Peter Drew

I've seen several naked eye aurora from the UK over the last 60 y ears so yes, a fairly rare event. I have seen one as far South as Bedford and two "World class" ones from the NW 20 miles S and similar N of Manchester, rainbow intensity, casting shadows and bright enough to read by. The last one was 2002 or 2004? my memory is not that accurate anymore! 🙂

Taurus should only need to strip the coating and recoat it so the turn around time shouldn't be too long. 🙂

Looking at the adjustment knobs a little closer in the image I suspect that there is a straight knurl finish on the o/d not quite resolved under the ambient lighting. 🙂

I'd give 20 years of my life to be 60! Welcome to SGL. 🙂

I don't know why I've read all through this thread being as I've no ambitions to becoming an imager, maybe it's to confirm this 🤣. @Ollypenrice, out of interest, what imaging setup did you first use as a beginner, if you can remember that far back. 🙂

Had a quick look in Ha this morning, the Sun is certainly getting active. No time to set up a WL telescope but the detuned etalon provided a good off-band view of the groups in red. 🙂

You can bolt an EQ6 mount on top of a "Todmorden" mount, no need for steel plates etc, a spacer to spread the load is helpful though. 🙂

Yes, I placed the OCS on the end of the nosepiece, I didn't try it elsewhere. I use the Denk exclusively in my 150mm Ha solar telescope without the OCS. 🙂

I have the slightly different Denk "Big Easy" the OCS screws on to the nosepiece of the binoviewer on mine. 🙂

Yes, not your best due to the conditions but the available detail shows what could be expected on a favourable occasion. 🙂

I would love to do a comparison, I have a couple of good C8's, one ancient and the other modern. 🙂

A couple of things look not quite right to me. The small black dot should be centered on the cross formed by the spider and the third mirror clip is not showing. Maybe a bit of a rotational tweak of the secondary and a final one of the primary will put it right. 🙂

We all do! ☹️

I made my own mylar cells to fit over the objectives of a 10x50 binocular. Excellent for solar eclipses but you need to have a pretty significant sunspot before it is visible at 10x. 😎

A nice set-up. I have a SW 150ED, it might hit the roof! 🙂

I was building a 16" Mak in the late 70's but unfortunately the corrector shattered during fine grinding due to an annealing issue. The project eventually became a Dall-Kirkham with an optical window, the aperture increased to 17" as the primary was oversize to suit the Mak. The telescope was made for and still owned and used by noted amateur David Gray. There is a very large Maksutov variant at St Andrew's University. 🙂

I would have thought that with your skills and facilities you would have preferred to design your own fork. This is what I did when making mine. 🙂

I certainly remember the zoom shown on the Fullerscopes catalogue and H W English offered a Japanese made zoom terrestrial eyepiece around the same time as I bought a few of them. Although not strictly a zoom eyepiece, it is quite easy to make a variable power eyepiece. You just need an eyepiece fitted to a 1.25" od tube and another tube fitted with Barlow lens that will slide inside that tube. You slide the barlowed tube, with the Barlow lens closest to the eyepiece, this provides the lowest magnification of the system. The more you slide the Barlow away from the eyepiece, the greater the resultant magnification. You have to refocus each time and this can extend quite a way eventually but you retain the apparent field of the eyepiece. The Speers-Waler variable power eyepieces work on a similar principle. 🙂

Certainly seems to be a possibility. Not sure what these days is the minimum spec for seeing solar objects in Ha. 🤔

Well done, good to see another UK contributor featured.

Quick look myself this early evening with a vintage orange C8. Good seeing and transparency again, Aristarchus and Gassendi were the "stars" for me. 🙂

Is there enough height to place the OTA on to its base, the base is the largest footprint. 🙂

Very nice image but I don't think that's Copernicus. Tycho? 🙂

Look for the three conjoined craterlets on the rim of Stadius, a good test for small telescopes. 🙂

It wasn't the weight that concerned me, it was the ergonomics of the girth. 🙂