michael.h.f.wilkinson

Nice image despite conditions. What equipment did you use?

I would have a look at the beginners telescope section of FLO (see link in banner). There's a lot of good advice there. I would think the Sky-Watcher Heritage 100P ticks a lot of the boxes. I am not sure what you mean by ability to connect to a phone. If you mean you want to control the telescope through the phone, that is not possible with the cheaper systems, but there are phone adapters to attach the phone camera to the telescope.

Celestron C8. Twenty-seven years old, but still going strong.

Clear Outside and other services had been predicting a beautiful clear night for tonight for a while now, so I set up the scope outside early, for it to cool down properly. Around 20:00 I set about polar aligning the scope, and looking at Jupiter. I noticed the collimation was off. I got decent views in the Nagler 31T5, but the Pentax XW 10mm gave mushy views, not due to seeing (which seemed really good). I set about collimating the scope, which is always a bit fiddly, but after tweaking the secondary perhaps 5-10 minutes I found the view in the XW 10mm was now great, with the GRS nicely centred on the disk, and the thin ellipse of lighter hue surrounding it crisply outlined. I even went up to 254x with the Delos 8 mm, and still got nice stable views. All seemed set for a fruitful planetary imaging session, first Jupiter, which is not too low any more, and then later Mars, which rises really high. And then clouds intervened . I had noticed one or two wisps of cloud passing, but was still firmly convinced that these would pass. Now, however, a solid belt of cloud came out of the east. Checking Clear Outside to see if this was merely a thin belt, I was disappointed to see that the forecast had changed to clouds for the rest of the night. Nothing for it but to pack it all up and go inside. ☹️ Oh well, at least the scope is well collimated again, and probably will stay so for years, if the past is anything to go by.

Superb image!

I have worked my way through the Messier list, am still working on Caldwell, the Herschel 400 and 2500 lists, Brightest Planetary Nebulae, and the Revised Shapley Ames Catalogue of Bright Galaxies (which I found for a bargain in hard-cover online).

I have imaged with DSLRs, non-cooled (essentially planetary) CMOS cameras, and Peltier-cooled CMOS cameras. My first foray with a DSLR was with a modded EOS 450D, which worked, but the later 550D completely blew it out of the water I then started using my non-cooled ASI183MC with the Meade Schmidt-Newton, with quite pleasing results: Getting darks for every single temperature you are working on was a bit of a pain, however. I then migrated to Peltier-cooled cameras, which make life so much easier in grabbing a dark library once for you favoruite set-point cooling. Having said that, I still use the DSLR for wider-field imaging

Just one stack of 25% from 6780 frames worked out decently. I used my trusty Celestron C8, ZWO ADC, Siebert Optics 1.3x tele-centric and ASI183MC. Stacked in AS!3, postprocessing in Registax 6.0 and GIMP. The moon looks a bit odd, not sure if that is some internal reflection or a collimation issue.

Nice capture

Lovely image. I really like the natural look you achieved

Just got this second-hand guide camera and guide scope in. Should work nicely with my Meade SN6 6" F/5 Schmidt-Newton, without the added weight of the old ST80. Might use my ASI178MM or ASI174MM for a wider FOV, rather than the little chip of the ASI120MM

I mentioned the percentage of CO both for my planetary Newtonian (23%) and my SCT (34%) in the discussion so far. I have experience in military optics, but studied astronomy at the Kapteyn Astronomical Institute in Groningen, specialising in optical astronomy.

Newtonians typically have smaller CO than SCTs. I had a 6" F/8 "planet killer" Newtonian, with just 23% CO compared to about 34% for the C8. The C8 captures more detail, but the contrast is a bit lower. The point on internal temperature is very important. A Newtonian is an open design, which cools down to ambient temperatures much quicker than the closed-tube SCTs and Maks. Big refractors have similar problems. There is also this: very people have looked through a apochromatic refractor larger than about 6". The biggest I have looked through was Olly's TEC 140. Great scope which gave me horrible views of Jupiter. Nothing to do with the scope, everything to do with seeing (Jupiter was less than 10 degrees above a horizon filled with hills that had been baking in summer heat). Bigger scopes suffer far more from bad seeing than smaller ones, simply because the seeing disk is much bigger than the Airy disk of the optics.

