Paul M

My first thought is that a 6 year old would struggle to use a telescope without experienced adult assistance and would then be disappointed with the view. If her imagination is fed by exciting pictures of the planets in books, any telescope within a sensible price range and that's usable by a novice will disappoint. But I don't know the child and she may well enjoy just seeing things through the telescope. So the recommendation above is as good a place to start as any! Wide field of view, low magnification, would be good for the Moon and star clusters and the brighter "fuzzy" nebulae. Just avoid the toy telescopes from high street stores that claim outrageous capabilities. I just found this from the sponsors of this forum. Simple, just point and focus! For the money it's worth a gamble?? https://www.firstlightoptics.com/beginner-telescopes/celestron-firstscope-signature-series-moon-by-robert-reeves.html I think mum will need a few starter books!

Nice book idea and a fun project! I'm a romantic so like to see the Milky Way, at least where the scale is appropriate. Plainly, it's not needed and brings nothing to the usefulness of the charts. So I'd ignore me One thing I look for every now and again is the conjunction of asteroids on highly divergent paths, such that it would make a dramatic animation. Unfortunately there is a dearth of relatively bright, high inclination asteroids to feed my idea but plenty of main belters, just waiting. Good luck with the book, are you publishing it, or is it just a personal project?

It seems entirely possible to me that the 3 nights I got a week ago or so were likely my last of the year! I'm just ending an 18 day shift break and was hoping for bit more than that while I'm off work. I can't even maintain match fitness, let alone advance my imaging. Remote imaging sounds great, and I've looked into it. But I like making things work for myself and perhaps I'd feel that any remote data I collect would be a collaboration. Maintaining and managing the equipment is a big part of it, the hard part maybe. But I find the acquisition more enjoyable than the processing, therefore I'd be denying myself the best part!

Thanks Paul, I tried that already. ASTAP has that function available but my one attempt with this data so far didn't go right. I've used it in the past with success so maybe worth another, less rushed attempt. Anyway, other than play with the data already collected, I'll leave this one alone. Upwards and onwards! An obscure Jovian satellite next, maybe

WoW, you certainly do some mind blowing imaging with that scope! They seem to be a bit out of fashion now. There is a Youtuber in your part of the world "Northern Panorama" who was using one, with great results, for a while. He's since gone onto reflactors, or some such.; telescopes without mirrors, apparently. That's another stunning image of an object I've never heard of and I'm sure there is no point in my wasting electricity trying to find it myself! The threat title caused me some consternation initially, I imaged IC342 last week, so got confused with your image. I had to go back and read what you'd actually written!

No just another Crab! As a warm up before starting on my main target yesterday evening/this morning, I grabbed a few subs of M1, my favorite DSO. I need to go over the collimation of this RC250. Focusing was a labour, which isn't normal! Out of focus stars became spikey crescents. Enough excuses, I just grabbed 10 x 300 subs with the ASI071 with gain @240. The sky was good, guiding on the NEQ6 Pro was consistently in the region of 0.65", quite good for the big load. This was stacked in DSS and further tortured in PS. One of these days I'll get on board with star reduction/removal etc... one of these days.

Like a dog with a bone, I'm in this for the long run. Lat night (this morning) was forecast to be and turned out to be a very good night. So I had another go at !Gunk, sorry, that's the only way I'll remember my tussle with this object. But remember it I will. Another 30 x 300 sec, in a moonless sky, but more importantly, the right bit of sky!! I did have trouble with focus, Collimation seems to have been abruptly disturbed but at best focus the stars look ok, just ok. I have an anxiety issue with flat calibration frames. So, from the warmth of my bed at 07:30, I used the twilit sky as a flat reference. It works well but, yet again, I've got some condensation on the sensor, I really should leave the camera cooled after the imaging run ends to avoid this. So there is still a residual watermark off center. For consistency I used random processing routes. First is a stack and stretch, entirely from ASTAP. The annotation is from ASTAP to, which uses MPCORB.DAT as a reference file. So looking good so far as astrometrics are concerned: At upper left it looks like some light leakage. I think it's from the neighbour's IR night vision security camera. But it looks to me like there is something in the middle of the box. Although over the time range, the subject should be slightly elongated. The above image goes down to mag 19.8 according to a photometric calibration. and !Gunk is 19. 2 or something. Next exhibit is a stack form DSS, stretched in PS and annotated back in ASTAP. I'm going to claim a win. Cross referencing with DSS imagery, there are some bits an pieces in that area but I think they are fainter. This is obviously the very limit of my urban sky. I'm beginning to understand why Clyde Tombaugh wore his trousers so high, no explanation, just an understanding...

