Whistlin Bob

Hi Dominic, I'm not sure. My own experience is that I spent ages trying to see them in a 14" dob at home (Bortle 5) last year and failed miserably. I then had an opportunity on holiday in a Bortle 2 with the same size scope and they were still quite tricky- although it was very satisfying when I finally got them. Unless your skies are excellent I would say it's pretty unlikely you'll find them.

Well done to all the winners! Really enjoyed doing this, and it's a great opportunity to improve my image processing: looking forward to the next one 😁

I've recently taken to covering the glass surfaces then putting the eyepieces in my jacket pocket whilst swapping between them during a session. There's just enough body heat gets through to warm them up sufficiently to avoid fogging problems. Ten minutes in my pocket is looking enough to achieve this. Make sure there's nothing else in your pockets to damage the eyepiece though!

Is three entries too many? This is a video, so I'm not sure it counts anyway, but I had fun making it and hopefully it might interest a few people. Got talking about the old chestnut of imaging v observing and then what you can see with different scopes and cameras and thought I'd try to simulate it with this data.

I hope it does. I really enjoy your videos and I know quite a few other fans as well. Hopefully the nature of the subject and audience will reward the greater time and effort you put it into it. Then again, I cannot begin to understand the appeal of spending hours watching other people play video games and taking things out of boxes, so what do I know about what works on YouTube? 🤔

This is one of my favourite lunar features- it's a beautiful sight. It's quite a bit shorter, but in height not dissimilar in scale to the Alps.

I'm really fond of the Wild Duck Cluster- and I know that asterism from star hopping my way to it. I'll think of it as Pixie's Croissant on my way there each time now!

It's a beautiful part of the world you live in @merlin100. We were at Portencross yesterday- with the sunny weather it's a stunning location with the views out to Arran. Shame about the boy racers!

Yeah- camels have a pretty fierce kick as well- I wouldn't want one of them near my telescope 😬 It's funny the way that observing changes- at home in the garden I relish the animal noises as part of the experience of being out at night- where I live is urban but there are cats, bats and hedgehogs aplenty and they all add to the experience. Out in the country the risk is barely larger (although I've never trusted rabbits after The Holy Grail!), but the rational bit of my brain struggles to suppress the fight/flight response. Glad we don't have camels roaming about the place!

Really nice image. I think I prefer the first image, the colours are a little gentler and a bit different to what we see so frequently.

Away for a couple of weeks with the family at the moment. Car was a bit full to bring the dob, but I've bought my etx105 and some Celestron 12x70s with me. I've discovered that technology really isn't for me whilst observing, so the scope is de-forked and now on an AZ4 mount. Every night bar last night is meant to be cloudy, so I was really keen to have a session, even if targets were dictated by cloud gaps. Our cottage is half a mile outside the village and the skies are magnificent with the Milky Way prominent across it. I set up on the edge of the plot right next to a field full of sheep. Did you know that sheep make human sounds whilst sleeping? Ok- imagination plays tricks in the dark, but it's very off putting! Just lining up on Izar. Cough! Who was that? Just a sheep... Nicely split- companion just outside the first diffraction ring. "Oi!" Hello- is someone there? No- another sheep. This continued throughout the session, at one point a sheep sighed loudly right behind me- I nearly had a heart attack! Spent a while on Jupiter and Saturn. Saturn was glorious with hints of the Cassini division, but Jupiter was a fraction lower and wobbling like crazy. In the better moments of seeing you could see a couple of bands but it was never great. I found the very high targets uncomfortable and the etx was quite unbalanced, so I stuck to 40-70 degrees. M13 was wonderful, resolving a long way into the core. M31/2 was good in the scope but better in the binoculars- showing more of its full extent- couldn't get M110 in either instrument though. It was also pretty cool naked eye- spent a long time looking and it gradually seemed to emerge from just a faint smear to showing quite a lot of size. Clouds came across to the North so I switched directions. Couldn't see much of the big nebulae, but had a nice view of M11. I really like M11. Next up was Mars- this was the highlight for me- and my first view in this apparition. Vibrant orange with the polar cap prominent and some smudging on the surface. I spent a long time just soaking it up. What a sight! Decided to switch to the binoculars for some wide field sweeps of the Milky Way but found they were completely dewed up, which was disappointing, and the etx wasn't far behind them. A shame to pack up with the skies getting better, but at least I've managed one good session on this trip! And a bit of a relief to get away from those sheep and their weird human sleeping noises!

