GavStar

Thanks Martin. Please could you expand a bit more on nv having a much tighter nebula vs star balance?

On YouTube there are several videos of observing with night vision monoculars. They are fun to watch and give a “feel” of what night vision astronomy is about. However, generally I feel the videos do not show how nice the actual live views are and have a lot of scintillation in them. I have posted quite a few still phone images of the view through my night vision monoculars but have so far struggled to get my phone to produce decent videos of the live views. However, after watching a few more night vision videos this week, I decided to have another attempt using the nightcap camera app. This app enabled me to adjust the frame rate and iso used for the video recording. By reducing the frame rate to 1 per second and reducing the iso to a relatively low 650, I’ve managed to produce some videos that, although not as good as the live views, do give a reasonable feel of the live nv experience. These were done using my 92mm refractor, 67mm eyepiece and pvs-14 nv monoculars giving around 10x magnification. The first video is a mini tour through Cygnus ie North America, gamma cygni, crescent and nebula containing the elephant’s trunk. The second is a tour through Sagittarius Witt the lagoon, Trifid, swan and eagle nebulae. I want to stick just with my phone rather than get a specialist astro camera, but hopefully I will be able to gradually improve the results. It was a lot of fun producing these! FullSizeRender.mov FullSizeRender.mov

It’s staying on the Isle of Wight for now. I don’t think my partner would be happy with it clogging up the boot each time we visited 🤣 My c11 is absolutely fine for when I feel like more aperture in London or darker sites in Surrey/Sussex.

My dob is not a 20 inch but quite close and in combination with my night vision monocular I think the views are amazing with very good image quality. Not sure I’d like to go up against Gerry with his 24 inch one though 😀

I’ve just found the an interview with the founder of William Optics, William Yang, where he discusses the Pegasus Binoscope. The English translation is towards the end https://www.binomania.it/william_yang_intervista/ I note that the original 10 units (of which mine was one 😀) sold out very quickly. But he is making a new run for 2021. Here’s some phone shots of recent visual views from my London back garden through the Binoscope (with my night vision monoculars). (Rosette, monkeyhead, California, soul and heart nebulae) It’s a really impressive instrument.

These are my bad boys. A 103mm William optics Binoscope. Fantastic widefield views of the skies...

It was good to be able to do a meet up after such a long time. Shame I forgot that I didn’t have a diagonal attached to my AP130GTX! However luckily I had my tec turret to use instead which was quite fun to rotate around for easy magnification changes.

I do like a 16 inch f4 dob. Here is mine, a Skyvision t400. Any more details you can share on yours, eg mirror maker, who built yours, etc?

I’ve just done a video montage of recent phone pics I’ve taken using my ovni-m night vision monoculars and a variety of scopes including a 16 inch dob and a 40mm refractor. The images give a very good representation of the actual live visual views at the eyepiece. IMG_0123.MP4

I have just watched Al Nagler of Televue talking about how night vision monoculars turn an 85mm refractor into a 10-14 inch scope. And suddenly up pops a couple of images I recognise 😀. Link attached

Great report Max. Nice to see a night vision report given there are only a few UK astro nvers. Currently, the skies are not that conducive to night vision with a small scope as a) night vision is more impressive on emission nebulae, and b) due to need to use long focal length eyepieces (to get brighter views), the image scale is too small for many of the objects as you stated. I think a minimum of 10 inches aperture is really needed with nv to get the best of these smaller objects. August/September will be a great time for your nv plus 90mm refractor as Cygnus will be high in the sky and Sagittarius is also nicely visible. A few days ago I got up at 3am to catch these with my nv and 103mm Binoscope. Absolutely fantastic views even from light polluted London of the North American, pelican, gamma cygni, crescent, eagle (dark pillars of creation visible at 10x mag), and swan. As an experienced observer, I’d be very interested in your initial thoughts regarding standard glass observing vs night vision observing? Which objects do you prefer with each one etc?

As already mentioned, I do rather like AP scopes. Here is the unboxing thread for my AP130GTX And here is a comparison I did between my tec140 and my AP130GTX which eventually resulted in me selling the tec as I just preferred the views the AP gives me. Also the Ap is so wonderfully compact compared to the tec140 But the AP130GTX is bested my my Tec160fl (unsurprisingly) My little AP stowaway is pretty special too I always enjoy observing with my AP scopes, they just put a smile on my face each time. 😀

@Highburymark do you mean that in single stack mode your Solarscope setup shows limited surface detail? What about proms? Are they better in single stack or double stack?

