Whistlin Bob

This is terrific. I spent ages looking at this one on Thursday night at very high mag- and messaging @Stub Mandrel about it, a really amazing sight. Just not quite high enough to image at the time- wish I had your skills!

Just to say thanks for posting this one- bit murky tonight and very bright moon so I was looking for something that would work for the conditions and this list was spot on 👌.

Thanks! 😁 It came from Tiger sheds https://www.tigersheds.com/product/tiger-shiplap-windowless-apex-shed/ It's mostly ok- although the timber in the South facing wall has shrunk a bit and needs treating. The roof is pretty crude. I just felted the panels separately and bridged them with upside down guttering. It has small castors on the corners and on the wall edges to enable it to slide and then some handles near the apex that I use to lift them and hang them off the side walls. It's quite heavy and I doubt this would be feasible with a larger roof. It then locks in place with tower bolts that I had to bolt in place after 1 panel came off in high winds. 

Mostly agreed with the points on here. I converted a small shed to an obsy and it's been brilliant for making sure I get out there if the weather's ok. It's especially good when the forecast is a bit dodgy but the sky looks ok- I just get on with it which I probably wouldn't if I thought it was unlikely to last. I've had several good sessions that I would otherwise have missed. I did buy a cheap shed off the internet and it's mostly ok after 2 winters- I bought from Tiger sheds- you can tell it's built to a price but so long as I maintain it I'm not worried about how long it's going to last. Where I definitely agree with the other posters is on size- I fitted a 5x7 into the space I had and even though it's imaging only I wish I'd gone bigger. Otherwise no regrets. This is also an excuse to link to the time lapse I did of the build 😁

A lunar disc mosaic built from 12 panes, each based on 5% of frames from 1 min AVI files. Taken with an ASI224 with a x2 Barlow on a Skywatcher 200p. Stacked with Autostakkert, assembled in Gimp and then tweaked in Pixinsight.

Very much in agreement with @geordie85 and @alacant, but to encourage you further, I found the D2 to be a very good LP filter. I bought it after an 8m LED streetlight was fitted right outside my house and had thought the imaging part of my hobby was over. The picture below was taken with a modded 600d and the IDAS D2 (on galaxies I don't think the mod'ing makes so much difference) this time last year.

Was having too much fun last night and forgot to post. Forecast wasn't looking good, but told the family I was popping out for 5 minutes to check it out and was still sat out there an hour later- lots of thin cloud, but was able to cut through. The pics are below are DSLR with 300mm lens and then prime focus on 8 inch dob. A lovely sight, and then also found the seeing was very steady and spent a long time with Binoviewers enjoying the moon. the highlight was some lovely texture on the floor of the Copernicus crater.

Lovely capture of an interesting object. The scope sounds amazing!

A very nice set of images. I especially like the M81- seems to be very delicately processed- showing lots of detail and colour but not overcooked. So hard to get that balance.

Loving this build- look forward to seeing the final result.

Welcome to the forum Tom. The answer to your question is "It depends"- on your skies. The Messier catalogue was compiled with equipment far inferior to yours and includes much fainter objects, but he didn't have to put up with 21st century light pollution. If you're in a reasonably dark area then for sure you can. Otherwise there's a cliché- the best upgrade for your telescope is petrol (bit tricky at the moment though). Even without this there are many many fascinating and beautiful objects within your telescope's reach.

Is it responsible for this extreme effect ? Been yanking my hair out over the cause of it! I don't think so- the effect is usually to make stars in one corner appear a bit Pac Man. That effect looks more like reflections somewhere in your image train. For the OP- I can't comment on the STs as I don't have one, but the 130pds is wonderful providing you get a CC (the Skywatcher one has been good for me and f4.5 is good to image at) and don't mind a bit of DIY on the drawtube for the issue described above. With those 2 issues fixed it's a giant killer of a scope.

That's a smashing result out of the ASI224. If you're using Pixinsight, you might try the multiscale function and just out say 0.1 bias in layer three or something- just very subtle to lift the detail a little- but really it's a lovely image and I really like the colours.

I've got a roll off roof shed obsy in a fenced in back garden and have often left my kit running overnight if the chance of rain is that low. I rarely sleep well though... It was just as well last Sunday: I'd left the rig running on M101 and woke up at 2 in the morning feeling anxious about it. After arguing with myself for some time I went and checked it and found that the PC had hung and left the scope to go clattering the filter wheel into the obsy wall instead of parking itself. Apparently no harm done (I've been imaging with it all week since) but I don't think I'll leave it running again- at least not with the 200p where this can happen.

That's lovely Neil- you've really caught the asymmetric arms 👍😀

Thanks for this post- it went into my list for last night and I had a fun fifteen minutes locating and then observing it. In a 14" in Bortle 5 with moderate transparency it was just visible with direct vision and gave away some shape with av and scope wobbling. Really nice target 😀

Wonderful thread and report. I picked NGC2403 as my first galaxy to trial my new imaging rig this year and it was a wonderful target. I then tried observing in my 14" and it was little more than a smudge. Oh for some dark skies! I don't get to watch Timber Wolves, but I can see my kids chasing each other round the back garden with plastic light sabres. Does that count?

