Knighty2112

17 minutes ago, Vroobel said:

Hi everyone, 

I began my adventure with longer scopes (and my first refractors) totally accidentally thanks to @Franklin, who sold me his Vixen A80M Japan (F/11.4) in June this year. It is wonderful achromatic refractor allowing me to see even 4 biggest craterlets of the Plato with negligible CA, while the seeing was average. Less than three months later I bought a new Starwave Ascent 102ED F/11, which is just enough for me at this moment. They are only two, but the two make a collection now.

I'm preparing to test of general performance and comparison of both thanks to doubled every eyepiece, as I use binoviewer. This is how I'll do the live comparison:

The 102ED doesn't have extended dew shield, so it looks similar to the Vixen, but it's much longer.

I'll add pictures of single slopes soon. 

Not looked through a Vixen A80M, but the views in my AA 102ED are excellent, so you should get great doubles observations and lunar and planetary views too.

Excellent work. Great images! 👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻

On 21/09/2022 at 20:27, andrew63 said:

Gosh, reading this thread and had a very similar experience! Just been looking at my copy of Nortons from then, with luckily some markings I made - note just under the Pleiades. Thanks for bringing it all back.

 

Here’s my first 3 recorded sightings of Halley on Map 5. I made a further 6 recordings on Map 3 with my last sighting of it 5th January 1986.  

Another tome to read arrived through the post today for when i got home from work!  

6 hours ago, Dave scutt said:

Nice postman brought me this.

I did have an home made one that did fine but time for an upgrade 

File comes in handy sometimes maybe?  

On 16/09/2022 at 13:39, Astroscot2 said:

I kept note books with all my observations back then,  They will be in my attic somewhere, I had log books for solar projection which I took every clear day, was lucky to own a Carl Zeiss 63mm refractor which was pin sharp.  You have put me in the mood to revisit themthis weekend.  I will confirm my first observation of Halley.

Mark 

Hope you find them Ok. 👍🏻

And another warm welcome to ya from the other end of the M62 (plus a little bit further east)!  

What mount are you using with the scope? I find with my heq5 pro that I get excellent results after a 3 star align. Also I own a Celestron 6/8SE goto mount too which also performs much better with a 3 star alignment.

Been a while since I did any double star observations, so even though last nights forcast wasn’t looking to promising when I nosed outside at 9pm’ish most of the sky was clear so decided to put my Heq5 Pro goto mount out and set up. Even though I was only doing visual work I still levelled up the mount and polar aligned, then using wifi I did a 3 star alignment with Synscan Pro app, then switched control of the mount to Skysafri Pro 6 which makes it a breeze to get targets with. Earlier on I had been planning (with the help of Agnes Calrke’s Discovering Double Stars) to select some suitably placed constellation to start off with, and as Hercules is pretty handy from my back garden I chose the list from Agnes’ book to go with first. Scope used my Celestron 120mm f8.3 ‘frac, with mostly my Baader Zoom Ep fitted with the 2.25x barlow, which was set to 10.6mm mostly;

100 Her

56 Her - not seen. Secondary too faint.

95 Her

Alpha Her

Delta Her

Gamma Her

Kappa Her

Mu Her

Rho Her

Struve (STF) 2063

Struve (STF) 2411

After going through these doubles to the end of the list until approx 10:25pm, I then decided to go for the following targets also as the sky was doing pretty well with just the odd fleeting patch of cloud coming over;

Albeirio - who doesn’t like looking at this great double!

M27 - Dumbbell nebula

CR399 - Coathanger open cluster (used 32mm Omni EP)

M71 - faint globular but seen best with averted vision.

NGC 6828 Blinking planetary nebula

Saturn - seeing was pretty steady so got great views

Neptune - easy to spot with pale green colour in sparse starfield.

Jupiter - Nice details showing in the banding. Good seeing.

NGC 7662 - Blue snowball nebula.

NGC 6543 - Cats eye nebula.

M92 - globular in Hercules

M13 - the one and only in Hercules.

M57 - ring nebula

Epsilon Lyra - double double. Easily split with both pairs. Seeing nice and steady.

Nu1 Dra (Kuma) - double in Draco. Nice easy matched double.

HD 208063 - double in Cephus. Wide double.

Vesta - 6th mag asteroid easily seen in same fov with much fainter stars.

Juno - 1st observation of this asteroid for me. Again easily seen as 8th magnitude object in very sparse star field. 
 

After this at 11:45pm I was getting tired, and with clouds starting to pile in I decided to call it quits for the night, but very happy with the just over  2 hour session. Love using Skysafari with the goto mount. Way better than using the old handset, and much more accurate too after doing the 3 star align with the Synscan Pro app on my Ipad, then giving control to Skysafari. All objects fell easily into view with the 10.3mm Baader zoom EP. Highlights of the night seeing Vesta again, and Juno for the 1st time.
 