Agreed with the previous two posters- the stars look more like tilt then coma to me. For APT and plate solving there's and excellent guide in the software section For troubleshooting, when you launch the platesolve you should see the background programme launch in your taskbar- have a look in and see what it's doing. You should be able to see the image you've asked it to solve and the stars it has chosen. Less is more on this- I normally do just a two or three second exposure for plate solving as it runs more quickly. If everything seems to be working ok here, but it's still not solving, then double check your telescope and camera settings in APT as it can't work if these are wrong. Also, you mentioned that you didn't think you cc was reducing- it's critical that you confirm this one way or another. If this isn't right in APT then you haven't a hope of it working.

Ok- I probably need to stop playing with this now. But I'm away on my hols, with a scope and some imaging gear, and the weather just isn't playing, so what can I do? I thought it might be interesting to make the blue/green tones dominate and then colour Oxygen in the centre red to contrast with them. I used the same formulae for Pixelmath but with these values: RedSulphur=0, RedOxygen=1.25, RedHydrogen=0 GreenSulphur=1.5, GreenOxygen=-1.5, GreenHydrogen=0 BlueSulphur=0, BlueOxygen=-1.5, BlueHydrogen=1.5 So, it's sort of an OSH palette, which worked Ok for the gases but the stars looked awful. I spent some time trying to desaturate them, or mix in more natural colours, but got nowhere, so I gave up and starnet'ed it. I do like Starnet- and it works a lot better on this than my Newtonian data. I obviously realise this isn't the normal approach to narrowband colours, hopefully it doesn't hurt too many people's eyes!

Thank you for sharing this data! Staying in a Bortle 3 zone and cloudy every night so far- so this has given me a nice opportunity to do some processing. This has all been done in Pixinsight. Workflow: Register Images Masked Stretch on all 3 images- and then backed off a bit in curves as the signal was a little strong! (...a new one for me!) Ha seemed sweet, but there was a bit of noise in the other 2, so did a luminance mask on them and used the Multiscale tool to noise reduce at Pixel Scale 1, 2 and 4. Then ready for combining in PixelMath. I've got the following formulae for PixelMath: Red=Ha* Red hydrogen+ Sii* RedSulphur+ Oiii* RedOxygen Green= Sii*GreenSulphur + Oiii*GreenOxygen + Ha*GreenHydrogen Blue= Oiii*BlueOxygen + Sii*BlueSulphur + Ha*BlueHydrogen I thought I'd go for something a bit more naturalistic, away from SHO, so my values are: RedSulphur=0.75, RedOxygen=-0.75, RedHydrogen=0.75, GreenSulphur=0.4, GreenOxygen=0.2, GreenHydrogen=0.0, BlueSulphur=0, BlueOxygen=1.0, BlueHydrogen=0.0 The idea is Sii and Ha both feed into Red, but Sii has a green component too so that it's distinguished from the Ha. Oiii is then Blue with a hint of green and a heavy extraction from the red so it doesn't get drowned out. I can (and sometimes do) play with these values for hours. You can make it really lurid by playing with negative values- but I felt it wasn't what was called for here. I then tweaked the saturation up a little and went after sharpness with a bias tweak using the multiscale tool again but at levels 4 and 8. EDIT: Stars reduced; bit more saturation.

I have a Meade ETX 105 and would second what Vlaiv said. Lovely little scope.

