Ruud

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

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!!

That's creepy!

Hi Gyuri, welcome. Thank you for the sketch. It's really good!

Have a look at this video. It's a timelapse from images taken from the Lagarnge point between the Earth and the Sun:

Last quarter at the end of Summer and a beautiful night with excellent seeing, it couldn't have been better. Thanks for watching!

Wouter, that's wonderful!

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.

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.

Ooh, that's a big one!

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.)

This is an intriguing idea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sea_deluge_hypothesis

I remember reading that the Moon has shielded the Earth from many an impact. Can this be true? I'd think that the Earth, being much bigger than the Moon, would shield the Moon much more effectively than the Moon could ever shield the Earth. Anyway, if c/2019 q4 ends up hitting one of the two, I would prefer it'd hit the Moon rather than the Earth. I'm not too worried though. Many cultures have recorded floods, in different locations and at different times, but I've not heard of any evidence for a flood destroying most of humanity, like the floods you find in the epic of Atrahasis, the epic of Gilgamesh or the story of Noah. Great stories though.

Hi Jack, great that you took up sketching, and a what promising start you made! Hope to see many more by your hand.

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.

It does look interesting! Is that the field stop I can see in the bottom up view?

As Dave says, it's time to talk to the dealer. Refer them to this thread.

This sounds like a very out of focus star with the bright spot in the middle being a positive interference effect. When the circle shrinks you may actually be getting closer to focus. Can you make the big circle shrink to a point? Now I think you found proper focus. In focus you should see a point of light, close to focus (inside and outside of it) you should see lots of rings. That you see a cross at best focus and an ellipse outside of focus may point to astigmatism. If the ellipse flips in orientation when you move from outside of focus to inside of focus that confirms astigmatism even more. However, you just get an ellipse on one side of focus and a blur on the other. Most likely there is more going on than just astigmatism. Could it be that the telescope needs the diagonal to be able to reach focus? Were you using the telescope without diagonal in the big circle from the first quote above? --- My guess is that something is definitely wrong with the telescope. Put it through another test: How does it perform on terrestrial targets? Try some contrast rich targets from about 50 metres to a few hundred metres. Do the images snap to focus and do the closer targets appear contrasty and crisp, especially when you use the 30mm Plössl? More knowledgeable members will be along soon.