SlyReaper

So many factors. As a child, I was always fascinated with all things space. I liked to imagine what it would be like to live in a cloud city on Neptune, or under the ice of Europa, or what it would be like to fall into a black hole. I would pick out a random star in the night sky, and wonder if there was anyone in my line of sight looking back in my direction. It also helped that I grew up in a time when Hubble was starting to return some spectacular images. As a birthday present (11th or 12th I think), my parents bought me a telescope. A refractor with an aperture of maybe 3 inches. Bu

Cloudy here, but it's often thin enough to see the sun through.

I went ahead and made a cross-eyed version. I tend to find cross-eyed stereograms a bit more comfortable.

I like to imagine it from the other point of view. If there's a life-bearing planet in orbit around Scholz's Star, from their point of view, it would be our sun "buzzing" theirs. And our sun would most certainly have been visible from their world, one of the brightest things in its night sky.

Proof that God made smileys in his own image.

Strictly speaking, you're wrong. The barycentre is inside the Earth and the Moon is well within the Earth's Hill sphere. By every definition, the Moon is a moon.

It's worth noting that by the time this happens, the sun will have swelled into a red giant and then shrunk down into white dwarf form. The jury is still out on whether the Earth and moon would be enveloped and destroyed by the sun during its red giant phase.

Thanks for the suggestions. Budget wise... I have recently found myself with an embarrassingly large heap of cash to spend, so I'd like to say money is no object. 4 grand? Okay. I can spend that. But I also don't want to be that guy who has all the gear and no idea. It has been less than a year since I bought my first scope, so I have absolutely no confidence in myself to make sensible choices. I think I want to be spending a large fraction of the total spend on the mount, so something like a HEQ5 appeals to me. But I worry that might be over-speccing it. In addition to my dobsonian

I'm unhappy. I have this 10 inch dob that is fantastic at taking pictures of planets, but not a lot else. Anything that's dim, that requires more than a few seconds exposure, it won't come out clearly, because the tracking system is simply not accurate enough. I know, it's an alt-azimuth mount, of course it's going to be pretty much useless at imaging galaxies and nebulae. What's worse is it's front-heavy, so it slowly pitches downwards. I've known this all along. But it came to a head last week when someone on another forum took an absolutely stunning picture of comet Lovejoy, tail and

It's not a star or a planet, it's a space dragon egg. Does nobody watch Doctor Who?

Yeah, I was surprised how big it is as well. Small bright centre, but its glow seems to extend a huge distance. Can't see the tail though.

Just found it with my 10 inch dob. Couldn't resist attempting a photo, even if it's probably a lost cause with my setup. Currently guzzling photons at a rate of 1 frame every 20 seconds. It just looks like a grey blob, but there's always a chance I might capture something more? Who knows, I think it's worth a try.

Are we? It was my understanding that we're nowhere near its pole.

There's an abundance of hydrocarbons on Titan - doesn't mean it's economical to go and extract it. No, the reason anyone will go there will be because a rival nation is trying to get there first.

Astronomers don't see UFOs because they spend so much time looking up, so they actually know what they're looking at.