Sunshine

Great question, I would love to see an image of that!

1 hour ago, Phigla said:

But is sill remaining a bit nebulous

"nebulous" brilliant, haven't heard that word used that way but its a sure be I will be using it when referring to my lack of clarity with something, love it.

16 minutes ago, JeremyS said:

Tessa’s night tonight (I hope)

Funny how your 120 looks about the same size as my 102, I guess the 102 may be a bit oversized for its aperture. It sure seems like it weighs as much as a 120, awful heavy for a 102, its my only gripe about Sarah.

May not be the most ideal lunar phase but still very pretty, doubles galore tonight!

Without a doubt the constant yearning for that next "better" scope and, the realization that funds do not allow for it all the time.

It's a disease.

Incredible amount of fine detail in this prom! just awesome.

For planetary/lunar imaging the Skymax Mak's are crack shots, I had the 150 and took some of my fav planetary images with it.

Great work here! also, why do the images from the FS60 differ so greatly? with a soft, almost ethereal look to them.

These are spectacular! 

My eyeball is angry with me, I feel like my right eyeball is larger than the other. Having had a great time this night working my way through doubles I decided to have a go at Zeta Bootis and Zeta Hercules. 

Zeta Her took a while and a whole lot of patience but for a second or two at a time I did manage to spot a blob slightly gyrating in the airy disc with clean sky between the two. Not so with Zeta Bootis.

This nasty little dot is impossible!! I do understand I'm using a mere four inches to tame this demon but I was hoping for at least a glimpse. Not so, after straining with the patience of a trained  sniper for the better part of an hour, using every eyepiece/powermate combo I had, my eye was left defeated, exiled, and left for dead!. What sort of aperture is needed to split this elusive beast? I could have easily gone online and read up on my chances but I believe that only serves to discourage me, I'm up for a good challenge. This night I was left tail between legs and weary of anything that starts with "Zeta". 

Wonderful image!

clouds have gaps?

A beautiful image, love the contrast!

Welcome! Dan, you have a great library of astro pics on Flickr, those beautiful wide field images are my favourites I must say.

Some amazing granulation detail, great job!

Love this image! those spikes are nice.

Great image!

5 hours ago, MalcolmM said:

I feel this setup is so beautiful it could be displayed in an art gallery

Malcolm

This is a beautiful looking setup! the tripod, mount, and that runway model of a scope are just a match for each other. Though the small counterweight catches my attention, is it enough? my eyes are telling me it is small.

It’s no wonder I didn’t know about Procyon being a double, for some reason SkySafari doesn’t highlight it as such.  Even though I have it set to highlight doubles, it highlights doubles all around the vicinity except Procyon. Also, I made an error in my post, the second double I mentioned with the gold bronze color was Algieba, not Regulus.

Welcome to SGL!

59 minutes ago, Nik271 said:

Such nights are truly special. There was a similar evening here last month in Oxford, we had a high pressure system over UK and no jet wind. I managed x400 with a Skymax 127 and still the stars were perfect. Felt I could go on increasing the mag forever. I could spot elongation in Dubhe.

@Sunshine, did you look for the companion of Procyon? Looks like it was the perfect night for it, the separation is just under 5'' but the difference in magnitudes is 10, even worse than Sirius. I guess at x500 there could be some hope to see the dim secondary away from the glare of the primary.  

 

Did not even think of it as I had no clue there was one! 🤣 spent very little time on it as I was itching to see Castor and Regulus.

Just WOW!! I have had a "few" nights in the past few years where I thought I had seen the pinnacle of good seeing conditions but on this night I was dumbstruck!. At first I was hesitant to take my scope out even though the sky seemed clear, it is a work night and my time was so limited, maybe an hour but something nagged at me and I set it out to cool. Loving doubles as much as I do I first set a low power gaze upon Procyon A, could this really be? I noticed ABSOLUTELY no disturbance, none! absolutely no perceivable shimmering, fuzzing, dancing, vibrating, nothing!. Against the inky black was a gleaming bright perfect diamond looking cool point of light, I had to do a double take but as I put in my 9mm upping the power a bit I could confirm that tonight was special. Close by was Castor, a glimpse of these two was beautiful! same cool white and very similar in size, just perfect dots, in went the 5mm for 163x and this is where my fun began. Noticing how wonderful and absolutely rock solid these two looked, as though I was looking at them outside our atmosphere I opened the floodgates on magnification. It seemed I would quickly run out of power on these two doubles and sure enough I did, in went the 3.5mm for 233X and Castor presented two laser cut dots with airy disc which seemed drawn with a fine pencil tip.

Looking at these two was wonderful, I cant recall ever seeing stars so undisturbed (I thought I had before) but tonight was exceptional. My 3.5mm is my shortest FL eyepiece so from there my only choiceis inserting my 2.5X powermate. Starting off with the 5mm and the powermate for 408x I honestly thought I would be disappointed when I brought my eye to the glass, NO!! I could not believe the scope held up! I was still enjoying this double as sharp as they were before!. By this time I sort of sat back a bit and pondered about whether or not this would happen again, seeing stars without a smidgeon of disturbance of any perceivable kind just doesn't happen often. Just imagine my excitement as I picked up the 3.5mm to pair with the 2.5x powermate 🤣 I imagined a magnification being a googolplex but confirmed with my calculator it was 582x. This was amazing, the image held up nicely and Castor was still a set of beautiful discs with fine edges. No fuzziness around edges and two wonderful discs around each one, the stars raced through my FOV so fast it was hard to keep up with slow motion controls. Everything I experienced with Castor I repeated with Algieba except even more amazing considering their stunning bronze/gold colour, what a superb night, seeing was memorable tonight, even though my session was short, I would not trade it for some other hours long sessions in mediocre seeing.

if you could borrow JWST for a day and study/image one object, what would you choose and why? I would point it in all directions randomly as I do my telescope and within minutes the clouds would surely roll in, somehow.

32 minutes ago, pipnina said:

I wonder what instrument commissioning entails : o
This telescope literally made science with its first published image (of space), before the alignments were even remotely complete. Who knows what it's going to tell us in these next few weeks!

I'm guessing there's no fanfare about it, more like nasa saying "ok you science folks can borrow it now" lol

It seems everything is aligned and ready for commissioning!

observatory/sauna 

Good topic, I don’t have a pair but often thought of contact lenses that can correct for astigmatism, this would be great as you wouldn’t have to specifically look for eyepieces with long eye relief. That is of such a thing is possible.