michael.h.f.wilkinson

Callig it a game changer is a bit much, I agree. At a similar focal length, and lighter weight, I will stick with my Meade SN6 6" F/5 Schmidt-Newton. It was also ridiculously cheap. Correction perhaps not quite as good as a top of the line apochromat, but at twice the light gathering capacity, and no diffraction spikes it makes me wonder why SN6 was discontinued. I am sometimes tempted by various Mak-Newts, as well

Welcome to the forum, Dylan!

I had a similar mount and telescope (4.5" f=500 Newtonian, now refurbished as mini-Dob). The mount isn't that stable, but after changing the aluminium legs with home-made hardwood legs, it was a lot better. More details here: I ultimately ditched the mount (which I didn't really need, as I had a perfectly serviceable Great Polaris mount), and put a mini-giro manual alt-az mount on it

In that case you'd better not practice the fleckerl in the Viennese waltz as I did yesterday

I just worked out that in the sixty years (and a bit) of my life so far, the earth has moved just over one third of a arc second in its orbit around the centre of the galaxy. Should I reach 85, that will go up to about half an arc second. Since Galileo's birth, the centre of our galaxy has moved just under 2.7 seconds of arc with respect to distant galaxies. A bit of a pale-blue-dot moment.

That is a lovely kind of set-up. I often use my APM 80mm triplet with a 2" Amici prism and the Nagler 31T5, yielding 5.3 deg FOV at 15.5x magnification. I did a comparison with the views in a pair of Helios Apollo 15x70 bins here: The bins have the definite edge in portability, but the 80 mm triplet beats them for visual impact

I can ask the people at the observatory

It actually is capable of fast imaging, and huge data throughput.

Had a bit of a struggle today, but at least got some result. Clear skies were replaced by clouds the moment the entire set-up was ready to go, but I persevered, and waited for the skies to clear. Indeed, 30 minutes or so later the sky was clear enough around Jupiter, so I decided to give it a go. Seeing was choppy, but I got a series of SER files before the next batch of clouds popped by. I waited some more, whilst doing a quick process of one or two files (with mixed results). Once the sky was clear again, I gave it another go, but the seeing was considerably worse, and with more clouds threatening, I gave up the idea of waiting for Mars to rise above the trees to my east. As it turned out, the first SER file I took was the best: Not brilliant, but better than nothing I suppose. Equipment: Celestron C8 on Vixen Great Polaris mount, with Siebert Optics 1.3x Tele-Centric, and ASI183MC camera

I don't think a regular Barlow would fit in HiPERCAM

An astronomer I know and I discussed the option of imaging Jupiter with the Gran Telescopio de Canarias (10.4 m, and he had observing time on it), with a very fast multi-band imaging device (HiPERCAM). He had observing time available, and all we asked for was 5 minutes, but the powers that be decided against it. The problem is that even with very short exposure times, freezing the seeing is not straightforward on such a big instrument, according to the technicians of the observatory, as you are requiring a much larger part of the sky to stay put. We were eager to try it in any case, but ultimately didn't get the green light.

Had a quick lunch break outside with the Coronado SolarMax II 60. Apart from quite a bit of activity on the disk, with some nice spots, plage areas, and filaments, a huge array of proms was visible on the right-hand (eastern) side of the disk. A smaller prom could be seen at the eight o'clock position. Several students joined me to have a look, so it was a nice little outreach event.

That is very nice. Very natural look with loads of detail

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.