Craney

We all pay for the electricity for street lighting via our council tax. Could they cut the lighting by a couple of hours every night and give the rebate back to the house owners...ie. lower council tax which means funds available for the energy bills. < and we get darker skies 👍 > Probably too simplistic and too small an amount but hey-ho !! it's an idea.

You would have thought he was a triplet ........

Indeed..... I was expecting Deposit = €100 Balance = €8K + That will give EQ8's... Ioptron 70's, 120's a run for their money in terms of working payload. Hopefully it will be class leading and excellent mount without having to upgrade 🤔 I'm gonna need a bigger pier !!

These are great. Thanks for posting. I would hate to be the person deciding what to photograph next !!.... Does it do star-trails ??

Yep... I can see that straight away.

When I say 'see' .... I mean visualise the shape of the bird. It has never sprung out at me before as a bird of any form. I suppose the North American Nebula just grabs the attention in this region. It is a great one to show friends. It is pretty much geographically accurate. The poor ol'Pelican hangs in there, floating around off the 'Florida' coast. I did an hours worth of imaging to get the picture ( 20x60s SHO with Samyang 135mm and Atik 414ex) and processed it in Astro-Pixel-Processor. As I was tweaking the values I suddenly got the shape and it all made sense. although looking again, it could be a Moose !!!!!

Blimey ! That's a beauty. You have got a lovely rich spectrum of stars in there as well which adds to the galactic image.

You have got the Shark jumping through hoops !! This is such a difficult target. My attempts look like a sea-slug. Yes, dew looks likely with such central circularity.

The camera was static and the World spun.... so this produces a problem trying to meld all possible meteors into one frame...... ideally to show a radiant direction. I used REGISTAX to keep the stars under control, alas my roof looks like it is forming some sort of Mandelbrot set !!!! The pesky aircraft is still there due to being on a sub with a decent meteor. Combine1.tif

I imagine most cameras would have been pointed Northwards. Here is my take. Canon 60D 10sec exposures..... about 5 hours worth !!! ISO 2000 Samyang 14mm lens F2.8. Stacked in Sequator. Maybe I should have stopped it down a bit more or used a slower ISO. and here is a composite of 3 shots showing a passing aircraft but also a photo-bombing Perseid . Cheers, Sean

I was near Baden-Baden in Germany, chasing the clear spells. At 70% coverage, a thunderstorm passed over and it wazzed it down for about an hour. Totality was spent looking out from a friendly residents open garage. Ho-hum. So it does go darker and colder during a total Solar .... and wetter. (2017 made up for it though).

Try stargazing around Menwith Hill near Harrogate. It is an American military 'Listening' station and information hub from Cold War times whose strategic importance is once again on the rise. If you pull over in a lay-by anywhere within a mile and a half of the domes you will be soon visited by curious armed constabulary. Which is a shame as it is a good stretch of open dark skies just outside of Harrogate. "So Officer, it may look like a mortar, but in fact it's my travel Dobsonian ........" "Really........"

Great pictures. I like the colour combo. Yes, I think it is the biggest I have seen in the 4 years I have owned a Solar scope... that is with cloud permitting here in the North of England.

M57 has a familiar ring to it..... and a useful target for fine tuning satellite orbital dynamics.

Nice images Francis. Yes, my Atik 414 was showing +25'C on APT last night. Normally I can get it down to -15'C on the cooling Delta....but not last night...only got it to -12'C and got an attack of the moths with the laptop screen.

Blue sky on arrival !!!! Surely one of them warrants Venusian levels of cloud cover !!!?? Enjoy.

Canon DSLRs ( stretching back a few years) can use Magic Lantern which works as a very useful intervalometer that loads onto the SD card. Saves an extra wire having of the mount and is very good for time lapses on the like when not hooked up to the scope.

Which direction were you facing ?? How high above the horizon were you looking?? An astronomy app like Stellarium is really useful to identify the brighter objects if you are unfamiliar with the sky. This is the view for Florida (ish) this morning at 5:30. You have quite a display of planets there.

Have they forgotten to take the Bahtinov mask off ?? We have all done it !! but seriously.... are the spikes a result of the hexagonal cell structure of the mirrors ??

Normally appear around local mid-night give or take an hour. So look to your Northern horizon between 12:00am and 02:00am. Any lower clouds appear much darker if not black in contrast to NLC's beautiful electric blue. NLC's also have that spiny filamentary structure. This is a picture I took in North Yorkshire in July 2020 at 03:15am with dawn rapidly approaching. Itwas a good display that persisted. It has some high Cirro-Cumulus in it like your picture and they are starting to catch the dawns rays, but the NLCs literally shone through even against a brightening sky.

If I had 'spangled' the carpet as a kid, I would have got a clip around the ear...... and made to Hoover it !!!

The secret is for your other half to live in a separate house. Works just fine for me. To quote the boss "A relationship based on the phases of the Moon and the vagaries of the British Weather." I'm allowed to leave batteries, cameras and adapters all over the kitchen work surfaces (more or less permanently), she gets to do 2000 piece jigsaws on the dining room table. I can be up all night faffing, she can go to bed at 9:00pm. One day, we shall live together and all hell will break out !!!!

Hi @Skyline Was that the Celestron C-8N ?? Funnily enough in the last day or so I was "reflecting" on that scope (Ho! Ho!), as an 8" F5 is a nice fast focal length for the likes of the Veil, North American Nebulae and the Eagle itself. I might have to move around the garden to get a good transit arc of a few hours. Glad to hear it is getting used. Sean.

Sorry: Post removed

Yes, it took me a while to get anything decent with this target. There is one significant tree in my neighbourhood, and guess where it is !!!!