Ruud

This image has character. It's wonderful.

Louis, what an effort this must have been and what a great result you have here!

I have a question regarding kidney beaning.  Do you still have EXIF information for the images? It would allow calculating the entrance pupil (= camera lens effective aperture, "focal length / focal ratio used for the picture") for each photograph. Most of us use our astronomical eyepieces with observer pupils of around 5 mm or larger.

For an observer, a messy exit pupil causes kidney beaning mainly when the pupil of the observer is only slightly wider than the exit pupil of the eyepiece. Especially the Nagler T4 12 mm and the Meade 4K UWA 14mm both show severe kidney beaning in the second of the two images you post for each, which may have been caused by an entrance pupil that is only slightly wider than the exit pupils of the eyepieces. In that case, even the mildest SAEP would show as kidney beans. That being said, both of the first images for each of these eyepieces also show kidney beaning, though very much milder. I wonder how big the exit pupils of these eyepieces and the entrance pupils of the camera lens were for these four shots.

The Nagler T4 12mm and Meade 4K UWA 14mm may indeed have particularly messy exit pupils. I actually tried the NT4 12mm in a bright daylight test. From the dealer's shop it showed a strong tendency to kidney beaning so I decided against it. My pupil must have been pretty small at the time, but since it is also small when I observe the Moon I thought this eyepiece was not for me.

Thanks for the thread. I think it is epic and deserves to get pinned.

Neat sketches Rob, very clean and well presented.

Thanks for sharing.

Okay, it's a nice image though, well composed, good tones and so on. Even the print is well placed.

But there is way too much jpeg compression! If you save as .png you get much cleaner results in the first place, and it will show up here in its original quality. An image as good as this deserves that!

I go here. When low, mid and high clouds are absent, and when the seeing is 4 or higher the night is good.

You may have to set the dark theme if you don't get it by default. The light theme is terrible.

Thank you Alexander!

Hi Steve. It's amazing. I'm speechless.

Thanks Agnes, I had no idea.

So I searched and I found this video. I haven't seen it yet, but I already know it'll carry me well into the future. It's an hour and twenty five minutes long. I hope it's a good video.

It looks like you found a bug. I think we should alert@alexwolf. See what he says.

The eyepiece is a magnifying glass with which you study the image from the telescope's objective. A magnifying glass magnifies more when it allows you to study an object from a shorter distance. Thus the shorter the focal length of an eyepiece, the larger the magnification it provides.

Hi,

I just visited the Unistellar kikstarter page. There was an update on September 10, 2019, but I can't read it. Is it good news? I'm mainly curious about how the beta testing went.

Welcome Martyn! Thank you for joining the SCL.

Wow Martin, it's an astounding image!

Awesome and amazing! And big too.

Love it! 

      Hi Cary,

     looking forward to your sketches!

6 minutes ago, JamesF said:

Well, you know, if I must.  It would be wrong not to try to help out, really.

Wonderful! James will organise the effort. Send him a PM and let him know how many items you are willing to take in.

26 minutes ago, johninderby said:

And Ruud will take all this out of date gear off your hands.

Now that is a good plan, but ...

On dear. Maybe I should have kept my mouth shut.

I guess I'll have to make at least an effort. Anyone willing to help?

NO!! Visual observing is so last century! 

Sell your gear before it is too late. Don't ask more than 1/3 of the new price, or you won't be able to get rid of it.

SELL NOW!!

I'm going out to prepare for a sketch of the Moon. It's a fine night and the seeing is good. The Moon just rose and it'll take a while before it is high enough, but there's so much more to enjoy.

14 minutes ago, Rob Sellent said:

Can't beat @Ruudexcellent suggestion.

I say Rob, you just beat me on argumentation.

Hi, welcome.

This would be your scope: https://www.firstlightoptics.com/beginner-telescopes/skywatcher-skyliner-200p-dobsonian.html
You'd have some money left for an eyepiece or two. You could even take some pics of the Moon with your smartphone.

Planning you do with Stellarium, available for free from stellarium.org. Smartphone aps work as well.

Quote

Is observational astronomy on the wane?

I hope so. Imagine all the eyepieces that become available on the used market.

Very good, except the B&W at the top. That one is super good!

Hi Martin, welcome.

That probably was a meteor. They happen a few dozen kilometres up, so they are pretty local. Whereabouts were you when you saw it? I wasn't out, so I saw nothing 🐸.

(The emoticons are letting me down - only the frog is working.)

1 hour ago, davhei said:

some people add a touch of colour to their sketches

Yes, it would look nice if you did that with your star sketches. You should try the freeware GIMP.

I imagine this is how it would work in GIMP: open your scan or photo. Add an empty layer, change its blend mode to colour and paint an orange blob on the empty layer over Arcturus. Anything underneath the blob that is not black or white will take on the colour you used.

I did this in Photoshop using a rather tacky highly saturated orange-red for Arcturus:

The orange blob is bigger than the star, but that does not matter because black and white are not affected.

I should add: the original was a grey scale image, so my first step was to convert it to RGB colour.

Some search terms to help you find the right tutorials: GIMP change image mode to RGB, GIMP add new layer, GIMP change blend mode of layer, GIMP save as png.

Good luck. Get GIMP and get going. It is an excellent tool for this task.

Wonderful sketches. Making them must help to really know these star fields.