Sunshine

4 hours ago, Rusted said:

That's an excellent image with lots of detail.

Keep going! Anybody who can pull off such an image, against all the odds, deserves praise and even greater success.

I had a bit of a play to give you some colour, like you wanted: I am afraid I lost some of your original detail.

 

 

Whoa! that looks way better!

3 hours ago, starbob707 said:

I wonder why anyone would waste their time looking at Venus.  The most boring thing in the sky.  

Venus is a challenge, seeing subtle detail requires the right conditions and optics, there are many many objects which can be considered boring until one learns to look at them and be patient.

Great images! that supernova is certainly impressive.

With my TSA-102 I have seen on occasion bluish/red hues around Venus bright stars lower on the horizon and the moon, on other nights nothing at all, I suspect you may be experiencing atmospheric anomalies. If I were to take an average over 10 nights observing I would say that on only two or if lucky three of those nights I see no anomalies. In fact, last night was one of only a handful of times looking at Venus where it was surprisingly clean, absolutely no color but these nights don't come often.

1 hour ago, markse68 said:

M101 was at Zenith- hard to zero in with starsense and as expected- vain hope of spotting it (anything) with a 6” scope from London skies. Oh well. Moon and Venus were very decent though. Trying out my new focuser- lovely  

Mark

What is that in the background? looks like an alien ship touched down! you did notice that, right? 😅

Welcome! don't be overwhelmed by the experience, many of us wanted to do too much at once when first starting off and it can feel frustrating but the best advice I can offer is for you to seek out amateur 

astronomy clubs in your area and join up. You'll be in good hands and they will be glad to help you along. Ask of us whatever questions you may have and we will guide you.

Enjoyable read, I'm sure you'll get the mount up to snuff and Monica will be a crack shot with dob's soon enough, that mirror certainly did clean up nicely.

With the wrong camera, no doubt wrong software, wrong editor, wrong person for solar imaging 😂 and a whole lot of button mashing I have managed a solar abomination!.

Make no mistake, I am aware I was using the wrong equipment (Neximage5) but I just had try something, exposing for this flare was a nightmare and ultimately I was not able to 

do it through Icap but by literally moving the sun so the flare was closer to the edge and the camera would adjust exposure. Then I hand tracked with one hand on the slomo knob

and the other pushed the button to record, If Mr. Bean took up imaging I may have actually learned a thing or two watching him. Why is it in black and white? I have no idea, how do

I apply color? no idea, will I get a proper mono camera? YES! this makes me realize just how talented solar imagers like @Nigella Bryant are, she can do this while sleeping but I will get there!!

I wouldn't hesitate on a SVX127, I have read nothing but stellar reports as I was seriously interested a couple of years ago until I got a ridiculous shipping quote, I was ready to pull the trigger. No doubt the 127D would replace the TSA120 and cool faster, and those 7mm extra aperture won't be a big deal but it won't hurt. As for the tests, don't become the guy who spends more time testing and looking at out of focus stars than in focus ones. 🤣

So beautiful! 

Beautiful!

Nice work!

Waiting for sunset.

Very fascinating and some great work!

37 minutes ago, Peter Drew said:

Completely different Ha systems.  The lunt has a glass based etalon, Quarks have mica chips which need to be heated to an optimum teemperature to get them "on band".  I have noticed some PST's improve the performance after a few seconds of exposure.    🙂

Thanks, i am aware of the Lunt being a glass etalon vs the mica quark but I wondered cause I thought I heard someone mention that their Lunt performs slightly better after a few min observation. This could be simply that their eyes have adjusted and nothing to do with the scope itself, or maybe the glass etalon in the Lunt does perform better once the scope is warmed a bit, thanks.

This may be a dense question but with Lunt scopes does it operate best once it reaches a certain temperature after observing for a given amount of time? I know quarks do need to heat up. 

One of the best I have seen, amazing detail.

56 minutes ago, RobertI said:

I’ll probably adapt it to my 102ED-R to start with then my C8. I don’t have a Stella Lyra dob …..yet! 🙂 I’ll probably try the approach of fitting it to a ball head so it can be oriented, therefore does not have to sit on the top of the OTA, and fit to a standard finder shoe bracket. 

Nice, as long as it points up and moves with the scope it should be fine.

6 minutes ago, RobertI said:

I’ve literally just done it! A 70mm Explorer frac is on the way! Of course I justified it by promising the scope to my 8 year old (after its separation from Starsense of course). 😀

So I take it you'll be adapting the module to the Stellalyra? you'll have a blast!!

I can't say enough about starsense technology (phone module) It has been revolutionary and i regularly run into others who have purchased the cheapest celestron scopes and basically took the module off and easily adapted it to their larger dobs. This may be something you can consider, I believe the stallalyra dobs are mechanically superior to the celesstron, I have no doubt after using a star field dob which are the same scope. Maybe this is something you should look at, with the extra cost of the starsense dob, you may be able to buy the stallalyra and the cheapest celestron refractor and just remove the module. With the starsense dobs come the product key you need to activate the starsense app which is good for use five times on five different devices. With the stallalyra and a starsense module you would have a sweet piece of kit as I have contemplated selling my starsense dob for really cheap without the module and buying a star field dob (same as stellalyra). One thing I noticed when others have adapted the module to their dobs is there seems to be some confusion about positioning, it will only work correctly if the module is mounted directly on top of the dob, looking straight up, I have a friend who mounted a module on his skywatcher dob but had it off to the side a bit and he had issues until he relocated it directly on top of the scope.

That's great! I first saw this awesome chain just recently in my 8" dob, seems like you had a spectacular wide field view of the whole chain.

Wow this is just beautiful!

7 minutes ago, Mike Q said:

It has been forever since we have had a sky even worth setting up under.  Well for the first time since November we have a chance to go all in.  Last night it rained and washed all the dust out of the air, late this afternoon the clouds broke up leaving us with blue skies and not one cloud to be seen.  This could be the first multi hour observation night i have had since mid November. 

That right there is heaven! 

I'm just honest with my CFO, she understands why I have three, I explained one is for the sun, one for planets and moon and one for galaxies,.

15 minutes ago, RobertI said:

Thanks, yes it was remarkable actually, I wish the photo could show the incredible detail visible at the eyepiece. Still, I can’t help wanting one of those lovely Lunt solar scopes.  

Unfortunately and for the life of me I can’t understand why they cost so much more across the pond. They should cost no more than an additional shipping cost and that’s it.