michael.h.f.wilkinson

I moved from a 6" Newtonian to an 8" Schmidt-Cassegrain, and really noticed the difference. When I had the 6", I frequently looked through my friend's 4.5" Newtonian and the different performance was also evident, especially on Jupiter and other planets

Very nice result. Great detail, and good balance of sharpening vs not enhancing the noise. Subtle colour differences on the lunar surface also show very nicely

My planetary and lunar line-up with my Celestron C8 consists of Pentax XW 5, 7, and 10 mm, with Tele-Vue Delos 6 and 8 mm to fill the gaps. The 10, 8, and 7 mm get used most. I also have a lightweight line-up for travel, consisting of Vixen SLV 5, 9, and 15mm, and these are superb, only compromising on field of view, not image quality. They are clearly a step above the TS Planetary EP I have used for outreach.

Very nice indeed

Great result. I do feel the sharpening is a bit too much to my personal taste, but only when I go pixel-peeping at full resolution. I prefer to use deconvolution and unsharp masking with ImPPG (automatically running on all panes).

Nice shot, and very sharp indeed. I do notice a few stitching errors. You could try Microsoft Image Compositing Editor (MS-ICE, which is free), which does a great job of automatically stitching images.

Globs work well, they have good surface brightness

I know, I just wanted to illustrate how a planetary camera can do DSO work

I have used the ASI178MM for DSO imaging with decent results, using my APM 80mm F/6 on an EQ3-2 mount, and likewise with the bigger ASI183MC. Using even a chea EQ mount you do not have to limit yourself to sub second exposure times, and that makes life a lot easier ASI178MM result (3890s total integration, only L band, 60s subs, as I recall) ASI178MM result, very short integration, LHOO filter combination (a bit weird, but nice to catch in less than an hour) ASI183MC result, 162 60s subs

I generally use Astro Pixel Processor, and final tweaks in GIMP. I don't like rental software either

I use an ASUS 14" Zenbook with an i7 and 16GB of RAM, plus a 1000 GB SSD. That works a treat on lunar imaging with the ASI183MC (19.6 FPS sustained capture). For DSO capture, with much slower data rates, my old i3-based laptop with a Samsung T5 external SSD worked fine

I watched the video of the tragic, but very much self-inflicted accident. You could clearly see a parachute being blown away during launch, and without any back-up system, he was doomed from that moment onwards. I have indeed heard that he started supporting the flat-earth idea as a means to attract funding and attention, rather than being a believer. Not sure if this is true, but it doesn't seem unlikely. I think he just wanted to push his own steam-powered rocket idea to the limit, and unfortunately, this lead to his death. There are many out there who assert boldly that the only way to tell the earth's shape is to go into space and observe it from there, but they clearly forget about the concept of "logical inference". The ancient Greeks already accepted that lunar eclipses were caused by the earth's shadow falling on the moon. Simply observing the shape of that shadow, with the moon in different parts of the sky shows without a doubt that the earth must be (nearly) spherical (as long as you accept some basic geometry). In a discussion about this topic elsewhere, someone tried to insinuate that scientists shouldn't discount the flat earth theory off-hand, and they shouldn't treat its adherents as weird conspiracy theorists. This got me thinking about the difference between conspiracy theorists and scientists. I think the key difference is that conspiracy theorists only ever search for evidence supporting their theories, whereas (good) scientists make observations or try to design experiments that disprove their own theories as well. A former colleague of mine had a favourite motto: "Kill your darlings!", by which he meant that you should try to destruction test your ideas, and if they survived anything you could throw at them, they might be good ideas. Richard Feynman expounded similar ideas in his essay "Cargo-cult Science". Sadly, we have learnt that the idea of manning a home-made steam-powered rockets can be deadly.

I fear I will miss this one too. Atrocious weather forecast for the entire week.

Tried it with a more modest scope (80 mm) before I read the above posts, so no surprise I failed 😁

I love my astro-modded Canon 550D. It is a great little camera, and for that money you cannot really go wrong. Some results:

I use an 80mm F/6 for solar (Ca-K, H-alpha and WL), and it can also be used at night very easily. It is superb for wide-field and travels well. You can get great solar imaging results even with the fly-weight EQ3-2 I have (got me some prizes as well, as can be seen in my sig), and performs well on deep sky imaging. A rig like that would let you do all sorts of solar work, and yet allow you to have a go at night, should you feel like it. Some DSO results below

Same here

I use a WO Zoom II 7.5-22.5 mm, which has more comfortable eye relief than the Lunt 7.2-21.5 mm I had before (which otherwise had fine performance). The Lunt's eye relief is fine for most, but if your wear glasses the 18.5mm eye relief of the WO is better. The WO is no longer made, it seems, but I think this Omegon might well be a clone: https://www.astroshop.eu/eyepieces/omegon-premium-7-5mm-22-5mm-zoom-eyepiece/p,33244#tab_bar_1_select There seem to be a number of other clones around.

This isn't CN, much as part of this thread might have seemed to be. Giving reasonable suggestions is not a banning offence

I watched a tiny bit of it on Youtube, but then decided life is too short to waste on this drivel. The man might have an open mind, but clearly his brain has fallen out. Before I waste any more time pointing out they are wrong, I challenge them to come up with a sane, flat-earth explanation of this video:

The main issue is to tune the etalon and get focus just right for optimal contrast. Once you have got that right, grab 1000 frames at such an exposure time that you fill the histogram well, without saturation. Using a white plastic bag or a few layers of cling film over the scope allows you to take flats, to correct for uneven illumination and dust bunnies. Did you have a look at the tutorials yet? These should provide a good starting point.

This one contains a track (Vaticano), captured on December 30, 2019, between 18:32 and 21:37 CET I have a FITS file which is rather massive (257MB), so I am hesitant to add it

It looks a bit like coma to me (perhaps combined with field rotation). Did you collimate the scope beforehand? The comet-like stars seem to be radiating away from a point in the upper right-hand side of the image. That seems more like coma than field rotation. I assume this is a 4.5" F=500mm instrument, which is pretty fast for a Newtonian, and a coma corrector might be needed.

Very tempting stuff. The only thing stopping me is the fact that these will have to move to the back of the queue of planned items (like one of those 6" F/5.9 achros to convert into a dedicated solar rig for H-alpha, Ca-K, and Solar continuum, using the Beloptik Tri-band ERF halfway down the tube)

I used to have Helios Apollo 15x70 bins, as a replacement of cheaper Omegon 15x70s, and they were a clear step up. The only reason I no longer have them is that I went for a further upgrade to the Helios LightQuest 16x80 bins. I sold the Apollo 15x70s to the outreach coordinator of our astronomy department, and she is very happy with them indeed. I have no doubt you will love yours