melsky

Great news, my ieq45 is a fantastic mount but I've been eyeing up the CEM60 and the sexy new CEM40, any news of when that will be available?

With camera lenses it’s fairly simple, set the lens to its infinity mark and take a shot if it’s in focus the spacing is correct, If the lens is at anything other than infinity you could have problems because moden lenses use internal floating elements that change their spacing for different distances. Wide angle lenses are particularly critical for this, I have the Sigma Art 14mm F1.8 which I use via a Sigma adapter on a Sony A7S and it works brilliantly, I initially was using a Commlite adapter and getting terrible coma so much so I thought I had a faulty lens (still showed it at F8) after contacting Sigma they of course suggested using their adapter which cost £130, I was sceptical because both are just tubes with no optics but it cured the problem. I measured the tubes to see what the difference was between them, 0.2mm

Hi Stephen, do you still have the ASIair for sale? Thanks Mel

It wasn’t brought by the postman but it’s a new addition from Astrofest last Friday, a shiny new ZWOASI183mc camera, lens mount and mini guider

Has to be Swarovski Swarovision 8.5 x 42's ultra sharp right to the field stop, I made the mistake of looking through a pair and five minutes later I'd bought them

Hi Bryan If this filter is still available I would like to buy it for £30 please PayPal with fees is fine. Thanks Mel

I’ve heard the first production units will start to become available Dec / Jan but there should be an update with photo's of it in use appearing very soon.

Looks like some the flat earth believers are on the offensive and touring the UK, they’ve put out a list of dates and places so I thought it would be nice if they had someone with an alternative viewpoint to talk to, anyone fancy it? You can see some of what they’ve been up to here https://www.youtube.com/user/roxanne291 Here is their schedule- Newquay 21-Sep Barnstaple 21-Sep Bath 22-Sep Bristol 23-Sep Newport 24-Sep Swansea 25-Sep Milford Haven 26-Sep Snowden Wales 27-Sep Holyhead 28-Sep Dublin 29-Sep Cork 30-Sep Limerick 01-Oct Galway 02-Oct Belfast 03-Oct Ayr 04-Oct Glasgow 05-Oct Oban Tobermory 06-Oct John O Groats 07-Oct Thurso 08-Oct Stromness 09-Oct Kirkwell 10-Oct Stromness Inverness 11-Oct Aberdeen 12-Oct Perth 13-Oct Stirling 14-Oct Carlisle 15-Oct Newcastle 16-Oct Middleborough 17-Oct Scarborough 18-Oct Hull 19-Oct York 20-Oct Leeds 21-Oct Huddersfield 22-Oct Doncaster 23-Oct Stoke-On-Trent 24-Oct Nottingham 25-Oct Leicester 26-Oct Cambridge 27-Oct Ipswich 28-Oct Chelmsford 29-Oct Oxford 30-Oct Swindon 31-Oct Weymouth 01-Nov Yeovil 02-Nov London 03-Nov

Managed to grab a shot of it last night, this is 4x 3.2 seconds @5000iso with an 85mm lens on a Sony A7s camera. Mel

Richard certainly knows how to produce beautiful products and the new Astrotrac 360 looks very tasty but a bit pricey, hopefully they will be offering the single arm unit for sale as an option as well, the polarscope arrangement looks a lot more robust than the TT320X-AG. Mel https://www.astrotrac.com/

New generation Astrotrac has arrived. https://www.astrotrac.com/

Countdown ends at 1am tomorrow so it will be announced on the 31st March not April 1st. Really excited to see what Richard has come up with, I've been using an Astrotrac TT320X-AG since they came out and it’s been one of my most used pieces of kit. The GEM with inbuilt guiding they showed at astrofest a few years ago never appeared and I enquired many times to find out when that would be available, I'm guessing this new device is something completely different and operated from a smartphone would be my guess.

Another vote for the Samyang 135mm F2 lens, this was shot at F2.4 on my Atik One 6 camera.

I also have recently bought one of these lenses, here is a test shot I took this week with the lens mounted on my Atik One 6 through a 5nm HA filter. The lens was half a stop down at F 2.4 and this is a stack of 11 frames of 15 minutes each from a light polluted town in Oxfordshire. Images stacked in DSS and all processing done in Photoshop, I'm very pleased with the result.

Challenging conditions last night with the full moon but I had a go at capturing asteroid 3122 Florence. Checking on Sky Safari this was the best opportunity to photograph it close to the Crescent nebula in Cygnus, I used my old modded Canon 600d and a 200mm lens on my astrotrac to take a sequence of 3 minute exposures through a 12nm HA filter, this movie is a crop from those images. click for timelapse