I can help in some points. Moved from a 550d to an asi1600mm with the ZWO LRGB and narrowband filter kids at Christmas. It performs superbly: much more responsive than the 550d in most respects, although I did find my 550d has excellent Ha response. I use it on a 130pds and a 200p- I did need to trim a little more off the drawtube on the 130, the 200p was fine. The focus lock must be in to prevent tube sag I've found though. But these are minor challenges: overall I'm very happy with the outcome. For processing I can't help you so much: I use Pixinsight which has excellent tools for mono- although it does take longer. But you see plenty of excellent mono pictures processed with other packages, so it's clearly not impossible.

Excellent report and sounds like a lot of fun. I think comparing instruments probably forces you to look more carefully then you otherwise would. Good to hear that you're getting so much pleasure from your kit. Like John, I had absolutely lousy seeing here last night. We had a family over who were keen to see Jupiter and Saturn and all I could show them was a pair of wobbly blobs. Very disappointing!

Excellent report- sounds like a great session- and even better with company. My first decent telescope was a 200p five years ago- I still use it regularly. It really is a superb instrument for the money. I hope you have many happy years of use with it.

Thanks Lee- nice report!

Finished the set last night by trying it with the 200p. Seeing was pretty dodgy, but spent quite a long time waiting for moments of clarity. The lowest I could split it was 12mm - x100 exactly. My 3 scopes have therefore given me: Etx105 - 97x 200p - 100x Dob 14" (masked) - 82x Although it's not very scientific (as I did them on different nights) from prior experience I think this is probably about right. The little etx punches above it's weight due to the much smaller Central Obstruction. The 14" dob performs much better at splitting stars when it's masked, as it still has 160mm of unobstructed aperture. I guess this throws a bit of shade on the Skywatcher, but I had a lovely session with it last night. A mate had come round to share a couple of beers and help me swap out the forks on my mountain bike. The night was forecast to be cloudy, so it was exciting to see Jupiter pop out of the murk. There's nothing like the expression on someone's face when they see Saturn and Jupiter for the first time with their own eyes. The Cassini division was there on Saturn and the moons were beautifully spread on Jupiter with the GRS floating in and out of visibility in the seeing. He also saw the split on Epsilon Lyra and liked the idea of it as an executive toy on a vast vast scale!

I knew they'd use a different word for it! Whilst I would have liked his equipment (especially the free laptop!) the thing I was most envious of was his dark sky! I did have to chuckle at the bit where he initially thinks he's nearly there when he's actually falling into his abyss- the use of clouds in the graphic seemed very appropriate too!

@EmuStardust showed me this video yesterday. The presenter (they're probably called something else on YouTube) does quite a lot of good stuff- but I really like his choice of subject for a difficult skill to learn. It's a little bit sponsored and corporate, but it's an interesting take on a subject close to many of our hearts!

Pretty murky tonight- but enough gaps for a go with the 14". The minimum mag at which I was sure I had a split was 82x- and this needed an aperture mask. So, a little better than the 105, but do it should be given the size of the scope!!!

I joined the 1600 club last Christmas after several years DSLR imaging and have no regrets. Switching to mono was easier than expected and the results more impressive (including dealing with LP in RGB and NB). I would not now switch back for my main imaging rig. The only thing that would cause me to pause would be the announcement of an imminent successor in the same sensor size & price bracket.

Well this is a good bit of fun for a moonlit cloud dodging type of evening- encouraged me to get the little scope out. With etx105 mak and Baader 8-24 zoom and using the excellent guide above it was notched at 18mm (81x) and definitely split at 15mm (97x). Very pleasing 😁 Next time I'll try it with the 14" dob... Whilst I'm on here- lovely views of Jupiter and Saturn (despite altitude) with Jupiter showing 4 bands clearly. Saturn was a bit more of a struggle- hints of the Cassini division, but not really clear. I also split Izar and Iota Cass and had a nice view of Plato and Montes Jura on the moon. It's the first outing for the mak in over a year. Nice to have a scope you can pick up and wander round the garden with...