Ruud

Of course, they could also be  balloons. Starlink satellites was just the first thing I thought of.

Hi, this appeared on You tube today.

The satellites appear shortly after the 2 minutes mark.

I like it Mike. Such a clean style. Thanks!

Oh yes, excellent images.

Awesome images Avani! Stunning and perplexing! Top class!

Oops, I ran out of superlatives. I'll have to but a thicker dictionary now.

I love the sketches, Mike, especially the close-up. I have no scope with vanes, and never looked though one at Venus, so I have a spike question: Why aren't the spikes planet wide in the close-up?

This is a 40,000 km2 view of the region around Mersenius. The seeing was bad half the time, but with some patience I gathered about twenty craters and a few rilles. This is big one.

The three largest craters are labelled. From de Gasparis (the crater at the bottom) three rilles emerge, one of which appears to continue past Mersenius.

Cavendish’ west rim is just catching the morning sunlight. It came into view as I was watching which was a mesmerising event.

The inset is a screenshot from Stellariun. This zip Quickmap.zip has a screenshot of Quickmap with nomenclature.

Thanks for looking.

That's just wonderful! Thank you Achim.

There's of course the fact that higher above the horizon is better.

Do you have Stellarium on your computer? You can move to all sorts of locations in Stellarium and observe the sky they see there.

It's free. Get it here: https://stellarium.org

Same here - poos conditions due to lots of wispy clouds. I would have liked a better view, like yours. Looks great!

Both sketches are great. In white light the sunspot group is a real eye catcher, in Hα the big prominence at the rim is magnificent. Wonderful!

No idea, but maybe you can download them manually from: https://sourceforge.net/projects/stellarium/files/Extra-data-files/

for more tips check here: https://sourceforge.net/p/stellarium/discussion/278769/thread/e0679ae8/

That's a wonderful picture!

Hi, yesterday  evening I made a sketch of the crater Watlther which is named after the German astronomer Bernhard Walther (1430 –1504).

Thanks for having a look!

Hi Paul. That's a beautiful disk! Thanks for posting.

Just want to say hello and welcome to Alan. (I haven't yet seen any of those craplink satellites myself.)

What is your age? Do you use reading glasses, and if you do what strength are they? Can you see sharp at infinity without glasses?

You need to take into account how much people's eyes can accommodate to find out if they will have sharpness problems due to field curvature. Ideally you want response from people in your age bracket.

Hi Avani, that's a really good Jupiter and an Extra Super Ganymede!

Thanks for an awesome post.

There is this free Astronomy textbook from OpenStax College / RICE university:

         Astronomy, Fraknoi, Morrison and Wolff, OpenStax, 2016

It is an introductory level textbook. Each chapter is followed by a list of key terms, a summary, links to articles, videos and websites, group activities and exercises.

1186 pages + index

The book really is free with the option to make a donation to OpenStax.

LINKS
to preview: https://archive.org/details/Astronomy_201904/page/n513/mode/2up
to pdf:        https://archive.org/download/Astronomy_201904/Astronomy-OP_RoX1Ths.pdf  

Below the preview you find different formats than PDF.

Bear in mind that the book is a 150MB download from a slow server. If you have your browser set to open PDFs as they come in, it is better to Right Click and choose Save Linked Content to download the book to a folder on your disk and then check after 15 minutes or so if it has completed.

Enjoy

Such fine eyepieces. Congratulations!

I had just started building a collection of Delos (already had the D8 and D12) when the Morpheus appeared. I tried the M6.5. That compared so well to the D8 and D12 that  I decided to forget about getting more Delos. So I also got the M17.5 and M4.5 to fill the remaining gaps in my collection.

I think the M17.5 is just about perfect. Which do you think is the best of the Morpheus and which the weakest?

Lovely!

It's very beautiful, a dreamy start of a new day for the Sea of Crises. Well done!

In this one the dark side is Quickmap's  albedo map.

The editing is not difficult, but with the Moon's nutation changing every day it's going to prove difficult to find matching images for the dark and bright sides. 

This is how I did the disk, with layers and mask, but reduced to 1024 px wide to bring the file size down: Explained.psd

I saw an intriguing Moon image the other day and I had to try for myself. This is the result:

This image is made from 6 sections of the near side from Quickmap. The background is from a Stellarium screenshot.

The 6 Moon images were merged into a large panorama image. The result was duplicated to a second layer which was made darker. Then a mask was applied. The terminator could have been anywhere.

Have a look at full screen. I got the inspiration for this image here.

I think I'll try another one tomorrow, maybe using the same mask but different processing.

Thanks for looking!

Wonderful sketches, Marios. Thanks for sharing!

I so hope that Y4 Atlas becomes a great comet.