SteveNickolls

Hi Wayne, Thanks for your message. The red led finder I'm using on the Apollo's is a 'Sky Surfer III LED-Fiber Pointer' from Baader Planetarium. It has a variable intensity red dot control as I have found some others are just 'on' or 'off' and can be too bright. I originally bought mine years ago together with a purpose made L bracket from 'Scopesnskies. Depending on how you Internet search you either come up with http://www.scopesnskies.com/prod/binocular/red-dot/tripod-bracket2.html (currently out of stock) or http://www.scopesnskies.com/prod/binocular/red-dot/tripod-bracket.html and in stock :-) Best to ring and check! Cheers, Steve

He he no it's not wrong to lust after them but I had to wait until I was 60 and a certain lady in my life bought them for my birthday. Certainly an arm and a leg (or two) cost-wise but I have poorly eyes and I find binoculars are better for me than telescopes for viewing so not the excess it may appear. Cheers, Steve

Here is the pair of Vixen 81mm's (BT81S-A). Cheers, Steve

Hi ghostdance, I don't think I could properly use the binoculars without the finder. I use my bins on a tripod and the combined bracket and finder make everything so much easier to locate. Some of the combined brackets/finders on the Internet do not have a variable intensity red led like mine do so they can be too bright in use also right now some vendors don't have any in stock. I've found that mounted on the Tracker 4 tripod I can view up to the zenith. Hope this helps. Cheers, Steve

I seem to use my binoculars for virtually all my observing nowadays (a case of two poor eyes propping each other up). Here is a photo of my Helios Apollo 15x70's, I use them with a one piece bracket and red led finder and a Vanguard Tracker 4 heavy duty tripod. They are my mainstay and despite the heavy tripod are quite movable. And my two Pentax binoculars the 10x50 and 20x60- For my 60th my dear wife bought me some Vixen 81mm binoculars (BT81S-A) that stand on the Vixen SXG-HAL 130 tripod, fork mount and plate which can have their eyepieces swapped to give magnifications of between x19 and x48 and varying FOV's. M45 looks magnificent through them at x19. I must get to take a photograph of these binoculars next time I use them. Cheers, Steve

Hi Lee, glad you have things working now. As you've found the two S@N files contain conditional action script allowing detection almost out of the box. There are other conditional action scripts out there depending on what you want to do. I found that after a while detecting the first meteor trails and checking everything worked that I wanted to reduce the number of screenshots taken (to preserve some hard drive space mostly). More recently with 'The Admiral' I have been looking at the initial parts of a number of signals showing increasing and decreasing frequency, but that's deeper down the rabbit hole. Others are keen to record both the screenshots and audio. Some wish to send off their data to the Radio Meteor Observatory (RMOB). A lot of the learning is trial and error and I would say have fun experimenting, making mistakes but learning all the time and reading up as much as you want as meteors are a fascinating area of astronomy. You will produce your own data and compare with others and do this 24/7 regardless of the weather and in the comfort of your own living room. No more only being able to observe one night in five anymore and light pollution doesn't matter. Initially Spectrum Labs can come over as very detailed (which it is) and this can be daunting but later it turns into a very flexible tool that you can use to explore detecting meteors with. The manual that comes with the software is a good start. I don't think you ever stop learning and I have come to regard meteor work as the most rewarding part of astronomy I have done, it's certainly the most cost effective by far :-) Here are some links you might enjoy reading- http://www.popastro.com/meteor/index.php http://www.imo.net/ The IMO have a very useful pdf of showers due in the year. http://www.dmradas.co.uk/Downloads.html There's also a lot of SGL threads which you might find interesting too Lee, we are all learning together. Let us know how you get on. Best of luck, Steve

Thanks FLO for this-have added as a favourite. Best regards, Steve