Littleguy80

Last night I headed out to the coast to try catch a picture of Neo over the North Sea. My 13 year old daughter and 11 year old son asked to accompany me. The clouds weren't kind to us as bank of cloud covered the area around Neo nearly the entire time we were there. The Milky Way overhead was very impressive. My daughter in particular was taken with this. Around 12:45am we decided to head back as the kids were feeling the cold. As I was packing up I noticed Neo just starting to poke through the clouds. I grabbed the camera and took a few quick photos from the top of the cliffs, the best of which is below. When we got home around 1:30am, the sky was beautifully clear with Neo bright and obvious naked eye. The second picture is taken from my back garden. Another lovely night and all the nicer for sharing it with two of my kids.

I’ve been using Siril for stacking on my Mac. It’s taken a bit of playing around to get the best out of it but has worked well for me.

I've processed a few images from last night. One with my zoom lens, one through my 80mm frac and one through my 10" dob. I was also treated to some NLC clouds at the end of the night but Neo was lost to cloud for me at this point. The picture of the NLC's is a quick iPhone snap. Thoroughly enjoying seeing everyone else's images and Mike's sketch.

Finally calling it a night. Didn’t matter whether I used bins, 80mm frac, 10” dob or just plain old naked eye, this comet is superb! It will live long in the memory. Enjoyed lots of other great targets too. Veil, NAN and Crescent for my nebula fix. Nice detail on Saturn with some banding and a sharp Cassini division. A distinctly orange GRS on Jupiter. By far my clearest view of the polar ice cap on Mars. This is astronomy at it’s very best! Great night.

Clearly naked eye this evening. I dragged my two older kids (13 and 11) out of bed to see it. Really stunning. I have a love of comets but have never seen a proper one until now. Kids enjoyed it. We had a look at Jupiter and Saturn too. They’ve been sent back to bed so Dad can play some more!

It’s already visible in binoculars here! Time to hit the coffee

Hi Don, I've often wondered about the APM vs the Docter. Have you done an on axis comparison between the TV plossl, Delos and the APM? Would be interested to hear how the APM stacks up against these.

Your secret is safe with me, John The processing is really tricky. The best advice I can give is to follow some online guides to get an idea of which tools to use. After that just experiment a bit. I posted a Milky Way photo recently which I spent hours working on following various online guides. I must have take it back to the beginning and started again at least 20 times. Eventually I got to a result I was satisfied with. It took a day or two for me to go back and feel pleased with the result. You start to over analyse it after so much time working on an image. I don’t know how the serious images keep their sanity 😛

Thanks John. I'm new to imaging too. I'll try to give you all the little tips I've picked up so far. Connected the camera to my dob via a T-Ring. I focus using live view on the camera lcd and setting the zoom on the lcd to 10x. I was using Capella to get the focus sharp. I set my camera to stack 10 consecutive images. For processing, I use a Mac so I used software called Siril to stack the images. I think on Windows, Deep Sky Stacker is the recommended best free option. I then used Affinity Photo to crop, adjust contrast, highlights/shadows and curves to bring out the comet as much as possible. I've been using Affinity Photo since Dave Eagle's talk on here. I bought the guide he produced for using Affinity Photo to process astro images. I'm not very scientific with it at this stage. Just fiddle around with it until I getting looking about right. Hope that's of some use!

Well Dave, this is the best I could manage. Used my Samyang 14mm Lens. I’ve got the ISS, Venus and with a lot of zooming I could just see Neowise through the clouds. If nothing else it’ll serve as a nice reminder of my observing location.

Had a go at stacking some images taken through my 10" dob this morning. There was a bit low light cloud around at the time. I think it came out alright though.

Up at 2:45am. The Moon, Jupiter and Saturn made a impressive trio together at this time. A bit of cloud around in the wrong place but it cleared enough by 3:20am to see Neowise. Used the 10” dob rather than the frac this time. Looked stunning. Took loads of pics. Even had a go at Dave’s Neowise, Venus and ISS shot though I think cloud might have spoiled that one. Mars gave some great views as the sky brightened. Had a really nice time observing with Hedgehogs running by me on the green.

Don’t let it put you off. I nearly talked myself out of getting up last night as the forecast worsened. I decided to gamble and got great views of the comet. (Disclaimer: Clear skies are not guaranteed 😛)

Got up at 3:10am and went out with the 10x50 bins. Found Comet Neowise almost straight away so rushed back inside to get the refractor and camera. I've never seen a comet like this before with such a pronounced tail. It was like a fan almost like to two tails coming out either side. Quick edit on an image below taken through my 80mm refractor.

Thanks Paul. I've only ever seen it in my 10" Dob. I'm not sure on your 5". I'm only using 133x mag to see it. How well does your 5" resolve the stars in M13?

Do most people go down the virtualised route rather than using native Mac apps? @happy-kat’s suggestion of Startools looks like a good option at a very reasonable price.

Does it work work with most recent version of MacOS? I thought I read it stopped working since Apple dropped support for 32 bit apps

I’ve only got the trail and haven’t found a fix for the constant license prompt bug unfortunately

The price does stack up quickly unfortunately. Do you definitely need the help extra 20mm?

I use this one with my dob. Works for all my eyepieces and I have a good range https://www.firstlightoptics.com/adapters/baader-2-inch-click-lock-cl-extension-47mm.html

Unfortunately not but I've never really found this to be an issue personally. It's only when you get to high powers on a manual scope that having parfocal eyepieces is really useful. At lower powers it's not a big deal to refocus IMHO.

I've experienced the same thing with my 9mm Lunt XWA. I generally just use orthos for planetary but have just bought a 10mm Delos which doesn't have this issue.

I picked up second hand Baader Genuine Orthos. Very good and are normally only £50-£60 second hand. The 10mm Baader Classic Ortho has very good reputation and often comes up for £35-£40 second hand. The 13mm is good for larger targets like M33 or if I’m looking for something fainter that doesn’t show in the 9mm. Sometimes backing off magnification can allow it to be seen. Also useful if want to increase exit pupil when using filters.

Thank you! I have the APM 20mm and 13mm. The Lunt is essentially the 9mm APM, I just got it before it was rebranded. The 20mm and 9mm get used every session with the 10" dob. The 20mm is the always first eyepiece in the focuser for a DSO session. I find that I often skip the 13mm and go to the 9mm after that. The 9mm is an excellent eyepiece. If I'm looking for very faint objects then I find that a 9mm ortho will pull them out when the Lunt can't. If you're not interested in going for fainter targets then I don't think you'll be disappointed with the Lunt/APM 9mm, especially if you like the 13mm.

Thanks Steve. Glad you enjoyed it!