Edinburger

Just noticed this and signed. Where I live the LP is horrendous. Car park lights on all night, local business insecurity lights on all night. Not to forget the fad for 'mood' lighting where businesses think it's a good idea to make their building look better (when everyone apart from us is in their scratcher) by drowning it in purple ruddy lights. Rant over...

I've got the same scope and have only checked horizontally. This has spurred me to go check it again vertically! Cheers! I always make sure the lock screws are tight and assume its all good

Kate Bush - Cloudbusting

No, no, he's definitely Scottish ;-)

I'm still too new at this to have an experienced opinion but for a beginner I use Turn Left at Orion to identify achievable targets. Stellarium for telling me where it is in the sky and when. Lastly I use FLO's Clear Outside to tell me its gonna be overcast all night. Probably got that in the wrong order though!

Yip last clear night was hogmanay and guess what I was doing that night?? Glug, glug! Seriously regretting it now

Got mine am iron(for a laugh)... Never saw the funny side???

I'm still new to this so I've not had the chance to make too many errors. Still managed one last week though! I stayed up all night as the forecast was for clear skies. My targets were the planets Jupiter, Mars and Venus. So at roughly 0230 I checked the sky was clear, it was. I went outside and took the scope out the car and set it up in the street. Jupiter was staring down at me, bright and sharp, so I aligned to scope to Jupiter and went to lock it up and overtightened the Alt adjuster and stripped the thread. Arggg. Session ruined and a wasted night staying up watching junk television! Fixed now though, tapped it out to M6 and fitted M6 bolt.

What a coincidence!! I'm just off Stallarium looking at exactly the same thing. Clear skies and no telescope buying please;-)

Cheers for the heads up bud, some may like to keep their secret knowledge to themselves but to share it with others is enlightened! I had also toyed with idea that there must be somewhere off the lang whang maybe near the old RAF base so to hear about the reservoir helps a lot. I'll probably do a reccy in daylight so I know when to turn off the headlights! Whiteadder also looks good. I really didn't fancy blindly diving around farm tracks and risk getting shot at by farmer Giles or bumping into Stan Collimore;-)

Hi, I've been wondering the same thing since I decided to finally take up the sport a couple of months ago. Still have no answer but here's where I'm at just now... For the pliedes meteor shower last month I headed up to bonaly (head for the scout camp but turn right before you get there and follow that single track road to the end). Good darkness, I could make out the faint milky way after a while although the field of view was a bit limited. Secondly I had the idea that somewhere along the east coast might be an idea as there's no street lights out to sea! Turns out maybe I wasn't far out with that as I found out Central Scotland Astronomy Group are holding a star party soon at Yellowcraigs, North Berwick. I did a quick surf on Google earth and found a decent looking car park at a place called ferny ness nr aberlady. I'm assuming you drive but if not there's a bus stop too. If the skies are clear tonight as forecast I might head out for a bit. If so I'll report back