Great to hear that you got a first light so quickly. A few things that have helped me with my 200p are an ironing chair (saves your back when the scope's in a tricky position, but be ready for the assisted living spam if you get it off Amazon), a Rigel Quikfinder (so you can get a rough aim) and Sky Safari - planetarium app, where u can set your field of view up- really helps with the Star hopping. I find Betelgeuse (even in it's current diminished form) and big orange stars like it very beautiful in a dob.

An excellent choice- they're wonderful all round scopes. It will give you superb views of the moon, planets are great in it and it has enough light grasp to get you going with DSOs.

Thanks S&S. Yes- definitely a good session- and I know I'm luckier than many being Bortle 5- it's just that the photography brings home objectively how much is hidden from so many of us by light pollution. My Orion 14" is a USA model so made by Synta and a close relative of the Skywatcher models. It's a bit of a unit, but it does pack down nicely and goes in the back of a Focus without dropping the seats- so pretty portable too. So long as you don't want to lift it once assembled! (75kg!!!)

Thanks Ciaran- good luck with the low energy bulbs. They made my skies better for observing but worse for imaging because the LED is much harder to filter out, but even though it's brighter it's usually better directed.

Cheers Stu- it's a 14" dob I'm using. Yes my first view was at a darker site- I do find with these things once you've seen them it becomes much easier to get them the next time. With the flame it's the dark lane down the centre directly beneath Alnitak that reveals it- what I'm seeing at home is a darkening of the glare from the Star perhaps more than the nebula itself.

Sunday night was one of those rare occasions when a clear night is accurately forecast in advance. Shame it was work the next day, but the forecast meant I able to set up both imaging rigs and the dob in the daylight and get going as soon as the sun set.. The observing was pretty good- I really wanted to make the most of the winter targets that are now drifting away and had good views of Venus, M42, the Running Man and the Flame. Conditions were good so I had a go at the Horsehead with a number of eyepieces and filters, but no joy. Having seen it once (at a darker site) it always seems to be teasingly on the edge of vision- the bank that it sits in is often just discernible and so logically you would expect a gap in that bank to be visible too… To make life easier I spent a bit of time on the Pleiades. It may sound funny, but after 5 years of looking at it, including 2 with the telescope I’m using now, it seems I’m only just now learning how to look at this. When I first look, the magnification of the scope (it’s 1650mm fl) makes the stars relatively sparse. Some strong nebulosity does appear quite quickly, but it’s only after literally minutes of just gazing around the object, wobbling the scope and moving just off the object and back on again that the filmy nebula away from the brighter bits emerges. Really gorgeous. And maybe I’m a just a bit slow on the uptake! Inspired by the report below I then moved into Perseus- Starting with with Mirium (lovely yellow/white double and new to me), I then moved through Theta Perseus (really nice colour, but companion very faint), Melotte 20 (better in the finder!), M34 (quite sparse- I must admit I couldn't see the hunting bird), the Double Cluster (always lovely), and Iota Cass (I couldn’t see the colours very well this time, which was a bit disappointing at it has been very obvious before). I then moved up to Ursa Major for M51 (it was quite high, the 2 cores were bright, and the bridge was visible, the arms less so, but a nice view all the same) and NGC 2403 which I recently imaged, but which was hardly visible in these skies. Next up was M106, but the clouds beat me to it and it was time to pack up. All this time I had my Star Adventurer doing a wide field view of the sky to my south. I know this isn't the imaging section, but I thought it might be instructive to post a couple of the images to make a point about flipping light pollution. Firstly- here's a stretched & calibrated stack of 60sec exposures under a Bortle 5 sky: The blueish tone comes from a CLS filter which is actually blocking a good chunk of the pollution. Isn't it a miracle that we can see anything through this? The bottom left corner is the sky glow from the town that I live in a suburb of. I then used Pixinsight DBE tool to digitally remove it and show what's actually there (I had to crop it a bit as well- the bottom left was beyond the software to fix): The red is at a wavelength that's difficult for us to see, but the rest of it is hidden by light pollution- it really underlines for me what most of us have to battle with much of the time. If this isn't a motivator to get out to dark skies then I don't know what is!

A nice list with a few I'd like to check out- so thanks 😁 What scope were you using?

Yes- definitely do. Especially for small targets or tight framing of larger ones. I use a 200p on an HEQ5 and it usually guides at around 1-1.2 rms, I get slightly better figures with my 130pds (hard to tell definitively because the seeing impacts this). This means I'm losing potential resolution, but I'm still collecting more than double the photons with the eight inch. Sure- it would be better if I had a bigger mount but I don't and that's that. M51 image below was taken with a Canon 600d on the 200p / HEQ5.