Roy Challen

4 minutes ago, Stu said:

Luckily for them, it was ready just as I was reaching that stage. A close shave…. 🤣

For them, or your lawn? 😄

47 minutes ago, JeremyS said:

Grass looking good, Stu.

Cracking Tak too. 

He must have sent Mrs Stu to the lawnmower people...😄

You've seen it many times before, but here is my Skylight this morning. Seeing was terrible so I went for a walk. Now I see that @Peter Drew has spotted a huge outburst when I am at least an hour from home 😄

8x21 pocket bins + 90mm dewshield with homemade Baader film filter 

Bins set to my IPD inside the dewshield, I can easily see all the named ARs with no seeing issues 🙂

My FS60-CB shows CA around Venus, as others have said, it's more likely to be atmospheric dispersion, maybe a bit of both. This is with a mirror diagonal. It's actually not much better than my long achro, with the added disadvantage of shorter focal length making high mag viewing more difficult.

Same scope shows virtually colour free image of the moon.

Thanks for the kind comments, congrats to the other winners,  the standard of submissions was very high and I really enjoyed participating. Looking forward to the next one😊

That's great! If someone said to me to try that, I would have been pretty sceptical. Good result.

6 hours ago, Nik271 said:

It is TAL -1T. It was a hugely poplular model of telescope in USSR in the 1980s.

The letter confusing you is the cyrillic letter 'L'. These telescopes are made in Russia, hence the name. There is a lot of the history in this thread:

 

 

Correct. Not TAA, Тал in lower case. 

To the OP, it's a good telescope, I had one and enjoyed it very much 

I don't have a quark, but I do have a Solarscout. No issues with power in the two and a half years I've had it.

If there were no issues before you sold it, then I would suggest that it must be a fault with either the cable of the new owner; or, something happened during shipping.

I would check that the socket on the quark is free of debris, that the cable is rated for at least 1.4 amps, and that the battery/supply is fully charged.

Also, is the owner aware that it takes a few minutes before anything meaningful can be seen through a quark?

25 minutes ago, Paz said:

I had a go this morning, was the flare in the position of the spots 3311/3313? That area had the brightest bits I could see at the time. I'm still relatively new to Ha so am not sure myself what is what sometimes.

Yep, although the group on the opposite side also seemed to be flaring albeit in C class, at least that's how it appeared at the time. Things were very changeable this morning though.

Seeing was pretty good this morning, caught the end of the M flare @Nik271 mentioned. Had another quick look just now, one of the big proms looks significantly different from this morning. Hope the weather holds 🙂

51 minutes ago, paulastro said:

Have you thought of seeing a therapist?

Why? Do they sell astrophotography gear now? 😄

I hope you haven't jinxed the weather with your post😄

I, too, really would like to know the answer to this. From what I've read, the extender is way better than a barlow...but it's also way more expensive. It would allow better balancing with FS60-CB using the cradle.

Great to hear you're happy with the Daystar, Neil👍

I'm fairly sure all the Tal 100 fracs use 1.25" eyepieces. The Tal 1 newt used slightly larger (32mm?) eyepieces in the early versions, then swapped to 1.25 later on. Not sure when the transition was.

Glad you found a solution 🙂

5 hours ago, Ags said:

That was quick...

seems nicely built but confusing. I tried to put an eyepiece in the wrong end 🤣

That is the eyepiece, isn't it?😄

I don't generally use finders, no need for lunar or planetary with a long frac. But I also have a short frac and a mac, for which a finder isn't necessary but does make things easier. I have a nice Japanese 6x30 and a Skywatcher 6x30, both are very good optically, and as you only spend a couple of minutes looking through them, the fact they're not RACI doesn't matter. Tal 6x30s are a bit better than average, at least the three I've had were.

2 minutes ago, Highburymark said:

I got by with nothing fancier than a set of Meade Plossls for 15 years, and today I use TV Plossls more than any other eyepiece. I bought an Astro Essentials plossl (£20) from FLO recently just to see how it performed and it’s very nice. For all our forum debates, eyepieces are far more similar than they are different - astonishingly so, considering the cost differences. Currently, the most expensive hyperwides are 45 times more expensive than the humble plossl I bought, yet on axis sharpness is pretty similar.

Totally agree, my most expensive eyepiece currently in use is a Hyperflex zoom, it's fantastic not just on axis but almost to the edge even in a f/5.9 frac. The only reason to spend more is for a wider field and more eye relief, not better quality.

Great set of images! I'm quite surprised that the main AR wasn't visible to my naked eye.

2 minutes ago, knobby said:

0 clear nights in Essex !

Same in Watford!

5 minutes ago, Highburymark said:

New Borg 125FL. All that aperture and under 4kg, if early reports are accurate. I’d happily trade in my perfect TSA-120 triplet for the Borg if CA is well controlled, purely because it’s nearly 3kg lighter. But the price is likely to be prohibitive. 

Forgot about Borg. I had a 60mm achro from Borg some years ago, it was better than a 70ED Altair I had at the same time. But better than a Tak triplet?  And 3kg lighter. Hmm, that would be something!

0 is what I see in my account after having been on FLO website!

4 hours ago, Stu said:

Good to resolve the puzzle 👍.

This is a crop from a smartphone image taken at 21.55 which shows the effect.

Smartphone image? Wowsers!

On 28/04/2023 at 22:30, Mr Spock said:

back off the magnification, settling on x217

Backing off to x217! I wish...!