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Whistlin Bob

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Everything posted by Whistlin Bob

  1. Glad there was another post to highlight this project- looks great 👍 I mucked around with a Tair a couple of years ago: lots of fun, but you've taken it much further than I did. Not sure how your getting on, but an important learning for me was that it performed much better at f5.6 than it did wide open. Hope you're having fun with it.
  2. That's a really nice review. I recommended one of these scopes to some family friends after reading good things about them, but was a bit anxious as I'd never used one myself. I needn't have worried: they brought it round and I helped them set it up and was properly impressed with the views it delivered on a wide range of targets. A ridiculously good piece of kit for the money.
  3. A little 24mm eBay lens for going after whole constellations 😀
  4. Thanks @FLO- perhaps the real issue is making impulse purchases at 2am!!! 🤣 Funny thing is, I would suggest that whilst it may not have been optimal, it did perform pretty well, and yielded some very enjoyable views that I otherwise would not have seen. I accept, as a retailer on this forum, you need to guide towards best practice, so I understand the reason for your comment. For everyone else, though, there's fun to be had breaking the rules a little and seeing what happens!
  5. Interesting thread. I bought a 45mm one from the classified section of this site a couple of years ago. The reason for purchase was a 2am decision after a brilliant night using a 30mm Aero in my dob and thinking "yeah- let's go wider" rather than any careful consideration of the lens design or attributes. I've tried it in 4 scopes: 8" f6 dob. Yields wonderful rich field views of the milky way. Not quite as immersive as the 30mm due to smaller afov, and also seems a touch less bright, but better corrected edge to edge. 14" f4.7 dob. Edge correction seems to really break down at this speed, but is well restored with a coma corrector. I especially remember startlingly good views of the veil using a coma corrector and Oiii filter where I could easily see huge chunks of the object in one field of view. 127mm Bresser f9.5 frac. It's much more comfortable at this speed: bright, colorful rich sharp views. Scanning the milky way in summer with this is a joy. Sw 72ed. Annoyingly will not reach focus! Overall, it's a nice eyepiece. I prefer the 30mm aero because of the wider afov, but for low power observing it's still a fine eyepiece to use.
  6. These are all mono only, there's a definite step up from my DSLR, which is a comparatively geriatric 600d. I agree about old lenses: you need to try a few, but this one has been great, and I've got a plastic canon nifty fifty which performs excellently. The others I've tried (Chinon 200mm, Paragon 28mm, Tair Photosniper 300mm) have all been a little more flawed, but none have been outright bad.
  7. Well deduced! Here it is: 1976's finest👍 Takumars have a good reputation, so as long a the condition is as promised, you should be good. The coatings should help with CA too.
  8. A few years back I upgraded to a dedicated astro camera for my imaging, but instead of abandoning the DSLR altogether I decided to have a little sideline mucking about with cheap vintage lenses off of ebay. This has been good fun- a few hits and misses without breaking the bank or over worrying about star shapes in the corners and that sort of thing. Of the half dozen or so lenses I've played with, one of the best has been a Soviet made 1970s f4 135mm. It has a little chromatic aberration, which is dealt with easily enough in post processing, but otherwise seemed good and sharp on the DSLR, and I got round to wondering how it would perform on my asi1600mm. The answer, IMHO, is pretty well (once you get past the slight daftness of pairing a £25 lens with £1.5k of camera and filters). As a result, I've had it set up in my obsy for most of the last couple of months. Here's what it has given me this past month: Auriga in HaRGB (definitely want to go and get the Oiii and Sii for this): Here's a bit of Monoceros- I grabbed some Oiii for this one, and processed it with an HHO pallette: Here's Orion's Belt and Sword- back to HaRGB this time: I really like just the Ha channel on this too: And finally- here's a bit of Cassiopeia- with Pacman and the Ghost. plus a bit of dive bombing from the Owl cluster: Feedback welcomed- thanks for looking
  9. Just had a really nice surprise session. Finally got a clear night, but I'm off out this evening, so I grabbed a quick hour at dusk. From my log: Jupiter- terrific views in 4mm. Io just by the disc. Gannymede hiding (is this right? I couldn't see it, but SkySafari implied it was in front of the planet). Multiple bands visible, with detail towards both poles Mars- again great views- lots of surface detail present. Ice visible at pole Vega - very bright low in a blue sky. Epsilon Lyra - drive a bus through there at 300x! Albireo- colours standing out against a blue sky. It's the true Winter Albireo!! 🤣 Up to Cass... Achird- fine view, white main star, deep orange companion Castule and wide companion both deep orange Owl cluster lovely view Ngc663- very sparse, not sure I got it Iota cass- super sharp view with nice clear separation I was thinking how odd it was to be sitting outside in the snow in January observing these summer targets, then came on here to find exactly the same sentiment from @paulastro!
  10. Yeah- I tried my SW 0.9x CC, that I use when imaging, with an Aero 30mm eyepiece and there was a nice improvement in my 14" f4.6 dob.
  11. I always enjoyed John's posts, and apparently like a bunch of others on here, I had the enjoyable experiencing of popping over to his house to purchase a telescope from him. Instead of feeling like a commercial transaction it turned into a show and tell of John's astro gear, conducted by his conservatory as we both tried to remain covid safe. A really enjoyable experience that I'm very sorry will not now be repeated. A lovely man with infectious enthusiasm- may you rest in peace sir.
