Stub Mandrel

Courageous choice. You've avoided the 'owe it to our lads' fallacy! Keep up the updates!

As a spectacle wearer I can vouch for the fact that the eye/brain combination is very good at doing on-the-fly RGB alignment. It can be fooled, illuminated TESCO signs in red and blue and the HSBC logo on a computer screen both show movement of the two coloured parts when I move my head - in fact the red spelling wiggle under TESCO moves side to side as I shake my head! But when the colours are overlaid, the eye correct (e.g. the word TESCO in white doesn't split into RGB except at the extreme edge of my vision, even though the red bit must be moving as much as the wiggle!)

Personally I find the Moonraker overdone, the understated Zeiss says quality that has gone into the optics, not the bling.

Great pic! I was able to find the moons in photo paint. You might try something like this: Create a circular mask around the planet (it can have a wide margin) Invert the mask Stretch the histogram until the moons appear, the background will become grey move the black point until the background matches that around the planet. You can tweak the histogram. Clear the mask For images where the moons are more obvious, you can just mask around them and use the same technique. I did this to bring out Mars and Regulus on my shots of this morning's conjunction.

Don't rush. You've got all the time in the world.

A 450D has live view - does anything show on the screen?

LOL! I made a model boat that took 16 years and cost me about £20

...or wood effect Fablon

I'm getting this irrational compulsion to spray my cheap 'frac white...

I can't take the suspense...

I must admit I am surprised how many people use 3-4" refractors and have brilliant results. I had always thought 3" was a kind of 'minimum spec'. It's made me look again at my cheap refractor and discover that it is capable of much more than I thought.

Where can I get one of those wall-mounted tripods?

>phew< I was getting nervous...

I think it picks up local time from your system clock? It certainly is giving me times in BST rather than UTC here.