Owmuchonomy

The Astronomik UHC gives me the most contrast on common targets and is magnificent combined with my ED150. The Great Orion nebula and the Rosette are staggeringly good with that combination. I have a Baader 2" OIII too and that is slightly better with targets that have significant OIII such as the Veil.

I can only disagree with the above. I owned two so called Powertanks for use with my HEQ5 and both were next to useless lasting about 30 minutes. A regulated mains supply is the only way to go unless you don’t have access to mains. I used a 5amp regulated 12V mains supply unit. It had a cigar lighter option for taking the standard mount cable. That should cover mount and accessory use such as dew heater.

Hi Rebecca, thanks for joining and your shout out. You may find reaction is a little subdued. The eclipse is penumbral as you identified which means it is unlikely to be discernible to spectators. You may also wish to ask a moderator to move your post to the Lunar Observing section and thus get more specific responses. Good luck.

That’s rather a good take on a HDR object. The trapezium core is well attenuated. Thanks for posting.

Are you near any Astro clubs or facilities? They are good resources for getting beginners started. I often run telescope ‘surgeries’ for local people To Harrogate/Ripon to get them going. The one I just did dealt with a scope that was seriously poorly collimated out of the box.

The favoured technique for Lunar (and planetary) imaging is to use fast frame rate video and then stack the best frames using stacking software. There are dedicated cameras for this purpose. Your DSLRs have much larger sensors hence the issue you have with the image not filling the sensor. Some DSLRs have a crop sensor video mode (my 600D did) which helps with these issues. It reduces the area of sensor used thus increasing the image scale of your target and also cuts the file size considerably to aid in fast capture and stacking. This is probably your first port of call followed by pixel scale matching with a powermate or similar. Aim for a f/ ratio of 4 to 5x your pixel size. Checkout the planetary imaging section on this forum for hints and tips.

Nice. You have picked up both spots there, one in each hemisphere. They are reverse polarity so both from the new cycle (25). Can only get better now until 2025.

That's a lovely rendition.

Do you have any medium to longer focal length lenses to complement your DSLR? It is often advisable to concentrate your resources onto procuring a quality equatorial mount. You can then start off with your DSLR and lenses taking wide field shots. Unfortunately, trying to match a single telescope to capturing DSOs and planets isn't going to work well. DSOs predominantly are faint, wider field objects requiring a short focal length and fast telescope. Capturing planets (or small bright DSOs such as planetary nebulae) requires a set of different techniques particularly the use of long focal length telescopes (I use 4.6 metre fl) and fast frame rate video capture which requires specialist cameras. The book described in the threads above is a worthy investment.

Marvellous. Captured the terminator region beautifully.

Whilst I do sympathise with this philosophy, a year of doing outreach with groups that include children reveals that GoTo is worth its weight in gold. One formula that works is to have a pair of binoculars on hand and that provides some celestial sphere navigation experience whilst the (GoTo) scope eyepiece is occupied. I would steer clear of the EQ solution because it is not intuitive so the 200P choice is a sound one in that respect. Enjoy.

Flashing lights are indicative of low voltage to the mount. 'Powertanks' I have owned have been as useful as a chocolate fireguard. It's quite common according to conversations on this forum for the units to fall well short of ideal. Use a mains power converter capable of 4 amps at 12V - 14V or get a decent battery type such as a deep cycle leisure battery like those used in boats and caravans.

I know you quote Rowan above but have you asked them if they can help you out?

Perfect solution.

If you are storing kit in there I would steer clear of a concrete floor completely. Condensation becomes a primary concern. A wooden suspended floor with access for your block and pier is a much better solution. Allow a 150mm air gap underneath. I did this with my build by having the floor suspended on 150mm joists and condensation is a thing of the past. A civil engineer friend always told me that concrete takes 99 years to fully dry out?? As @Swoop1 says, think long and hard about pier and wall height. I checked my designs 3 times and still ended up with the pier too low. Fortunately it was easily remedied. Enjoy your project, it made my life much easier having a permanent set up.

Great advice at the top. Bear in mind what @Stu says and the numerous threads on here about the Quark; they have in the past suffered from a lack of quality consistency in the performance obtained. I was lucky with mine and it gave pretty good views but not sufficiently better than my Lunt solar scope to warrant keeping both so I sold the Quark on. My opinion is that the Quark is better suited to imaging than observing. I too use the ASI174MM for solar imaging. There are some of my solar images at the flickr link in my signature.

Could be a whole host of things. Assuming your collimation is sorted and the scope has cooled (a big problem in our climate with the C14) then my comments would be on your imaging setup. Better results are obtained using a mono camera set up that has good near IR sensitivity and with an IR pass filter such as an 850nm version or similar. This helps somewhat with seeing issues. The 120 has an awkward pixel size too for your f/. It should work ok with a 2x barlow though. I find my ASI290MM with its smaller pixels and great near IR sensitivity gives best results on lunar work when using my f/10 9.25" SCT (or even my ED150).

Had a pretty good day particularly chatting with Neill at the Go Stargazing stand. Bought some meteorite samples from David and Martin. Particularly liked the display of Patrick Moore’s Ford Prefect. Felt sorry for the Rother Valley guys; you could almost see the tumble weed in their suite. In contrast, the other hall was humming. Friday night drive back to N Yorks was a bit busy.

I’m hoping to make my first appearance on Friday.

I wouldn't necessarily agree with that statement. I would suggest that if one is to generalise then a reflector on a Dob mount gives an excellent light gathering instrument for a lower investment. It doesn't necessarily mean it is 'better' for DSOs. It depends what you want to view, how portable you want it and as you say if you want to image. That is why not everybody chooses the Dob option. Personally I prefer the (usually) maintenance free world of refractors. My 12" Dob was a great light bucket but it required frequent collimation and expensive eyepieces. So if budget is a primary concern and observing a priority then stick with your Dob choice but there are other options.

I had a 17Ah 'Powertank' for my 12" GoTo Dob. It was as useful as a chocolate fireguard. After a couple of months it refused to last more than 30 minutes no matter what colour the lights decided to flash. I replaced it with a much more reliable deep cycle leisure battery.

No it doesn't. The method is covered in the Synscan instruction manual. 🤓

Short answer, no. Don’t bother with a polar scope it’s just a pain. Use the Polar Alignment routine in SynScan instead after doing a very rough North alignment. It’s much easier and I found it very accurate.

Looking poor for N. Yorks!

Thanks Olly, on the Xmas list.