No! Don't overcook it! That's M31 as it was intended to be seen. Sometimes an image is presented for science, sometimes for awesomeness of the subject. Here we have the latter

I've looked at oacapture in the past but not really used it. My memory is telling me that it's written by an active member of SGL. Perhaps a search of the forum would bring up some info and reveal who the writer is (I can't remember with certainty).

So, in my recent shakedown, post cloudemic on the 30th Nov, I needed to image a comet. My obvious choice was 12P/Pons-Brooks, just alongside Vega. Unfortunately west isn't my best direction, and by the time I was up and running, the comet was diving into the neighbours roof. I got one sub that indicated an active comet, well worth imaging. But then it was gone: This is a single 200 sec sub. the mad gradient is the roof Looking round, the next best candidate was 144P/ Not excitingly bright, and a bright Moon, but well placed. I ran off a bunch of 200 sec subs. The comet is almost stellar in appearance. Here it is drifting across the field: It's the faint track above and left of center. For those of you that are: 1) still reading 2) like white-knuckle rides Here is a short, very short animation. I hope you both like it. This is created via the Blink tool in ASTAP, which can save out the blinked subs as an animation/video, but it uses Y4M video format, which doesn't embed in this forum. Had to jump through some hoops as VLC just returns an empty file when it supposedly converts to MP4. Did it via an online converter. Works well, but £10,000,000 of Bitcoin has since dissapeared from my laptop... 😂🙊 L_4214_Bin2x2_200s_@20231130_205657.mp4

Yes, the image has asteroids down to mag 22 annotated by ASTAP. As you'd expect, none of them are detected. ASTAP uses MPC's MPCORB.DAT, master file, which I now know contains (229762), so there should have been a warning alarm going off in my head that it hadn't been picked up by annotation.

That's nice! I could crunch the numbers but, I guess that M33 isn't an easy object from NZ?

Absolutely. This session was a shakedown after a long summer/autumn weather layoff. I'm still getting to know my RC250 scope! So there was no fail in that respect. I got a unexpectedly deep image, full of faint fuzzies that I'm still inspecting with Simbad and other online resources. And this is the stuff that interests me. I do like big, beautiful images of the deep sky favorites, but image processing isn't my thing. I like the hunt, pulling resources together to identify things and dig deep for the oddball stuff. Cosmic Horseshoe being a particular object of interest that you pointed me towards. I am still playing with the "Not !Gunk" image, it's quite attractive as a non-descript deep field. That's where I'm happiest! Here is the colour image:

I'll post this here for anyone wanting to have a go in the next 3 weeks That might be me!

My subs ran between 01:19 and 03:58 on 01/12/2023 I got the position from SkySafari using a central time (not that it matters over the span of the subs) 02:07 giving: RA= 05:22:46.12 DEC = +03:58:32.2, which is where the box is. It seems that I didn't verify my coordinates with MPC or any other source. Looking at Stellarium it gives coords much closer to those you give from MPC and had I used them the target would have been in the field. It's a definite miss, but if the camera had been rotated 90 deg then !Gunk would have just made it into the frame, waiting for you to correctly identify it! I just know it would have been there.... Oh well, a lesson learned. But SkySafari has been reliable in the past.

I finally got a suboptimal chance to try for (229762) Gǃkúnǁʼhòmdímà I shortened it's name to Gunk in my subs... Anyway, here I present another episode in my ocassional series; "Not..." This is Not Gǃkúnǁʼhòmdímà. Close but no cigar. 31 x 300 sec with the RC250 + 0.8x flattener/reducer ASI071MC Pro. The moon was a few days after full, 01/12/23, so the sky was marginal at best for tracking down a mag 19+ TNO. My image goes down to 19.1 but I don't think I got it. A close up of the indicated loaction shows a pixel or 2 above the noise just on the r/h edge of the box but I think it's noise. I referenced DSS images to confirm all other objects in the field. Close crop of the area of interest. Not Gǃkúnǁʼhòmdímà on this Moonlit ocassion.