I did a side by side of my lunt 60mm DS vs my new Solarscope 70mm double stack (attached to a televue 76) last summer and unfortunately the views through the Solarscope setup just wasn’t as good as the lunt. The Solarscope filters went back to the Isle of Man to be adjusted but even when they came back the setup wasn’t performing as I wanted. Just goes to show how difficult it can be to get these filters performing optimally. I’m very keen to check out Mark’s Solarscope setup (which is virtually identical to mine) as I know he is extremely happy with his.

I’ve had a six month break from solar but this week had a good opportunity to use this setup again. This time I installed the telescope express adapter between the two front mounted filters. This enabled me to fine tune the setup by “clocking” the two filters. The views were even better with the surface detail and contrast noticeably enhanced in double stack mode with two external filters. I did try triple stack again by adding the internal pressure tuned etalon but although contrast was good, I thought the detail wasn’t as sharp or even across the disk and of course the views were noticeably dimmer. Going forward I’m going to stick with just the two front mounted filters and not bother with triple stacking. The views in double stack mode with Mark v binoviewers are just incredible. I also tried just single stack with one front filter and this gave excellent fine detail on proms and still showed a good amount of surface detail, much better than the 70mm Solarscope setup in single stack mode that I had. So @Highburymark how about a shootout between your Solarscope 70mm DS and my lunt ED 60mm front mounted double stack? 😃 Picture of the lunt setup in “clocked” mode below.

Yes great views today, one huge prom and one nice group if proms. Some well defined surface activity as well. I tried single front stack, double front stack and triple stack (one internal, two external filters), mono and bino viewing. Today my favourite for fantastic full surface views was double front stack with binoviewers, consistent detail across the full surface.

Thanks Stu, as you know it’s taken me a while to get the dob set up to how I like but I think I’m there now, it’s almost grab and go 😀. It’s the needle galaxy, one of my favourites and spectacular through the eyepiece of my dob.

No taken a few weeks ago with much less moon!

Some more phone pics with my 16 inch dob and new night vision monocular, taken recently with ovni-m (rather than my pvs-14 which I used for all the pics above). I think the ovni-m in prime mode gives sharper stars to the edge visually.

I think some night vision discussion on sgl even with the existing few practioners on a separate nv forum would be better than the current virtual zero nv discussion that happens on the eeva forums. A separate forum might also prompt more people to consider trying nv.

Night vision is very different to EAA in terms of practical usage. Cloudynights has recognised this and now has separate EAA and night vision sections. This change has been a positive development for both EAA and NV users.

Jim Unfortunately I don’t think gen 3 night vision monoculars will drop in price anytime soon, particularly in Europe where they are materially more expensive than the USA. (Europeans cannot purchase USA tech due to ITAR regs). I bought my first nv monocular over 3 years ago and prices have remained high since. It’s important to note that for astronomy due to the narrow ha filters used to view nebulae, you do need to get good quality gen 3 technology. Lesser gen 1 or gen 2 (with the exception of photonis intens tubes which also cost £6k plus) just won’t give good results. I think the best ‘cheaper’ option is to purchase secondhand. There is a Facebook group where secondhand gen 3 monoculars can be purchased legally. I recently saw a good spec gen 3 actinblack pvs-14 for sale for £3k there which would be great for astronomy. From a personal perspective and as a visual only astronomer, night vision has transformed the hobby for me - it’s a real shame that it’s so expensive. From my London back garden I was previously restricted to lunar, planetary and open clusters observing. Now I can see hundreds of other Dsos including many nebulae and galaxies. I don’t care whether it’s the original photons hitting my eyeball or not. The key thing for me is that it feels just like a ‘normal’ eyepiece when I’m visually observing AND that I can see so much stuff clearly. I’ve read about many starting in the hobby being disappointed with the ‘faint fuzzies’ etc and not really seeing much compared to astro photos. Night vision is fantastic as a visual observer aid. A few years ago there was a flurry of night vision posts on SGL but this stopped when the EEVA sections were introduced. I think many of us just didn’t think Night vision fitted into EEVA since it uses completely different techniques to EAA and feels much more like normal observing. Maybe in order to get more nv discussion, one of the 3 EEVA sections could be renamed to Night Vision Astronomy?

Is it a lot of gear? I can literally just put it into my diagonal and off I go like any other eyepiece. The actual in use experience is identical.

Here’s a link to the Televue section on night vision which I think is a good starting point for this approach https://www.televue.com/mobile/TV5_page.asp?id=36

Ah now you are changing it from use of electricity to original photons etc...