Luke

I had no joy with the Baader Ha filter and Quark! My Quark was way off band with it for some reason and I had to return the filter. I use a UV/IR cut (my one is Astronomik L-Filter UV-IR Block Typ 2c) up to 120mm. I've not had any problems with the UV/IR cut, with several Quarks in four different scopes. Hope you find a solution skybadger.

How many scopes have you got, Nik?! I think the right number of scopes is one more! That looks like a nice compact scope you have tucked under your arm in your profile pic. Is that the SkyMax? I don't think I have had a look through one of those, I've been very happy with my Skywatcher scopes. I'm especially fond of my SW ED100, which I love to use for solar with safety filters of course.

That sounds lovely Dave. I've never had a Meade telescope. I'm not sure if I have had anything from Meade, unless the SolarMax 60 counts! Not even an eyepiece I think. I feel like I should get something Meade when funds allow!

Lovely image, and welcome to SGL!

I didn't image with it, but I'd consider the Skywatcher ED100. It performs great with the Quark visually and is a really good scope. Quite long but light. The focal length should be fine with the ASI 174 and a cheap 0.5x reducer on the camera nose. I used the ASI174 with the ED120, which has the same 900mm focal length. Probably not the best choice for DSO imaging, but great visually with the Quark, and for white light too. I find the 100mm aperture helps for closer up detail over my Tele Vue 85 and for me is a sweet spot between scope size and weight to close up detail. If I kept one frac only, it might be the ED100! Good luck deciding.

Awwww. No obs here, but one needs to tread carefully: hedgehog crossing. Seems like we have at least two.

Thanks Mark, I will never forget the night we hunted down the Horse! We no longer have the 16 inch, alas. I had a nasty knee injury (not caused by the dob!) that took about a year to get better and I figured maybe the scope was a bit of a handful for me. My back can get iffy too! We thought about putting castors on it etc but I tend to want to lift the scopes around. We mainly use our 10 inch solid tube dob these days but would like to get a relatively light 12 or possibly 14 one day if funds allow. Mind you, I had a lovely time with an 8 inch SCT the following night. I really hope Sarah and I are able to attend another SGL star party, it would be lovely to catch up with folks and to meet more SGLers. And it would be lovely to see the Lucksall site again.

Thanks Rob, I think it clouded over at about 4am. I am technically "on holiday" (staycation at home) though out of work currently as well, so I figured, make the most of being able to have a lie-in! Thanks to everyone for the kind comments! Sorry I am a little late replying, I was wiped out for some of the day, had some stuff to get done, then had an all-nighter with the SCT! hope I never forget how unique and special stargazing is. Being able to e.g. see a galaxy is just mind-blowing.

