Ruud

It's a marvellous collage of high quality Jupiters . Thanks!

Wow. It may not be scientific, but this is great fun and beautiful to watch! Thank you, Avani.

Awesome!

Wow, Tareq! That's a really good image.

I think it's these knobs: You tighten them by hand. Once fully tightened, the telescope will only move by turning the slomo knobs. I got the image from here: AstroMaster-EQ_Telescope_Series_Manual_Web.pdf

Hi Nikki, Thank you for joining the stargazers lounge!

Thank you Mike. It's made on the computer. I used the smeary round brush of Corel Painter. I apply the brush strokes with a Wacom Intuos pen and tablet. A lot of the smaller detail is at best very approximate or no more than a happy accident (completely imaginary). This is really a personal impression of the region. I love the wrinkles on the plains, so exaggerate them, and the complicated rough terrain near Petatus is beyond my capacity to recreate, so that's why it is just a chaotic mess. This one is based on a rough sketch at 138 and 200x (Genesis + 1.8 Barlow + Morpheus 6.5 and 4.5mm). I used SVS image 4223 to get things in the right place on the painting. I kept true to the notes and didn't use the SVS image to correct mis-observed features like the crater at the northern tip of the rupes. I also posted computer paintings based entirely on SVS which have more accurate features in them.

Looks so warm! It felt warm too the past few days.

Ooh, that's perfect!

Original and negative, both are excellent!

Yesterday's Moon with the straight wall. Rupes Recta (middle right) and the crater Pitatus (bottom left).

That's beautiful! Gorgeous colours, thanks for sharing.

Don't be afraid to clean eyepieces. They are not made of sugar! Use a piece of cotton slightly moistened with alcohol and clean the glass. You may have to do this twice. If you see any streaks on the glass after cleaning, fog the lens by breathing on it and wipe it with a soft tissue. Kleenex regular is fine, or any other tissue that is soft and not impregnated with lotion. It's a good idea to first remove any particles, etcetera, with a blower before you clean the glass. Eyepiece coatings are quite hard, by the way. EDIT I have Baader's liquid wonder and think it is a waste of money. I regret spending €9 on it. It is just alcohol, propanol and water. Plain alcohol from a drug store is a lot cheaper and works just as well.

I read the thing about the weight. That may not be all that relevant because to use binoculars to their full potential you need at least a monopod anyway. Or some other support, especially for astronomy where the binoculars need to be above your head. For nature observation you regularly need to change focus. For that purpose, a central focus mechanism would definitely have been better than individual focusing. A general drawback is the 85% transmission of the Nikon WX. That is disappointing. But if anyone offered me a pair of WXs I would immediately accept them. I'd love to have these binoculars.

Interesting! They look very unusual with their Abbe-Koenig prisms. I found this review.

Hi Gilad, there is a freely available translation of Harmonies of the World, by Johannes Kepler (mentioned above) and Project Gutenberg has some titles on Kepler that briefly touch upon the topic.

Thanks for the new Stellarium. Stellarium rules! I turned on the info for rise/transit/set. Three lines are added to the info section at top-left. I can't read them though. The font for these lines is black. Is there a setting I can apply to solve this?

Yes, point your butt toward your target. That improves the experience of observing terrestrial views through a Newtonian. Some targets find this offensive.

Oh dear. It's a one way ticket.

Usually, collimation with binoculars refers to if the tubes are parallel, which is needed for both images to merge as one. It doesn't sound like that's what you mean. If you had really bad seeing, the view through both tubes would be equally bad. You might get that if you're observing through a column of hot air rising from the neighbours' barbecue. If there is an optical problem inside the binoculars, it would be rare that the problem existed to the same extent in both tubes, unless something is wrong with the mechanism that moves the focussing lenses in the tubes. Maybe the whole mechanism is crooked, or the focussing lenses are loose. source: see bottom of image At least the focussing mechanism is shared by both tubes. The other parts are independent of their counterparts in the other tube. If for instance there is a chance of 1 in 30 that an optical part in one tube is mounted poorly, then the chance is 1 in 900 that both tubes have a poorly mounted optical part. So My guess is: the neighbours had a barbecue, or something is wrong with the focussing mechanism.

I had an issue with defender's tamper protection. It was switched off. I turned it back on. If yours was also switched off after the upgrade, you'll have a yellow instead of a green shield on your Windows Security icon in the notification area of the taskbar. More people have this. See: https://www.tenforums.com/antivirus-firewalls-system-security/133397-defender-tamper-protection-1903-a.html --- EDIT I ran into another glitch. I have a 4K monitor, so I use scaling to avoid miniature system fonts and tiny buttons. After trying out different combinations of make text bigger and make everything bigger (both in settings > ease of access) I settled for text at 100% and everything at 150%, which was where I started from. Although I changed nothing in the end, the experiment messed up the icon spacing on my desktop. The icons ended up about 450 pixels apart, horizontally and vertically. That's way too widely spaced. This is a nasty bug. The only way to remedy this problem is by changing values in the registry (using regedit.exe) and if you make a mistake editing the registry, windows may stop working altogether. If you have the same problem happen to you: In the registry editor, navigate to the location as in the screenshot below and change the two marked values. The first one is for horizontal spacing, the second for vertical spacing and the units are probably twentieths of a pixel (twips, but I'm not sure). You must enter two negative values. With the values -1280 for horizontal spacing and -1128 for vertical you get narrowly spaced icons. That's good for me, I like to arrange my icons in compact clusters.

Hi Kristen, thanks for joining!

After the install, my NVIDIA graphics card was reset to limited dynamic range (16-235). I had to set that back to full (0-255) to make the 'pop' return to the colours on my screen. If you have a flatscreen and use NVIDIA you might want to try this: Go to the NVIDIA control panel - In Display > Change resolution > 3. Apply the following settings turn on the radio button 'Use NVIDIA color setting' Set 'Output dynamic range' to 'Full' Click 'Apply' at the bottom of the window - In Video > Adjust video color setting > How do you make color adjustments? turn on the radio button 'With the NVIDIA settings' go to the tab 'Advanced' and set the dynamic range to 'Full' Click 'Apply' at the bottom of the window The limited dynamic range, 16-235, is for CRT monitors (old fashioned fish bowl like monitors). CRT monitors can't handle the dynamic full range and may even get damaged by trying to do so. This is why the default is the limited range. On a flat screen, the full range looks much better.

Gee Dave, I hope you'll enjoy many clear nights with the Takahashi and the Moonraker without the need to worry about having to go to work the next morning!

Ah, two more downloadables have appeared in the assets list. So now I found stellarium-0.19.0.16932-win64.exe I'll let you know if I run into any issues.