michael.h.f.wilkinson

Just got the Coronado SolarMax-II 60 mm out for a quick solar tea break, and lo and behold, an AR is showing around the four o'clock position. Off band, a few sunspots showed, and on-band several swirls of dark filaments and bright plage showed around them. A small prom was visible at the 8 o'clock position. Great to see some stuff on the surface FINALLY.

I have found I could always pick out the granular, filamentary texture of the chromosphere once the scope is well tuned, even when it is as quiet as it is now. The rusted ITF will affect this. The discussion here just made me check my Coronado BF15, but that seems to be fine.

I use mine on a home-made P-mount that works a treat. Didn't cost me anything near as much as the Paragon Plus. Some pics can be found here:

I use the very compact and pretty light APM 80mm F/6 triplet for travel. Regarding aperture fever, I am sorely tempted by the very compact, and very light (2.1 kg) and 110mm aperture. Its limited FOV compared to the 80mm APM is the only real drawback.

Weird indeed. No surprise it is popular, it is an excellent EP for a very modest price. Robtics still lists it: https://www.robtics.nl/product_info.php?cPath=28_44_854&products_id=5649&pID=5649&language=en&osCsid=fqkvs84mcpulqj18bq3ji14nv1 But they are not always accurate when it comes to listing the supplies they have (they still list the XW 40mm). TS also don't list their Paragon 40mm any more. Looks like that line is coming to an end. I would not be surprised if the rather poorer performance of the 35 and 30mm versions has impacted sales of the series in general.

Apparently, the 40mm Paragon/Aero is a great deal better than the 35 and 30mm versions. My TMB Paragon was really excellent, and worked well in an F/6 scope

I used to have a TMB Paragon 40mm, and foolishly sold it. Clones are now sold as TS Paragon or SkyWatcher Aero 40mm. Really excellent performance, and very comfortable. Quite light too. The LVW 42mm I have now is also good, but is a bit less comfortable and a bit more prone to kidney-beaning.

Nice report. We don't often get reports from users of 25x70s, as most people go for 15x70 or 16x70 bins. I can imagine that the smaller exit pupil of the 25x70 would give more pleasant dark sky backgrounds than the 15x70s in your more light polluted area. The mount is of course essential. I can hand hold my 16x80s quite well, but 25x70 would be beyond me, I am sure.

I have looked through the smaller, slower 100mm F/10 achro, and that had pretty good contrast on Jupiter. CA was there, but quite well controlled. Stopping down a 120mm F/8.33 to 100mm would give you the same image quality, but stopping down further might well reduce resolution to such a degree that any boost in contrast is negated.

Interesting stuff. My only obstacle before trying it at the moment is the weather

I have seen hints of green and purple in M42 and M57, and the Blue Snowball is indeed a bit blue, but the clearest colour I have seen is with Olly Penrice's 20" Dob under brilliantly clears skies was in the Saturn Nebula: It was a really vivid blue-green. No O-III filter needed. I saw the Ring nebula on the same night with the same scope, and it too showed colour, but nothing like the Saturn Nebula

But posing with e.g. a nice bouillabaisse wouldn't smell too fishy

Feel free to differ in opinion, but please keep the tone friendly. I tend to agree with some of the early posts in this thread that all is fine as long as you are honest about the sources of the data. Astronomy is a science, so you can use other peoples' work provided you give credit where credit is due. If getting data from a rented remote telescope is "cheating", does this mean we can take credit for the kit we have, having just bought it off the shelf? Should we all build our own scopes, mounts, and cameras? So provided you mention the source of the data, and only take credit for the processing, all is well in my book. Moreover, if I plan the imaging (targets, instrumentation used, exposure times), I can take credit for that part as well. I recently got into a discussion with an astronomer from the Instituto Astrofisica de Canarias, and we got into a discussion on the potential of lucky imaging on really big scopes. He actually suggested donating 5 minutes of time on a seriously fast camera on a seriously large telescope. Unfortunately, powers higher up didn't want to "waste" even such a short time on the instrument for an experiment they thought would fail, but had I got the data and turned it into a neat image, would that be cheating? In the analogy of fishing posted earlier: I personally don't have the patience to go fishing, but I can cook some seriously good fish and seafood dishes. I can take full credit for the cookery, not the capture or culture of the fish, scallops, clams, etc involved. I would never pose with the fish, but I would happily pose with the resulting dish!

I always use the Baader Solar Continuum filter. The added contrast is worth the green colour. When imaging, you do need to add an IR-blocking filter of some kind, as the continuum filter had quite an IR leak. No problem for visual, but an issue when using a camera.

I got mine from dls-store.com Cheers, Michael

This time with copies of the signatures of Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins on it, and one of the heart of darkness Will have a listen to the Sound of Silence, in the version by Disturbed (check it out, if you don't know it). Will wear one of these at an outreach event tomorrow.

I keep using GIMP, especially now it supports 16bits per pixel properly. The kit is expensive enough, so free software is most welcome

Interesting

The APM 80mm F/6 was sold under quite a few names when I bought it, including TS. I chose the APM one simply because of their reputation for good optical standards. Haven't regretted it at all

I still haven't spent a huge load on deep sky imaging, and still enjoy visual stuff a lot. Ideally, I have my EQ3-2 with APM 80mm F/6 triplet (often with 0.8x reducer) with modded EOS550D (just 175 euro) ticking away whilst the C8 sits on the Great Polaris mount for visual work. My DSO imaging set-up is (still) cheaper than my visual kit. Flats are essential, I find. I also find I leapt ahead once I started using AstroPixelProcessor rather than Deep Sky Stacker. I still have the latter, but the former gets me much better results without too much tweaking. My favourite results so far are M42, the Flame and Horse-Head, and the Pleiades. I have also experimented with the planetary cameras, and got some decent results with the ASI178MM

Apparently there are still MaxVision 40 mm 68 deg EPs around. I would be tempted by those if I hadn't already got the LVW 42. Link here: https://www.bresser.de/en/Sale/Display-Items/0215240-1.html I gather these have the same optics and mechanical construction as the Meade SWA 40mm

I had the Paragon, and sold it, regretted that, and got the LVW 42mm instead. The latter shows a bit more sky, as is perhaps a shade sharper at the edge, but the Paragon (or Aero) wins in terms of lack of pincushion distortion, and is very, very comfortable, showing little or no kidney beaning. The Vixen LVW 42 isn't particularly bad in that respect, but it is not as comfy as the Paragon

Very nice indeed, especially for a first narrowband

I have the Nagler 31 T5, and if I need a bit more FOV, I switch to the Vixen LVW 42mm. A lot less hefty than the Panoptic 41, by all accounts (I never looked through the latter), but very sharp indeed in both my F/10 SCT and my F/6 frac.

Indeed. Got me the gold medal in the SGL Eclipse challenge in 2017