Craney

Got myself a new Dewshield to match the OTA courtesy of @fwm891

All looking very smart.....  apart from the cables.  Snag-tastic !!

Fiction becoming fact ??

Do astronomers dream of electric cuts  ?

Very nice set up and great detail with the granulation.

I agree.... amazingly detailed.  Well done.

1 hour ago, teoria_del_big_bang said:

As per usual in my neck of the woods the only clear nights coinciding with full moon again.

Yep, I'm just along the road.  Clear night  and a weekend..... Mrs C is in London.... oh....its the brightest full Moon ever....!!!!!

Anyway, I spent time star-test collimating a 6"RC and trying to get  zero's across the board on my SharpCap polar align.

Managed to eek out 24mins per channel on the Crab  (SHO) before it went behind the house.

Think I'll add to that tonight.

Always the Moon to image.....    the Morning after  😴

16 minutes ago, ollypenrice said:

I must say that I don't do anything during the full moon week....

you heard it here first.......

Any 4 dimensional surfaces, call on the  tardi(s)grade...

Do you think they are using PhD2  ??

... and somebody needs to take the Bahtinov mask off.

.... even the best of us have done it....  doh!!!!

This is one from my C90Mak.   ( Canon 60D I think..... )

or.... look on ASTROBIN.

Plug in the type of scope on the search panel and you should get lots of images (albeit with a range of cameras as well).   Some will be Lunar.

I can speak highly of the C90.   It did give very crisp views of the Moon and was of the right FL to get a full disc with a DSLR.    ( very useful for eclipses ).

Looks like he left it on ... the long and winding road....

If it's lost collimation  you might see a few  ringo starrs    through it...

Thanks @Merlin66.

No surprises about solar bunnies on the starboard bow, it was really a grab and go session whilst the Sun was clear of my local trees. Will have a look though for future images.

There is something to the left as well,  more of a swathe of darker colour which could be the sweet spot effect.  

The 174mm has such a nice wide FOV that I can move the entire solar disc around to eliminate the worst of the bright /dark zones. Sometimes difficult to see on a laptop screen.

Fingers crossed for a lot more Solar action coming our way.

Languishing in the store room and sadly overlooked in favour of night time objects and SCTs, it had been a while since I imaged the Sun in any shape or form.

I was very pleasantly surprised at the image I managed to extract from my single stack PST, 174mm and SharpCap combo.

This is from a 1500 frame AVI and various witchcraft applied via ImPPG.     ( edit... from the 27th Feb 2022)

Yes,  both surface features and prominence features are from the same stack.   Normally I have captured both separately and 'tried' to add them in PS.

Thanks for looking.

Hi Rick,

No sorry, never really followed it up and have  fallen back to using the traditional star test and lots of cold bruised finger tips to get my 8HD  'sort of'  collimated with Bob's knobs.

My feeling is that if this 'TRI-MASK' method was a tremendous step forward then everybody would be singing its praises.......  the silence suggests that maybe it does not quite meet the level of precision preferred by  astro types.

Then there is the new kid on the block.   The  OCAL

https://www.firstlightoptics.com/other-collimation-tools/ocal-electronic-collimator-pro.html

That can be done in daylight.....

Expensive though, but will sort out my  Newtonian F4's as well.... and maybe the RC.

Sean.

.... and it is possible to stack 'lights' even though they have come from different combinations of sensors and scopes. 

Every now and again I do a 'super-stack'  of data from several years on a certain object to see if I can extract any more detail out of it.   You have to except that the final image is framed by the session with the smallest field of view.

Lovely image.  You can begin to see the spherical nature of the gas cloud in a 3D kind of way.

300s without guiding on a medium small object...... that's some  mount.

.... don't worry, Elon Musk has got all those satellites up there  to keep an eye on how the weather's changing ...... oh!....that's a good thing....err......isn't it ??

Nice one,

On first listening, I thought he said   "Wharfe  Moon"    which I thought was a Yorkshire take on the tradition.   Maybe it should be, who has the definitive list ??

Edit:   for non-Yorkshire residents, the River Wharfe is quite a nice river in our region.

Are the flashes just material approaching the event horizon on 'our' side of the black hole, or the light paths of any radiation emitted are sufficiently curved and warped that they could have originated from a few regions, somewhere around the spherical edge ?  ( that is, if black holes are spherical, my Einstein-Kerr mathematics is not up to scratch these days...  ).

I think the flashes are probably material harvested from the stellar near misses.  
 

With all that action going on there must be a possibility of two stars colliding with each other, spectacularly !!

So it's One o'clock in the morning and still clear....   Moon is an hour or so from going behind my neighbours house, still casting shadows.  Some clouds scudding across as well.

Work day tomorrow.....  Lets try a LUM widefield and let it run until dawn.   Shriek !!   ... with a 3/4 Moon!!

This is what I got after 355 x 30 sec exposures.  ( Equinox 80 + atik 414ex).

If nothing else, it highlighted that I need to clean the imaging train as there were a few huge dust bunnies to photoshop out.

Totally agree,

These days we are 'blessed' with a big bright Moon whenever it is clear.    <  Is there a causal connection there  ?? ....hmmm possible research ??? >

So you just have to get on with it.  Always good to look to the other side of the sky and eek out some rare  Abell or Sharpless classified oddity that shines in Ha or O3.

I tried for this one last night....  Abell 31 (not my picture) which is in Cancer.   It was just a bit too big for my setup, but I know it's there and I will bag it soon. 

8 hours ago, Pixies said:

When you are watching the start of the programme and it comes up with "and with Pete Lawrence", does anyone else go:

"Yay! Pete's on!"

Yes, I make a mental note of what equipment he is using ..... just in case one day the chance may arise that I can buy a shiny new piece of kit, at least I know it is something favoured by the cognoscenti.

How long before somebody opens one of these beauties up and gives it a 'hyper-tune'  ??

I know some of you will not be able to resist.

At first I thought it was a Gatling gun...!!!

What a splendid creation. ..... Steam Punk Frac.

I can imagine Captain Nemo using it to view celestial phenomena from the deck of the Nautilus.

So this one took me by surprise.

I tend not to go for the Orion nebula (M42) because it is usually too bright  !!  ( yes, the core tends to saturate my Atik 414ex mono).     Earlier this week, on a scattered cloud type of evening, when I had far too much work on my mind,   I let the  Samyang absorb photons from midnight onwards   (the Graveyard shift).    No expectation at all.  Virtually a full moon in Taurus, cloud sweeping the sky  enabling exposures  realistically  at the 6 to 20 secs range.    Knowing previous attempts with longer focal lengths tended to have H-Alpha dominance, I was expecting a vividly red smudge..... Oh well.....  might catch a meteor to give me an action shot.

Actually turned out quite colourful with a bit of detail as well.     Now, some of that nebulousness in the rest of the frame may be an artifact of having so many cloud streaked subs, but as long as nobody knows that, everything is ok.

This is  80x 6s  Ha,    80 x 10s O3,   80 x 20s S2.

Hope everybody is well and stays well.    Rgds, Sean.