Luke

I love dramatic shadows on the moon! I find the moon a bit too bright when it is fuller too. I plan to try a variable polarising filter next time, so I can hopefully dim it to taste. I've been using it recently on Mars and it helped. Good luck for another session soon!

It's a shame solar scopes are so expensive! It took me a while to take the plunge, but even in cloudy UK skies it ended up getting so much use! I've not owned a PST, but they look very compact and convenient and I have looked through a few and they gave beautiful views. Have fun!

Ande, I can see your logic going for Photoshop, there are so many tutorials and books out there for it. I loved using it for 20 years but am out of work now and not a fan of subscription models, so I switched to the free GIMP. It took a little while to get used to it, but I don't miss Photoshop now. It works with some Photoshop plugins I used regularly anyway, and there is a neat plugin that works native on it called G'Mic, which has a whole bunch of useful tools including several sharpening tools. But as up top, PS may be your best option for easing in. But GIMP is very capable too. I can't comment on other options, but there is life beyond PS! Good luck on your imaging journey!

Welcome to SGL, Marc! May the New Year bring us lots of great astro goodness!

Well done, Pete! I especially love these as you hand tracked them, that is some lovely detail on the spots. I thought seeing was decent our way too around 11. I used to image a bit at lower power just letting the sun drift over the relatively large ASI174 chip.

Lovely shots! Do you get full disc in one shot?

Hi folks, My wife's Quark had not been used for a few years, we started using it again a few months ago and since then we are getting excessive glow through the eyepiece. It definitely was not like this before, in the same setups. We use the recommended Tele Vue Plössls (40 and 32) and I also tried a Delos 17.3. I have tried the Quark in two completely different scopes and diagonals. I have cleaned all surfaces. The glow is so excessive and drowns out proms, and we can't see much detail on the disk either. Spots are faint. I think tuning is okay, it is on what it was before, but I will try other settings when I get a chance. There is a small area where it is not as faint and details look okay in that area, which makes me think tuning may be fine. One odd thing that might be a clue: if we catch the eyepiece at a certain angle, the glow mostly goes away and we can see the proms. But we can manage this only briefly. We are used to these eyepieces for h alpha. Our other Quark (my one) has no such problems. I tested it with the same setups and during the same session. Seeing today was decent here, nice blue sky and I don't think there was much thin cloud about. Any ideas? Thanks, Luke

In a 60mm scope I'd expect the view to look a bit like this lovely image by Alexandra Hart, taken with a 40mm PST I believe: Except with less contrast and a monotone red colour. You might possibly see finer detail at higher magnification in good conditions and the proms might be easier to see than in this image. The spots and their surrounding areas should be fairly easy to see and the strandy dark filaments should be relatively dark and stick out. Images usually show much higher contrast than what you would see at the eyepiece. At 60mm you should be able to glimpse similar detail all over the disc as in the PST shot, but it may be difficult to properly see it depending on the filter, a bit like how it can be challenging to discern detail on planets. The struggle is due to low contrast I find. I find seeing spicules possible but tricky at 60mm. Fairly easy at 85mm. And gorgeous and immediate at 100mm. How contrasty the view is and how well proms stick out varies from filter to filter and you may find there are sweet spots in the view where to better see a feature you need to nudge it to the right place in the view. Re: how well the filter is performing, I would suggest to post an image if possible and to ask the imagers. They may be able to spot any issues or advise if the tuning is right.

My dad collected antiques and told me he had a few telescopes up in the loft. I asked him if he'd tried looking through them at the night sky. "I couldn't think of anything more boring", he said! Someone I know does not like to think how small our planet is in the big scheme of things. It makes them feel we are unimportant. I like to think of it as, we have a big house! I find it amazing to see a faint fuzzy blob in the telescope, and wonder: "Is there life in that galaxy looking through their telescopes at us?" Then my wife reminds me I need to clean that smudge off the telescope lens.

Very promising first light!

