Bill S

Great shot and explanation. Your Dobsonian must be well mounted and aligned. How have you set it up?

Just a bit of a ramble about a bit of a ramble around the skies in August. All snapshots are with a 200 mm Newtonian, Lodestar X2 with 0.5x reducer using Starlight Live and Jocular. Not in chronological or any other logical order. Planetary nebulae. The old favourite The Dumbbell. Good to see even a one 15 second sub showed it well. Still worth stacking a few though. Here’s something a bit fainter. Abell 70. I had a bit of a problem getting to this. When I put Abell 70 into Cartes du Ciel (searching using internet catalogues) it wanted to send me to the wrong part of the sky. I managed to find it using another designation, PK 038-25.1. (PK from a catalogue put together by the Czech astronomers Perek and Kohoutek. The PK catalogue is built into CdC.) Beware there is an Abell catalogue of planetary nebulae and another of galaxy clusters and so you need to know which Abell you are looking for. This one is a bit ghostly (Jones 1). See for example: http://helixgate.net/jones1.html How about some galaxies? The Webb Deep Sky Society Galaxy of the Month is NGC 7042. NGC 7043 is easily spotted too. https://www.webbdeepsky.com/galaxies/2019/ https://www.webbdeepsky.com/images/galaxies/ngc7042/ngc7042_finder.pdf Talking of faint fuzzies. I’ve often looked at Alvin Huey’s site before. Plenty of good and interesting information. http://faintfuzzies.com/ But there is another. One from Robert Zebahl. http://www.faint-fuzzies.de/en/home.html This is also a good resource for looking for objects of interest by type and then narrowing down by constellation. (See under Observations.) So, I had a look at some galaxies in Delphinus. Every season is galaxy season. You just have to look in the right direction. NGC6928 at the centre and NGC6930 to its right.. I had a look at a few others too. What else? How about a quasar? Andromeda’s Parachute – a quadruply lensed image. 11 billion light years or so. I’m going to need more magnification and very good viewing conditions to see the parachute shape. One night, perhaps! See for example http://www.faintfuzzies.com/Files/J014709+463037%20Andromeda%20Parachute.pdf And linked files at the end about the discovery two years ago. This was one that the late Nytecam (Maurice Gavin) and others posted EEVA pictures of. Finally something a bit nearer home – M15. Clear skies! Bill

A snapshot from a few nights ago. Before getting into EEVA (or whatever we want to call it) I would not have thought that it was a good idea to look for faint galaxies during the shortest night of the year with no astronomical darkness at 53.5 deg N (and 18 day old Moon - waning gibbous coming up as well). At least it's not too cold. Still, clear skies are rare so... The Webb Deep Sky Society's Galaxy of the Month for June 2019 is NGC 5954 in Serpens Caput, which together with NGC 5953 is Arp 91. See https://www.webbdeepsky.com/galaxies/2019/ and https://www.webbdeepsky.com/images/galaxies/arp91/arp91_finder.pdf Here's my snapshot with Starlight Live + Jocular. Things were visible after only a few subs but I left it running while I looked at background information on the web As mentioned in the linked Webb Soc pages Arp 91 is to the top left and NGC 5951 is to the bottom right. And, as we know, the nights are drawing in. Best regards Bill

Martin - thanks for the explanation. It all sounds rather complicated so it's a good job you are figuring it out and producing the software. A few measurements later and a look at the Starlight Xpress USB filter wheel details and I'm thinking things should fit and focus using the type of adapters you have described in other posts. (T thread on both ends of the filter wheel and T to 1.25 inch and/or 2 inch fittings for the Lodestar and the focuser.) I believe you have used Baader filters for LRGB. I see ZWO do some cheaper ones (probably not so good, but...). However, I think the ZWO ones are thicker and won't fit in the filter wheel. I think a phone call to FLO may be wise. I'm getting tempted by multi-spectral.

This is looking very promising indeed, Martin. Not convinced I can shoehorn a powered filter wheel in between my Lodestar and focuser, at least with a focal reducer in the train. Might have to move the primary mirror up a bit... You say you ran RGB then L. Does the order of RGB make a difference to the colour cast? (Not sure if you can run in a different order or not with SLL.) Rob - at what stage do things not work with Jocular? Have you got Python installed and apparently running OK? The 32 bit laptop I use for imaging must be a similar vintage as yours.

Mike That's a good one there - a real monster. And, so many other galaxies in that area of sky. A real treasure trove. Bill S

A bit of an opportunity a night ago rambling around looking at things mentioned on the Webb Deep Sky Society web pages. The object of the spring season is a planetary nebula (NGC 6781). Quite a fine ghostly object. The Webb Soc's galaxy of the month is Hickson 62 and I had a look at that but also had a look at this one from their GoM for May 2014. NGC 5529 is the obvious one in the centre but there are plenty of other galaxies in the shot some of which I managed to identify using their finder chart (by using Jocular's flip settings to match the orientation. I also liked it in the negative) : https://www.webbdeepsky.com/images/galaxies/n5529bw.pdf I also had a look at NGC 5466, which is globular cluster. I have to say it's bit of unglobular cluster in my opinion. Reading up a bit I see it's classed as a Shapley-Sawyer Concentration Class XII. (Didn't know such a description existed until yesterday!) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shapley–Sawyer_Concentration_Class Incidentally, the Webb Deep Sky Society's annual meeting is in June: https://www.webbdeepsky.com/annual-meeting/ There is even a talk about video astronomy. I believe Dale Holt generally looks with a Watec or another camera and then sketches what he sees. Unfortunately his website was not working the last time I looked. Best regards

Good one! It must be a quite monstrous size to not appear stellar at that distance. There is another monstrous elliptical, IC 1101, relatively nearby in the sky that is also that sort of distance and yet can be seen as a fuzzy. (Mag 14.7 according to Wikipedia.)

That's good. I'll have to have a look out for that. Amazing what can be seen even though we are living in the astronomical twilight zone at this time of year.

I have had problems with SLL when doing stacks but it sounds like it's different to what has been described here. Rather than jumping my problem has been the stacked picture suddenly becomes noisy all over. Hence I always make sure I save stacked images as I go along. However, since using Jocular and not stacking within SLL, I have not had any problems. (Now that's tempting fate isn't it?) Bill

A great set of shots but catching the supernova as well is the icing on the cake. Marvellous.

Thanks for all the hard work on this. Downloaded with just a few failed downloads that were restarted and then they picked up from where they had got to and completed successfully. A couple of Orion files seemed corrupted when downloaded as part of a seasonal set so downloaded the constellation separately and then OK. Bill