible there was some condensation on the lens or maybe not seated properly.  Still got to do some more testing once I get some clear skies again.  Will test it on the mak127 too.

Think the svbony 8-24mm is a different design possibly to the astromania one.  Certainly looks that way and wouldn't describe it as light lol.  

Does anyone have advice for tracking down decent observing sites short of driving around and hoping.  Like a list of Google map terms that will usually throw up places in the countryside with a carpark or similar?

My garden is obscured pretty much below 30° which to be honest is fine for most things but I'd like to look at the planets.  I'm near the east coast in Angus so I can get to the coast and get some horizon east and south, hopefully with minimal LP.

Don't go nuts with eyepieces.  If you are happy with the 30mm don't replace it.  I've got a 28mm skywatcher that came free with my scope and love the views.  I replaced it with a 30mm 1.25" Plossl cause I'm very lazy and didn't want to have to swap between 2" and 1.25".  Also 1.25" are generally cheaper.

The zooms are okay, but be aware that they often have a fairly narrow fov and some aren't true parafocal and will require focus adjustment as you change the zoom.  I got an svbony 8-24mm.  Not sure it works well in my F5 newt, but only tried it the once.

I believe the bst Starguiders are called astro tech paradigm eye pieces in the states.  You might get more milage out of replacing your 8mm with a better one like the paradigm and something in the middle like a 15mm?

I'd say at this point don't go nuts with eyepieces, get comfortable with collimation first.  Personally I'd go for a laser collimator as they make it a lot faster and easier.

The singularity in a black hole is basically called that because physicists don't like writing TBC on a model.  It tends to be bad for grants 😂