Beagleboy

As much as I'd have loved it to be Marvin, who's far and away my favourite cartoon character (thank you @Sunshine), Your explanation @Froeng, sounds much more plausible 🙂. The mysterious point of light drifted across my field of view at the right sort of speed had my mount been switched off. Geostationary satellite it is then! Thank you, hopefully I can get back to sleeping at night without fear of being probed again. 😉 Craig

Jupiter and moons were in the FOV and my scope has a wifi alt-az goto mount which was tracking Jupiter at the time. The point of light I saw was about the same magnitude as a couple of stars that were also in the FOV and actually passed between two of them. Nothing else was moving. It's genuinely got me puzzled. I reckon it must have been a satellite, but it was going so slowly across my FOV that it caught my attention. I'm not saying aliens..... 🤷

I was observing Jupiter last night around 9pm-ish through my 150mm reflector with a 750mm focal length and 18mm eyepiece. So mag was approx x40. My location was approx, my back garden, in deepest Central Scotland. I watched a faint point of light slowly traverse my field of view from left to right over the space of about a minute. I know the boring answer is that it was almost certainly a satellite, but they usually zip across my field of view, this was only pootling. Other than aliens (Okay, I admit I'm from Bonnybridge, the UFO capitol of the UK, 1995), what else could it have been? Near earth object or boring old satellite ? Craig. 😏

Hello! Haven't been here for a while. Anything exciting happen while I was away? Please forgive me if this is a forehead slapping, stupid question. I dragged my Skywatcher Star Discovery 150p out into the back garden last night for a lovely evening of planetary observation. I used my Pixel 7 phone, running Android 14 to connect to the scope's WiFi Alt-Az mount via the latest version of Synscan Pro. All went well and I had the scope aligned in no time. I then tried to connect to the scope through Sky Safari (with Synscan in the background). This didn't go so well with Sky Safari not seeming to recognise where it was pointing. It was too cold to be fannying around last night, so I just decided to control the scope through Synscan Pro instead. The app worked flawlessly, taking me straight to each target centred nicely in the eyepiece. However, as soon as I picked a target on my phone, the screen flipped from dark, eye-friendly red, to a glaring white screen as the scope traversed, only swapping back to dark mode once it had stopped and was centred. I couldn't find an option to stop this. Is there one? It's definitely a new thing since my app was last updated on the 17th Nov. Cheers for any help / advice Craig

I think I've finally narrowed down the problem, and it's to do with my Nokia 6 phone. The mount connects perfectly, and reliably to my wife's android Blackberry, and to my Kindle Fire tablet, (that I side loaded Synscan and Sky Safari onto). I believe that my Nokia phone is some kind of wi-fi tart, always looking for a better connection and this is where the problem has come from.

Hi there, I got a Skywatcher Mak 127 with an AZ-GTi goto mount as a birthday present last month and it has been working flawlessly until a couple of nights ago. I've been connecting to the mount's onboard wifi with the android version of the Synscan App on my Nokia 6 smartphone. However, these last couple of nights the system has been unusable as the wifi connection keeps dropping after only a few minutes of use. I'm not even getting enough time to align the mount. What appears to happen on my mobile screen is that the wifi symbol drops away for a few seconds, then comes back, but the movement controls on the app have now become unresponsive. The only way to regain control of the mount is to restart the mount and the app. Then replay the whole scene with the wifi dropping out a few minutes later. So far, I have tried. 1. Changing the wifi to channel 13, away from all the other local devices. 2. toldmy phone to forget all other wifi sources 3. Replacing the batteries in the mount. 4. Reinstalling the Synsan App 5. Restarting my phone. I'm not sure what else to do? Has my mount developed a fault?

My main hobby is mountain biking. I'm a Scottish mountain biker. There, I've said it, pity me. For all the weeks and weeks of slogging through axle deep mud every year, listening to the grit wear away all those expensive components, it only takes one dry, sunny day to remind me that yeah, I do actually love this hobby. I think my visual astronomy 'side hobby' has a similar vibe. I got Dobby about three years ago, and the first winter was fantastic. What felt like almost every other night was clear and bright, it was amazing. The last two winters have been very poor though. I've probably been lucky if I've been out in the back garden once or twice a month and now we're into spring, it's not getting properly dark till after 10pm...way past my bedtime on a work night. Then there's that idiot who's garden backs onto mine and who has fitted some sort of Gatwick runway light to the side of his house.... Like others have said, you've just got to persevere through the bad patches. Ride through the mud, but keep in mind that the good times will roll back round again. Currently, I'm planning on trying to capture images of Jupiter, Saturn and Mars with my smartphone connected to Dobby's eyepiece when they get to a suitable height in the spring sky, while also dreaming of short sleeved cycling jerseys and dare I say it......cycling shorts rather than thermal leggings!!!!