  12. I have to say this really is an excellent review. I think any experienced observer would glean a lot of information from it and have a very good idea if what they're getting.
  13. Thanks very much for the feedback- I think I'll have a go at the cross fade 😀. @tomato I think it's more the amount I've saturated them- probably just a little too carried away!!!
  14. With a few other members of my local astro club I'm in a syndicate at Roboscopes. December has been pretty sparse, so we've not seen much come through. However, we were gifted a rather chunky 50hr data set on the starfield around the Cocoon nebula. Now, most of my images consist of a few hours of data, grabbed between clouds in light polluted Staffordshire and I like to think that I've developed a bit of proficiency in compensating for the conditions I'm imaging in. Working with a rich gorgeous data set turns out to be a different beast entirely. Let me show you what I mean- here's 35 hours of broadband data with a simple stretch on it: This took no skill at all on my part: it's just a calibration and stretch- most of my effort was devoted to hanging my jaw open at the number of stars in it. Once you get past the staggering richness of the star field though, it's obvious that there's a heap of structure here, so I set Star Xterminator to work on both this and the Ha data. Somehow, in the gaps between all of those stars it managed to pull out this structure: I always have a lot of trouble capturing dust at home, so this had me very excited. I also have to take my hat off to the software- that point and click star removal is one clever bit of computing. I didn't want to lose sight of all of this, so I dimmed the stars down as I combined the stars back in, so as not to lose the structure of the nebulosity I'll hold my hands up at this point and admit that I'm very much in the pretty pictures school of Astrophotography, I'm not too concerned with making my images appear natural. My question is really to find out whether others also find this attractive, or would you prefer it toned down a bit- perhaps something closer to the original RGB?
  15. Terrific 90 minutes tonight on Jupiter, Mars and then a long sweep down the terminator of the moon. Interesting to read @Mr Spock's view of the Nirvana. I had a 4mm Nirvana in my SW200p and the two just seem to get on like a house on fire for planetary and lunar whenever the seeing will support 300x. The sharpness and clarity will match/beat my 14inch dob on all but the very best nights, and also edge out my Bresser 127l, which is no slacker when it comes to looking at the moon. I've got a page of observing notes, but the the highlight was the sight of a tiny craterlet (I think on the edge of Kirchner crater) , picked out by the sun, just past the terminator that gave the appearance of a tiny ring of light suspended in the void. Breathtaking .
  16. 🤣 Yeah- got to take my hat off to the processing here. It cannot have been easy, but to my eyes you've struck a really nice balance between bringing out the detail and retaining a natural look. Really nice image.
  17. Here's Caroline's Rose in Cassiopeia. This one is a favourite visual target for me, but always seem to struggle to quite capture the magic in a camera. I think the dark lanes are in this if you squint a bit!!! This is 2 hours of 60s exposures, filterless, with a 130pds and an SVBony 405cc. Edit: On looking at this again, I really wasn't keen on the colour balance- so have tried to fx.
  18. That is odd. Like @inFINNity Deck my first thought would be to look at the spider- or more specifically, to measure it precisely. I had some problems with non aligned spikes and it was simply that they were loose, but then when I tightened them (only a little bit), the secondary was slightly off centre. The answer was to get some cheap callipers and measure the distances precisely- which left me with beautiful perpendicular tapering spikes.
  19. I took a chance on an ex-demo SVBony 405cc in the summer for a second rig alongside my mono setup. It also uses the 294 sensor and sells at less then £700. I've mainly been using it paired with an Altair 4nm filter on a 130pds. The flats have been tricky, but setting the gain really low and exposing for 10 seconds seems to work well. If budget is important, then I think it's a great combination.
  20. @Roy Foreman Nice pictures! I wondered how you're getting along with this scope as I'm debating getting one 😀
  21. Bit of a processing binge tonight The trusty 130 currently has an SVBony 450cc with an Altair 4nm dual band filter in it. First up is Pacman - 4 hours of 5 min subs from last week. I've found the best way to process data from this is to separate the R, G and B channels - chuck away the blue because it's too weak, and then process the Red (Ha) and Green (Oiii) in the same way as mono output. Then from this week is the Heart and Fish Head nebulae. A really clear forecast meant I was able to leave it running overnight and collect 5 hours of data. Really happy with this setup...
  22. It's all cloudy tonight, so can't make it 4 nights running. Last night was a bit different- went down to Rosliston AG with my binoculars, and had some fun on m42 and the double cluster, but the big news of the evening was that we got first light in our club observatory. This project has been a lot of years in the making, and has been the hard work of a lot of people. The building was finished in March 2020 and then closed for a long time with the pandemic. Last night saw it finally come to light- with big cheers as first the owl cluster, then m42 appeared gloriously on the big screen! 😀😀😀
  23. A work and clouds induced 6 week hiatus ended in spectacular fashion tonight 😀 Needed my thermals and big coat, but had a greatest hits type of evening, starting with a looong time on m42 (first of the season) with e and f stars showing nicely in the trapezium: very nice conditions. Then round to the flame, just about there in Oiii, and up to the Pleiades for the gorgeous diamonds on velvet thing they do. Next was m31, with m32 showing nicely and m110 just about there with some av. Went for a challenge on m33, and managed to just make out ngc604. Very happy now!!! Finished off by dropping to the 8mm ep for a squint at Mars (very bright and some surface detail) and a star hop to tiny green Uranus. Haven't had a session like that in a long time- really enjoyed it.
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