Paul M

It's a thing of beauty! I started with a Dixon's own brand 60mm refractor. Identical to your new arrival but had a wooden tripod. It wasn't some speculative stocking filler, I already had the bug. The first object I saw through it was Spica in the dawn sky of Christmas Morning 1976. That scope absorbed me entirely for some years. I still own it, I think, but it went out on loan in the mid 80's to persons long forgotten!

To replace the cheap generic power brick that failed after a few hours. Gonna need some dense red film over that meter!

Here is a single 60 sub of (109) Felicitas. I'm currebntly trying to collect enough subs to make short animation. Loads of faint fuzzies but not showing in this. They'll show in the final stack.

Some of us of a certain age and older will have fond memories of waiting 6 weeks or more for a Fullerscope telescope! Mine might have been more like 10 weeks. But hey, I'd actually been waiting 20 years...

Does that mean Nikolas74 hasn't taken the 2"? If so, I'll buy it please

I like it! Nice colours. I'm disappointed with my efforts on M1 this year. Mostly due to equipment problems and weather.

Here is the Beast asteroid hunting.

Viking was in my era. I still remember Carl Sagan delivering the Royal Institute Christmas Lecture on Viking. Nothing, for me, will ever trump the early explorers, Sky Crane or not!

I've let the team down. After a 12 hour day shift I just couldn't face pulling the dew heaters off the big newt and setting up the Mak and it's very dewey here so the Mak wouldn't last half an hour without dew control. I look forward to the images though. I've looked in the past but never been confident I'd got the right features!

There is something quite refreshing about visible light solar images and that is a very impressive example too! I somehow regret not getting a big SCT or similar long f/l compact light bucket. I know they can be a handful but I don't think I've ever done anything the easy way

If it stays clear I might just give my 127 Mak it's first lunar outing!

One thing I found with CCD plate solving in APT with ASTAP selected is that it struggled with 1x1 binning. So in APT I have the default exposure set to 15 sec and binning set to 2x2 for solving GOTO++ etc. Works a treat now but was frustrating initially having had no issues with DSLR solving. It's an ASTAP issue for me as ASTAP won't solve any 1x1 images I give it in free standing mode either.

I've had nothing but trouble with imaging. Zero productivity since last May and I only stared with imaging in April! But imaging isn't what brought me to astronomy. I was visually only for decades. I can can back if needed. But I'm not that flappable. I actually find it funny sometimes. Luckily I'm not a huge spender and don't have complex gear. Even so simple things can spoil a night for no good reason. An example being PHD2 this evening. Showed alternate good then blank frames. Took some messing before I even tried guiding. No particular problem. It just decided to play up! I'

I don't have the filter but have spent some time with an OSC in APT using the native driver. How about using a bright star, gain set quite high (250?) and a 5 sec exposure in live view and have histogram stretch on. I guess the Bahtinov mask attenuates the star also. I don't use one but find diffraction spikes from my big newt or just star size are good enough. APT Live View with a CCD works differently to when using a DSLR. So you can select any exposure time you like. It just keeps updating the image. 5 seconds isn't to long to wait between focusing tweaks and if that isn't long enough

Now that's a nice find! I wasn't aware of that little Planetary but I'm going to look it up for sure!