PJW66

Hoping that these new 'scopes will be FPL 55 or FCD100 based, if they are not using an FPL 53 element.

Used a Nikon J5 - a mirrorless 2.7x crop factor camera - together with a really cheap Tmount 2x teleconverter, attached to my Orion Optics VX10L , put Mars in the crosshairs of the finderscope and shot around 400 raw frames in 5 minutes. I made sure the focus was as good as I could get it on the camera lcd, and I was surprised the images looked quite good on the camera screen. Ran the images through PIPP with a 2000x2000 crop, then the aquired avi with AS!2@ 65% of initial frames . The unsharpened stacked image was ran through Registax 6 wavelet and RGB align routines. Only the 5th wavelet slider carefully applieddue to noise showing up (lack of frames I guess). Happy with the result anyways. Obviously not quite as good as ZWO cameras that I have used , but still nice. DSC_3363_pipp_g4_ap1 (3).bmp

I've been an astronomer for 40+ years. Have seen a few unexplainable things at night ,and also managed to capture one fast moving light in the daytime. One Sunday afternoon in February 2007. In the back garden in Coventry UK ,with my new Canon dslr + 105mm lens in my hand, set up with fast shutter,infinity-focused...and within 10 minutes suddenly saw a bright light flying level with the north horizon,from east to west. Much faster than any low-level nearby fighter plane I have seen before. Probably too slow for a meteor however.Totally silent.Maybe 30 degrees elevation. Just about had time to bring my camera to my eye ,and fire off a burst of 3 frames. Ecstatic to find the object on one frame. Image is a crop from the original 10mp raw .Shows a tiny yellowish-white light . I cannot stress enough how fast this thing was . Crossed most of the northern sky in less than 5 seconds. I sent the image to well-known astronomy author Ian Ridpath, who rules out a meteor, and said it *could* be a helicopter. I would say no chance. Cheers,Phil