I've popped out a few times since. Looks like it peaked already. I'll try one more time before bed.

I'm at my darker sky site tonight. Beautiful sky, a bit of auroral activity and even more moonlight. But Orion shines brighter than both. Seen here with my Samsung phone camera, perched over a derelict bird table. If I was Orion, that's exactly what I'd do, hang round looking handsome.

My firstvaurora image! Taken from rural Cumbria but overlooking the bright lights of Penrith.

Arrived at our Luxury Cumbrian Villa this evening to be greeted by a stunning sky. Reports of auroral activity from much further south. All I got was a possible red glow. So I doubled down on the rising moon. I went to great lengths to find the right shot. I even to the village pub. That turned out to be a source of inspiration as on the way back I was taken aback by the glory of this little Cumbrian farming village in a deep frost. Taken with my Samsung phone in night mode, propped against a dry stone wall.

I say it isn't a plate solving issue, more an issue with APT/Ascom failing to drive the mount to the required coordinates. I've had issues with APT doing odd things ocassionally. Including events like yours. Shutting down and restarting APT or even a full reboot usually returns normality. I've got bogged down, over thinking problems in the past. But now just bite the bullet and restart. It's likely that you won't even be able to replicate this particular problem on your next outing!

I can imagine the excitement for those lucky enough to be along the ocultation path. I'm not sure I organised enough to collect coherent data, but I'd love to have a fast camera rolling and get a light curve, maybe. Good luck to those that are involved! As boring as it might be, there's value in negative observations on the edge of the path too!

Last night was my first outing since April, with the Moon being a killjoy, I just used the ocassion as a shake down. The evening was strewn with difficulties but I eventually got going. I chose a subject away from the Moon that would be visible for most of the night. IC342 is quite a large galaxy, this is uncropped, but low surface brightness. Nothing much else in this frame other than a couple of barely detected galaxies. 26 x 300 sec, ASI071MC Pro, RC250 with 0.8x reducer/flattener, atop my trusty old NEQ6 Pro. Borg 60ED guidescope and ASI 120mm mini guide camera. I took some flats this morning, in the cold light of day. White T shirt job, but the flats worked very well, until I started stretching and found the flats had frost marks on the sensor I'd cooled the camera too quickly. So I took a new lot as dusk approached but they don't seem to have been the best. Darks and bias also applied. I usually try to get away with using only flats but at that length of exposure and sky brightnes, the ammount of stretching needed also called for a full set of callibration frames. The data has been stacked by various means, none were great. This result is from stacking and stretching in Siril. Not my prefered tool but it does make a better job of (my) poor data. Other online images have this area awash with IFN but that is way beyond my skill and sky and, anyway, I've manged to clip the black while losing all manner of artifacts. Look, it's not my fault! I wanted to go after a very obscure Trans Neptunian Object in Orion, but with that glowing cheesball sat on top of it..? 🤣

Indeed, The guide scope could do with a focus tweak. But that aside, I have seen another "fuzzy" in my current guide frame while I'm imaging IC342. I've got a screen grab to see if I can solve that. Maybe another very red star? Interestingly, X UMi must be near the max of its range 12.5 - 18.4. I can measure that in ASTAP, later.

Tonight is my first outing since April. It's taken a nearly full Moon at the top of the ecliptic to burn the clouds away! So I'm rusrty!! I set up my RC 250 c/w 0.8x reducer/flattener. Many teething problems along the way, including working out why PHD2 was sulking. Then I remembered I hadn't polar aligned. Still it was within 3 deg of the pole So I use the Drift Polar Alignment tool in PHD2. My guidescope is a Borg 60ED and ASI12O mini. I had no idea what field I was looking at but noticed a brightish "fuzzy" curious as to what it was, I took a screen grab in the hope of plate solving it later: You probably don't need my directions to the fuzzy, but just incase, its below right of the green box. The line and box are just clutter from the polar alignmnet tool. The image did solve but I had to delve into Simbad to identify. And it aint no fuzzy. It is in fact X UMi, a Mira type variable: https://simbad.cds.unistra.fr/simbad/sim-id?Ident=%40317174&Name=V* X UMi&submit=submit It isn't a momentary abberation. I chased that thing all over the frame for some time getting aligned. It remained a distinct fizzy. The images I can find online don't seen to show any nebulosity in the area, What's going on? Any ideas?