DaveS

Going back to the core memory in the Saturn V, I remember a vid of the memory being built, lots of women (With slender fingers) carefully threading miles of incredibly thin wire through thousands of magnetic rings, and all to be dumped in the sea. It made me very angry at the waste.

Good, the CAA finally got off their arses to actually do something.

I started watching the NASA Spaceflight livestream last night, and left it on my phone so I could pick it up this morning, so just caught the launch when I surfaced to take my tablets.

Thanks Olly, I think I will do another stretch from linear. I problem I've found is the background is not the same colour balance in the two panes. I'm not sure why, but it may be due to not having a balance in the number of subs, I was short of 4 blue subs in Chi Persei.

I know I'm a Sky at Night fanboy, but I came close to turning over, as SPM would be in his grave if he could see what's happened to his program.

Not surprising really, as that would be cheerful, and totally anathema to the news channels, especially the Beeb, who operate on the principal that "good news is no news". And "we think you aren't miserable enough, so here's another bucket of cold misery to pour over you".

their attempts at FTL were far short of even this channel AsteronX

Despite Dr Becky I found this a very disappointing episode.

Some teenage work placement wonk playing silly whatsits with Sky at Night

The Multiverse has been rubbished by very serious physicists.

On now.

Inevitably, someone's going to post an image of the double cluster, so here's mine. This is a two pane mosaic (My first) with the main capture on the 12th. using the ODK rig. I set up to get 12 subs of RGB on each panel, but not all made it into the stacks, plus I had persistent dew problems requiring pickup capture. After stacking the individual RGB stacks were cropped and given a gradient reduction. After Trichromy another crop followed by DDP and a Richardson-Lucy deconvolution. Care was taken to match the histograms on the two panes. The mosaic was assembled using the Mosaic tool in AstroArt 8. After another gradient reduction there was a slight Saturation Boost and several rounds of Histogram Stretch..

Well, perhaps not... This a two pane mosaic with the ODK rig. Planned 12 x 300 sec Red, Green, and 525 sec Blue on each pane, not all the subs made it into the finals stacks. After stacking the individual RGB stacks were combined and given a DDP, followed by Richardson-Lucy deconvolution. Care was taken to match each pane during the DDP. The mosaic was created using the default values in the AstroArt mosaic tool. Saved as a JPEG C&C welcome, and probably needed.

I run everything on the remote PC, it's not that heavy, but then I don't do live stacking, just check the subs as they come in. All post is done on the main office computer.

I really wouldn't worry about 0.1 or even 0.2 degrees difference.

She did her astrophysics PhD with Chris Lintott.

You don't know the lovely Dr Becky?

On BBC 4, 10 o/c.

The cut off at 400 nm is because most optical systems are not well corrected in the deep blue, similarly for the 750 nm IR cut off. Solar imagers who work with the CaK line are in the very near UV at 398 nm, but they are using a very tight bandwidth so the "blue bloat" that can afflict deep blue RGB imaging doesn't apply.

Oh gawd, that happened to me last week. I was annoyed with myself as I have a rope to tie the cover down and had been working in that area cutting up prunings. Had to go out, just in my dressing gown to bring the soaking wet OTA in, and the TS 130 photoline is a heavy old beast. Needed a while to dry out the camera, as I could see the heatsink was soaked. Fortunately no power on it as water and lekky is a good way to fry your kit.

He's made it onto the BBC news.

As an aside, in the live chat I mentioned that I was looking forward to seeing Skylon launch, and after a few comments Jorden said that he had info about a similar launcher, and would be posting in a couple of weeks.

And no sign of Aunty Beeb, so no surprise there then.

Ideally your exposure times should be long enough to swamp the read noise by about 3x. How long this is depends on your light pollution, the read noise of the camera, and whether you're doing OSC, mono RGB or NB. The rather noisy CCD cameras that I use tend to need longer exposures, but CMOS can get away with shorter.

Ah OK, I was going to suggest selling everything apart from the dob and eyepieces, then purchase: SA-GTi A small, fast astrograph apo, from Askar or Sharpstar, keep it light and manageable. FLO have several options depending on size and mass. You could add a reducer for a wider field. A ZWO ASI 533, either mono or OSC depending on whether you want to risk the added complexity. I suspect that one of the IMX531 cameras might blow the budget. You may or may not want to add a small (30-50mm) guide scope and camera.