They are very sensitive to collimation, but when properly collimated they can be very good indeed. They are fairly simple to collimate, and hold collimation very well indeed. Due to the relatively large secondary obstruction, contrast will be a bit softer, but resolution is good. Typically Edge-HD versions are better corrected (and not just at the edge). Having said that, I am still very happy with the views and images with my 1995 GP-C8, now almost 27 years old

Lovely image. Might have a bash at that with the 6" Schmidt-Newton and ASI183MC-Pro

Great set of images. Love the detail

All colours are made up by the brain. Colours you perceive are not even a really accurate mapping of spectral information into a tri-stimulus colour space, they vary depending on context, observer, etc. The colours in these images are just yet another mapping of spectral information to some tri-stimulus colour space

I have seen three naked-eye comets in my life: Hyakutake in 1995, Hale-Bopp in 1996, and NEOWISE in 2020. I don't think another naked-eye comet is way overdue. Anyway, magnitude 6 might not be naked-eye, given that it is integrated magnitude, not the brightness of the nucleus

I spotted it last night in Hercules with my C8 (with some difficulty). Will be looking forward to it brightening

It is a very hard one, but also surprisingly compact. It really looks a bit more like a little galaxy than most other comets I have seen, which tended to have a larger coma. I imported the orbital elements into Stellarium, and that allowed me to map out the views in both the finder scope and the various eyepieces I tried. Before going on a few visits to some old friends (M13, M92, M57, and M27) I checked the position of the comet, and I could again spot the little ball of fuzz in averted vision at the right position. Best of luck with your hunt.

Made my longest animation of Jupiter with my C8 between 0:02 and 2:02 AM last night. Seeing was very wobbly to begin with, but gradually became a bit better. The best image is shown below I cropped the video to show only the planet. Might try to make a larger one with the moon too. An uncompressed AVI is available below Jup_002808_lapl4_ap65_pipp_pipp.avi

I have just bagged the rather faint comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF) with my C8 and Nagler 22 mm EP. It shows up as a faint little blob (mag 12.8 or so) in Hercules. I tried a few days ago, but conditions weren't good enough. Tonight the sky was more transparent, although it still was a difficult catch from my back garden (Bortle 4-5). Still, comet number 34 bagged. Will now wait until Jupiter rises above the trees

I use porro prism binoculars for most astronomical viewing (Helios Apollo LightQuest 16x80s). I usually use them hand-held, and only rarely get out either a mono-pod or P-mount (the latter only really for outreach). Before that I used Helios Apollo 15x70s (superb pair), Omegon 15x70s (cheap and cheerful BA-1s), and Bresser 10x50 porros. Occasionally I get out my birding bins (Zeiss Victory 10x42 SF, seriously good roof-prism bins, but without the massive light grasp of the LightQuest). Typically, porro prisms are cheaper. For a while I also used Vixen 10x56 roof prism bins, but did not get on with the field curvature. Quite good for birding, but not so much for astronomy.

Had a go at Jupiter between clouds (and with choppy seeing). I used the old Celestorn C8, Vixen flip-mirror, ZWO ADC, Siebert Optics 1.3x tele-centric Barlow, and ASI183MC. A quick stack of 30% out of 90s worth of images (some 2000 out of 6000 frames) in AS!3 followed by sharpening in Registax yields this result: Not too bad given conditions, but the moon on the left looks like there is some internal reflection going on (maybe in the ADC?). The effect can be processed out by deconvolution, but it is a bit of a pain. Will process the rest of the data tomorrow, and maybe make a little animation

The sun is showing a huge prom in the southern hemisphere, so I snapped a 10,000 frame SER file in H-alpha with the usual APM 80mm F/6, Beloptik Tri-Band ERF, Baader TZ-4 4x Tele-Centric, Solar Spectrum 0.3 Å H-alpha filter and ASI174MM. I stacked no less than 50% of the data in AS!3 (seeing decent in the red). Sharpened in ImPPG, curves and final tweaks in GIMP. Part inverted: Part inverted + pseudo colour: Still working on the full disk and Wl and Ca-K