“Just seen the new prices on Celestron Edge HD scopes,” said Space Hopper in a recent thread about price increases. “Open mouthed...........the 8" has gone up by a over third !!” I hope I am not tempted to sell mine! Let me see, how much did I pay. £1100! And about £100 less for the reducer than its current price. Gosh, just look at the date of the order confirmation. I bought the Edge 8 NINE YEARS AGO! But I can’t sell it, can I? Admittedly, I have not been using it much. I did love using it for a bit of lunar imaging, but I don’t image any more. Well I can’t leave this scope just sitting there, especially now it just got more expensive! So out comes the 8 inch SCT, still in pristine condition. But there’s a problem. I want to use the HEQ5, something I have not done for years! Although the little light bucket goes a treat on my trusty Giro mount, I am dead tired from the previous, spellbinding night with my 10 inch dob. I fancy some help tonight locating things. But can I remember how to set it up? First challenge is to line the mount up with Polaris. Now, is it this star here, or that one there? Oh, I’ll just pick this one and hope the mount works it out when I align the stars! So off we slew to Arcturus. No wait, mount, you’ve shot past it. And then some. My goodness, you’re a long way off, mount, and I thought I was bad at navigating!!! And it didn’t help that I’d forgotten to line up the Rigel Quikfinder for the scope – it was clearly some way off for the SCT, perhaps I’d last used it on a frac. I centred what might be Arcturus. I say centred, but my 40mm Tele Vue Plossl was not the ideal precision tool for this task. Might this be Capella? Off to Phad next – this star, maybe? Well, HEQ5. Are we in business? - “Alignment Failed.” Oh. Now it comes back to me. THIS star is Polaris! How could I forget? Well, I’d forgotten because the pencil markings on the patio had long gone showing me where to place the tripod legs. The handset’s previous date was in 2016! This time I take no prisoners with the alignment (apart from still using the 40mm Plossl). This is definitely Arcturus. And I even take a mo to line up the Quikfinder. Capella, check! Phad? Most definitely! Done! Well, HEQ5, what say you? - “Alignment may be inaccurate.” I take it as a compliment. I pop in the 17.3mm Delos and punch in M51. The HEQ5 places the Whirlpool dead centre. WOW! The view is stunning. I think I’m seeing spiral structure! Though I did eat two Curly Whirlys earlier. Through the night, the SCT serves up tasty views of galaxies. The Cigar was fab. That and M51 were better, I felt, than in the dob the previous night! Perhaps it was time to collimate the dob again, not that I’ve ever managed to get it that sharp at higher mag. And I was throwing more power at the galaxies, stepping up to a 12mm Delos I think. The barred spiral NGC633 was nice too. Good on galaxies, the SCT was glorious on globs! I’d forgotten that we had upgraded the focuser to a Feather Touch and it felt easy to bring things to a sharp focus. The best view of M13 – with an 8mm or 10mm Delos, I think, again tops the dob – the higher mag I am pretty sure is part of it and I find using the goto mount very helpful here. I can leave a higher power eyepiece in and not worry about that making it harder to find stuff. Lots of stars resolved in M5. M10 a bit faint, but sweet. M12 looks good with averted vision. M3 is impressive. M14 improved later in the night. M107 is tough, but possibly down in the the light pollution a bit. NGC7006 is barely visible. Caldwell 47 in Delphinus (nice to see the dolphin back!) is small and faint with the 12mm Delos, but well worth looking at! At some point I suddenly remember that I had been struggling to find the Eskimo Nebula of late. There it is! So it hadn’t gone fishing after all. I check out the Cat’s Eye. Looks to me a bit like Blinking Planetary minus the blinking. M27 the Dumbell Nebula, big ‘n bright – love it! I figured I’d leave open clusters for another night, possibly with the 0.7 reducer to widen the views. Though I couldn't help myself, I had to check out the beautiful Owl Cluster. It looked splendid, one of my best views of it, I would say! The SCT has a nice sharpness to the views that seems not a million miles away from my refractors. Enjoying the sharpness and Feather Touch, I fancied trying some double stars. 17 Cygni, I see a large blue and a small yellow or red. 61 Cygni is tighter, both stars look yellow to me. Is one of them whiter or bluer? And I really like 95 Herculis. Close and similar sized. Last up for the doubles: Sigma Cassiopeiae. Now this is a much tighter pair! With the 17.3mm Delos in, it first looks like a star slightly out of focus. With the 10mm Delos, it looked like it was on the brink of splitting. With the 6mm, I had a definite but blurry split. It had been a fab evening again. But there was one final thing I wanted to try. Howz about the Veil with an OIII filter? I seemed to recall OIII was recommended for larger apertures, but nothing ventured, nothing gained! I wasn’t sure how to punch in the Veil in the handset, so panned around the area. I couldn’t make out anything, alas. Gosh, I am really tired now! That's three nights out of four. I enjoy finding stuff manually with the dob, but tonight I have really appreciated the goto in my tired state. And the 8 inch SCT had reminded me of what excited me about it in the first place: compact and light for its aperture, it packs a surprising punch. Just like the very first SCT we owned, the unassuming, but very capable C6. I don’t plan on selling the 8 any time soon.

