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Johnny4365

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Everything posted by Johnny4365

  1. Here is my first attempt at a dso (M42) taken last night. A real WOW! moment when I saw this appear on the camera LCD, wasn't expecting to see any colour or that it would be that large. Plenty of room for improvement though. Single shot, cropped, Canon 600d on a C8N, 20secs at ISO 3200
  2. When I look up at the night sky now it's all a bit blurry. My eyes are not quite as good as they were when I was 10 years old. However I do time travel every morning. I wake up thinking I'm 28 then 2 seconds later I have travelled through time by 20 years and realise I am in fact 48. Now how did that happen so quickly?
  3. Just seen Mark Thomson on the BBC News24 'click' feature doing a short piece on Astrophotography !

    1. ronin

      ronin

      That "worries" me a bit. The first Stargazing Live showed an image of Jupiter and said You can do the same. What they didn't point out was that the image was captured with a 6" APM triplet costing ~£6,000. People with £100 scopes then expected the same results.

    2. Johnny4365

      Johnny4365

      He was showing various techniques, just a camera, camera and scope, webcam nothing too outrageous. A blurry image of Jupiter was used as an example.

  4. Cloudy again tonight, so put the motor drives on the scope. Got these as I hope to have a go at imaging at some point in the future, and they will be useful for observing in the meantime. All went well using the instructions, only confusion came when fitting the dec motor. This was caused by the fine adjust knob being where the drive should be. Luckily I got 4 rechargable D batteries (good ones 10,000 mAh , not the AAs pretending to be Ds) for my wifes radio which she hasn't used. Ideal for powering the motor drives. :smiley: Wrong Right I then decided to have a go at trying to get to grips with the polar scope. Found that AstroBaby has done an online guide for polar aligning for idiots (thats me then). Fantastic guide this http://www.astro-baby.com/HEQ5/HEQ5-1.htm All has become clear and the mystery of the polar scope and using the setting circles has been lifted. Just need some clear skies now.
  5. Tried out finder scope which is much easier to align now that its properly fitted. Had a go at collimating (at last) using AstroBabys guide. Think I've got it roughly right. Took me 2.5 hours to do it, lots of head scratching going on. Took me awhile to suss out how the primary mirror adjusting screws work. Should of checked to see how far it was out before I started, but I don't think it was ridiculously out, especially considering its not been done since the scope left the factory about 9 years ago :embarrassed: Haven't star tested it yet (no stars), hopefully will get a chance tonight. Next step. Putting some marked slabs in the lawn for quick scope setup. This may mean using the dreaded polar scope (celestron #94221) to get accurate polar alignment. I have the instructions for it, but boy it looks tricky.
  6. Hi fellow loungers. I've had my Celestron C8N for nearly 8 years. Had many a good night under the stars with it. I have never used it to anywhere near to its full potential, I have neglected it and not used it much the last few years. Started to service it today, beginning with the focuser which seemed a bit sticky. First thing I noticed was there is in fact a screw on the back of the focuser that locks the focuser in position when tightened. This was done up slightly and was making the focuser stiffer to use. Stripped the focuser down removed the clear, very sticky grease and used some teflon grease instead. Reassembled everything and it feels much smoother to use now. Since I've had the scope I have had trouble aligning the finderscope, noticed that I had in fact assembled it wrongly in the first place. Basically I had the mounting bracket the wrong way round. Reassembled it correctly and hopefully it should be easier to use now. My excuse for these basic errors is that I never really look at the scope in daylight. My sessions have been very impromptu as in ' its a clear night tonight I will get the scope out '. No planning or preparation involved at all really. Thats changing this year as I am determined to get more and better use from what is a pretty good telescope. Collimation is the next thing on the list.
  7. Thats pretty good going for a first proper session with a new scope. A quick polar align, getting polaris roughly in the middle of the empty polar scope hole, is good enough for observation and only takes a minute.
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