Stub Mandrel

The Skywatcher CC seems not to affect focal distance, plus you don't get a Crayford focuser with a 130P.

Pretty good :-)

Don't be fooled by the price. I have heard loads of good reports of this scope. I have the 'photographic' version of it, the 130P-DS which uses the same mirror and it is an outstanding bit of kit.

Apparently next week Falcon Heavy will send Musk's Tesla Roadster into Mars orbit...

They want to recycle them many, many times.

So why not recovering the first stage? Not many things as cool as a SpaceX stage 1 landing on a drone ship!

OOh - groovy music and star-trek type moving blobs of light!

Ah, same feed here: http://www.spacex.com/webcast I thought they would start sooner than 15 minutes! I remember the moon launches where we had days of excitement!

Only 3/4 hour to go but no coverage yet?

Harrumph - I bought two rolls of film for my Yashicamat and never got enough notice of a clear night to take it to a dark sky location! So much for that plan :-(

I'm no EAA expert but I love the interface design!

I'm worried what will happen when the snake at right gets to him...

Get thee hence to a place of contemplation!

Jury is out, I think I need a few hours data to give it a fair chance. There seem to be a lot of dark pixels in the image, as if some are not responding to Ha? That said, I've been experimenting with processing using different sets of control frames in DSS. Results are ... interesting ... but confusing as very different curves are needed to get similar (and therefore comparable) images from each approach.

Is there a similar chart for ED achromats?

Apparently the glitch was after first stage separation... they just omitted to mention this during the continuing webcast. Their CEO offered their 'deepest excuses to our customers' It seems both satellites ended up in their orbits but it sounds like at least one may not be able to get to where it needs to be.

I buy a lottery ticket every week. Hard question. My original philosophy is to achieve as much as possible with relatively basic kit. Only when I start hitting the limitations of the gear, rather than those of my own skill should I consider upgrading. The limited opportunities for imaging have me thinking I can't justify nearly £800 for a HEQ5 GOTO - anything smaller wouldn't be enough of an improvement and I'm not particularly convinced by quoted capacities (I think these are based on the capacity of steppers to cope with imbalanced loads and the supplied counterweights rather than any real engineering limitations). It's harder to think what would be a worthwhile upgrade in terms of a camera. A more recent EOS might be worth it, but then all the stress of modification with the risk of bricking it... Alternative would be a large sensor cooled astro camera, but then the cost is even higher. Definitely OSC as I feel imaging is getting too complicated already, if the moon hadn't been up yesterday I would have done unguided shorter subs, just for a quieter life. I don't want the complexity of a filter wheel and the extra costs of all those filters. Scope wise, I feel I have more than enough options and quality, especially with a 400mm x 66mm ED scope coming together.

Well this is the Ha (which was very noisy...) and the ha combined with my RGB data:

Despite by best attempts at screwing up and a guiding graph that was usually showing a horrible DEC peak on it, I managed to get 17 600-second Ha subs of the rosette last night. This morning I discovered that the DEC worm mount had come slightly loose. I'm going to fit a shim to keep the right spacing so I can tighten it down hard. In the end it has only spoilt less than a quarter of the subs. I lost more subs to the ST4 lead getting hooked over the DSLR, tightening up and rotating the camera several degrees during each exposure!

His left hand is at the balance point, looking at the rings... How heavy is a 250mm frac?

I do wonder if without the ldlers the back one would be prone to slipping.

You should be able to get away with just one idler, unless there isn't enough 'wrap' around the rear pulley with only one. Two roles of idlers - maintaining tension and increasing the length of wrap around pulleys

Burton upon Trent station would qualify as an 'orion' site. I enjoy the rare benefit of being a passenger last night, being driven along the A50 from Nottingham towards Derby I could see plenty of minor stars in Orion, probably down below mag 4. I could even see a star or two in Cancer, maybe even a hint of the beehive as a fuzzy patch. Edit - Ic ould see pretty much what @JOC has in his photo, allowing for the fact I was moving and the window kept misting over!

Another one bites the dust ... scrubbed for 24 hours due to LOX issues.