I was able to pop out for a bit on the 24th! I enjoyed the filaments, nice to see a few around! The seeing was a bit wobbly our way but the group of small sunspots looked sweet in white light. Despite all the cloud of late it's been great to get several solar sessions in. There seems to be lots of flooding our way, near Bedford. I hope everyone is fine.

Congrats! When I got my first h-alpha scope it seemed very expensive for just one object, but it got a lot of use! I recommend these accessories for solar: Baseball cap Sunglasses (taken off while actually observing) Chilled Coca-Cola

I'd say the sun is well worth observing at 60mm. I observe h-alpha in 60mm, 85mm, 100mm and 120mm scopes. There is plenty of detail in all of those but I like using the 100mm the most for visual, which for me is the sweet spot of detail to aperture in my typical conditions. For grab and go, I prefer the 60mm. Really, any aperture is worth it, I have had some cracking views through 40mm PSTs. I would say, they all give much more detail than planets in a large scope, plus the sun is very dynamic.

I had and may still have a Revelation 66mm - it was a sweet telescope with a nice build quality, and a very decent dual speed focuser. I was surprised by how nice it was for the price. I hope we still have it, your post reminded me I have not seen it for a while! As for me, I got cash and am tempted to buy a right-angle finder for the dob, though I should try a Rigel QuikFinder on it first as I have one spare. I struggle a bit with the supplied staight-through finder!

One thing I like about astro gear is that it seems to last for ages. I'm still enjoying scopes bought several years ago. My eyepieces look like they will last for 20 years plus. So I am trying to think long-term when the weather sucks. My recent views were well worth waiting for. I had taken a bit of a break during solar minimum and coming back to it sort of fresh makes me think again how mind-blowing it is what we can see and image. I am glad I have another hobby to do while it is cloudy, though!

It has potential as an observing chair! Lots of adjustability in seat height, you could replace the panel with the hand controller, and keep warm and power the goto via the pedals. Is there a bottle holder for the single malt?

Woohoo, another lovely short session last night, and I managed to catch a few more first views of the season: the moon (okay, I had already done MkI eyeball, haha!), M31, M34 and Caroline's Rose. I also tried a variable polarising filter on Mars briefly, which tamed the brightness nicely for me in my 10 inch dob. My wife Sarah tried a UHC filter on the Orion Nebula which I had tried previously and gave that a thumbs up.

I love my Lunt Herschel wedge! Enjoy! Hopefully you'll be able to resist touching the "Caution Hot Surface"... 😬

Nice! I imagine it would be fab on the moon and planets. I am missing the moon so much, I've not got around to a session on it yet this season.

Very nice, Craig. What aperture is the scope? I think a Newtonian would get my vote as best all-rounder.

I've had a lovely eve. I missed the early part of astro darkness as I was playing a card game with my son that finished later than expected (it was ace though, similar type of game to Magic the Gathering, if you know that). Thankfully it stayed clear mostly until about 11 and I managed to hunt down a few targets I had not seen yet this season, like the Crab nebula and one of my favourites, NGC457. I couldn't find Caroline's Rose and just missed out on M31 by the time I figured out what Andromeda looks like (I'm out of practice after hibernating during solar minimum!) and the clouds rolled in. The clouds have been frustrating these past few months, but it feels worth it now. Fingers crossed everyone gets some clear soon.

I'm going to be lazy and go for the 21mm Ethos. Why? Because it is my widest eyepiece and if you saw how bad I was at star hopping with a manual dob, you'd understand perfectly! They don't get so much love these days, but I am quite fond of my 8mm Radian. It has served me very well for solar viewing, and my gear tends to get more use for solar.

Very cool! I noticed the other day that FLO sell a version. I thought it might have been a joke product at first, like their Hubble telescope: https://www.firstlightoptics.com/other-science-gadgets-models-toys/solarcan-ready-to-use-solargraphy-camera.html

Proms should be brighter in the single stack. The double stack image looks flatter and more contrasty to me, the single looks more "spherical"/ball-like. I prefer the double, but the single is lovely and very detailed too. Alexandra, how are you finding the new camera?

That's because you got a new camera! Good luck, it's bizarre when that happens, I had the same thing a few years ago.