This season, I really wanted to get back into stargazing. I’d hardly done any for some years. I had various excuses for the lack of observing. But this season, I was going to be back! Well, the weather was dire for the first month or so. But over the season, the sessions gradually racked up. And I was wondering whether to skip tonight's session - I was feeling cold and tired. But there was no such defeatist talk over in the Astro Lounge: “Tonight is the night”, declared mdstuart. “Transparent skies over the uk tonight and no moon”. Well that picked me up. And anyway, get a good session in tonight, and it’s turned out to be a decent season after all! As for the cold, that turned out to be a non-issue. I put on a second thermal top, a second pair of trousers, and still managed to squeeze through the door! I felt pretty warm! Nothing could stop me now. Apart from, my neck is cold. Where did I put my scarf? Five frantic minutes later, scarf was located! Of all the places it could be, it was around my neck!!! Tucked inside one of my various layers. Scarf now deployed more strategically, I kicked off the session at low power with my 10inch dob – with the fab 21mm Ethos. Off to Auriga, before it dips behind the house. M36, M37, M38. Cass is getting a bit low – Owl Cluster next. Glad I got that in – I can’t get enough of this one, with its cool misty eye. M35 in Gemini. No Eskimo Nebula, alas. It appears to have gone fishing as I just can’t find it these days. Now often this season I have been plain lazy and stuck with the 21mm Ethos throughout. But in goes the 14mm Delos for a bit of galaxy hunting in Leo. Now I am pretty sure that’s M65 and M66 right there. But over here to the right, what goes on? I’m talking about M95 and co. Now I normally see three galaxies in this patch of the sky, two of them very close, and one lower down. But this pattern doesn’t appear to match M95, M96 and M105 in my Collins gem Stars book. M105 looks like it should be above the other two, not below it like I am seeing. Anyway, the 14mm is paying off. I’m not very good at navigating in real life, never mind navigating the Universe, so I mentally give myself a high five when I locate NGC 3655. I was actually trying to find 3632, but I’ll score this as a win! Oooh, must pop over to M67. It’s taken me over a decade to figure out where Cancer is – I only cracked it the previous session. Off to M51, the Whirlpool galaxy. What a terrific sight, best of the night so far! M81 and 82 are also splendid with the 14mm. And now for what will likely be a highlight of the evening – M13. I return to M13 a number of times through the night, plus a few other globs: M92, M5, M12, M3. M10 too, which was faint and delicate at the eyepiece, but also very sweet. M56 I found a little tough, but the view gradually improved as I stayed with it for a few minutes. As I went through the globs, I increased the mag to 12mm, then 10mm, then 8mm - the higher mag again paying off with it being easier for me to resolve more stars. I nip over to the Ring Nebula. I had a few pans through the Virgo cluster of galaxies. Then onto some galaxies in Canes Venatici. All of a sudden, WOOOOSH! A lovely meteorite, to the right of Lyra. It didn't actually make a woooosh noise, apart from in my head. Owl Nebula – not normally one I check out, but I will in future - it looked great. The barred spiral M108. An easy split of Alberio. Defocus to more easily see the colours. The hours are passing by. I take my time with some of the views, enjoying the jewels on display. The evening looks to be coming to an end, however – cloud is moving in. Cygnus starts to disappear from view. Hmmm, looks like the Veil Nebula will be clouded over in seconds. I don’t suppose if I go fetch my OIII filter and pop the 21mm Ethos in, there will be time to bag the Veil... So a few minutes later, and lo and behold, I’m looking at the Veil! The clouds seem frozen in that part of the sky. And the broom looks ace! Well, this would be a magical place to end the night. Maybe I should stop now. But, let’s just have a looksy and see if anything else is worth a scan. Oh, the full sky pretty much is clouded over now. That really was a good place to stop. The broom was a magical place to end a special night. And it sure feels good to be back!

I'm feeling a bit cold and tired but I think I am gonna give it a shot tonight, thanks for the heads up. I'd love to have another look at M13.

Sweet! Where does the time go? My 8 inch SCT still feels not that old but I noticed the other day I got it about ten years ago!

Lovely. Seeing a bunch of galaxies like this reminds me of what a special, mind-blowing hobby this is!

Nice one, Rob, I especially like the top one, it looks very pretty to me with the yellow tone and lovely detail all the way to the edge. And thanks for the view of the little AR. It may be relatively small at the mo, but it looks interesting.

Thanks for the observing report. Result with the zoom! I'm skipping the solar today as it looks relatively quiet, and I'm feeling a bit tired and cold from a good observing session last night. That's interesting to see how you've done what I think is your solar finder - two bits spread quite far apart on the tube rings? I was having a look at my trusty old laptop shade I made with cardboard and sticky tape last night while getting the dob out. I was thinking, it's probably six years old and is just parcel tape and Amazon packaging, how is it still in good nick? Enjoy the rest of the Easter sunshine!

Really lovely! I very much enjoyed my view of M51 last night when it was high in the sky and it's nice to see such a lovely shot shortly after fresh off the press.

Nice one, Steve, I don't think I can see any Newton's Rings. Love the colour!

Oooh, very lovely! That looks in great nick! Congrats! I had a look through one some years back and it was beautiful. I'll never forget it!

A toast to your new, post-C8 era! It was kind-hearted of you to let the C8 go boldy where it perhaps hasn't been for a while. Hopefully your broken heart be mended. Perhaps a bit of astro retail therapy can aid the healing process?