No expert but first you need to change directory to the folder were the files are on your PC/laptop. For example if the files are located on your PC/laptop in a folder on the C drive named Astropy, then in a folder called Fits you navigate to the correct folder first in command prompt with the command

CD C:\Astropy\Fits

This will change the path to show you are now in the Astropy\Fits folder.

Typing in py on the command line on its own puts you into the python editor command line where you can type in ptyhon commands directly (i.e. print(“Hello”) which will print hello on the command line as >>>Hello. This is not what you need here. 

Novel use for DPC!  

Nice shots of the two rille systems in Mare Vaporum Steve and Nigella. 👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻

Turned out very well considering then. 👍🏻

Nice daytime shot. Well done! 👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻

Hi Mr_Mojo. Plenty of good binos around yes, but if lunar observations are 90% of what you want to do why not think perhaps a small spotting scope that allows you to change magnification? Celestron do some very small Hummingbird spotting scopes with zoom magnification on them. Not owned one but remember when they came out they got good reviews especially the ED optics version. Worth a thought perhaps, and as the pics shows very compact too, and don't break the bank either. Worth a thought maybe?  
 

https://www.uttings.co.uk/p131849-celestron-hummingbird-9-27x56mm-ed-micro-spotter-c-w-carry-case-black-52308-cgl/

When I was starting to get back into astronomy about 12/13  years back I used to use a Celestron 70 mm travel scope for a couple of years before I splurged out on a better scope(s). Yes, the tripod that came with it was pants, so I used a photographic tripod for better stability, and whilst I couldn’t do all but the brightest DS0’s it was very nice to use even with the limited 140x maginification that was its limit. Got some great views of the moon, and decent ones of the major planets too, along with double star observations too etc. The point of telling you that is that whatever scope you get if you get a passion for astronomy you will enjoy whatever views you get with it. So starting off with an achromatic refractor is not a deal breaker, and you can still have great fun observing the heavens with it.

Although looking at it again most likely a satellite trail rather than a meteorite.

Got a nice meteorite capture though. 
 

I would have said it sounds like a power issue if using a battery(s) etc, but as it was running from mains this seems unlikely, although possibly might be worth checking if you are getting a steady voltage to the mount with a multimeter if you can just in case it is power related. There is a Celestron 6/8 SE goto mount up for sale in the ads on here. I own one also and get pretty good results with it, and the price they want for it is not too bad if in the worst case the mount has fully gone.

3 hours ago, Mark_Collins said:

Hi all,

I'm new to this forum but wanted to ask if anyone else had witnessed between 03:30 - 03:45 (I didn't note the exact time) an unusual bright looking star, get brighter and slightly bigger, nearly matching jupiter in brightness tonight and then fade out to nothing, between Phecda and Merak in the Ursa Major constellation approximately aroind the location of HD 99489.

Appologies if I sound like a crank, just want to know I'm not going mad as I'm at work and can't get to my telescope to look before dawn arrives.

 

Cheers, Mark

At approx 3:30 there was a satellite passing close in that area, so most likely catching the sun on it, or a flare perhaps from it perhaps.

Nice work Doug. You certainly had good seeing conditions if you could push the magnification that much? I too could make out some slight albedo colour changes on Mars last night, but the best the highest magnification I could get before things went south was approx x204 with my 80ED ‘frac with 2x barlow and 4.5mm TV Delight EP fitted. Was too tired to stay out much longer than about an hour and 30 mins approx, so didn’t look at the moon (apart from when getting focus as sharp as possible with the scope), then viewed the shadow of Io start to creep across the face of Jupiter from 1am for around 20mins before I called it a night.

I would tend to agree with Stu as to roughly where Io is for that date.

What date and time did you take the picture from your location? Sometimes Ganymede and Callisto can be quite a way from the planet even when their shadows are crossing the planet. 

Worst case scenario you could try stuffing some clean cloth down the neck of the opening in the back of the scope, making sure there is enough to be able to pull it out again. Get some very light oil with a fine neck (small Oil pens are available with small amounts of oil in) and squeeze some extremely carefully around the rim (marked with the dotted red line) where the two threads meet up. Wipe away any excess that might look as though it may go down into the scope itself. Let it soak down in the thread for a few hours, then see if you can carefully unscrew it after that. As long as the stuffing in the tube covers fully the width of the hole, and with very, very carefully placement of any thin oil it shouldn’t drip down into the inside of the scope. I would use this method as a last measure though only if all else fails. Can’t guarantee success but as a last measure worth a try.

6 minutes ago, Rob said:

Just grabbed one myself!. Nice

Excellent! Nigella’s brainwashing is spreading further I see?