Waddensky

What did you expect to see? Did you try to take a look at Jupiter and Saturn too? How did they look? As @kerrylewis says, Mars will be much better this autumn, although with a diameter of just below 23 arcseconds it will remain quite small at useful magnifications.

The Baader has excellent value for the price, perhaps a little narrow on the 24 mm setting but that's a common point of attention for zooms in this range.

A decent zoom eyepiece like the Hyperion from Baader gives you a lot of eyepieces in one eyepiece. I'm pretty sure they can be found second-hand for £ 150 or less.

Keep in mind that the data from this map is already 5 years old and that the ATLAS layer is the only layer that shows the actual effect of light pollution on the sky brightness. The VIIRS layers are more recent, but they only show the light emitted from light sources as seen from space, not the sky brightness. You can get reasonably good results estimating your light pollution levels by finding out the dimmest stars you can see from your location (NELM). This of course very dependent on the observer, visual aquity, dark adaptation, etc, so it's kind of a 'personal' bortle classification.

Excellent choice, I have the 10x50 of the same family and it's a really good pair of bino's. Have fun!

Most likely the bad data predicted the cometary fragments to be much brighter than reality.

24 degrees altitude at 20.54 UTC from northern NL, about 2 minutes before it enters the Earth's shadow. Should be dark enough by then.

Wow really? That was a lucky guess! Great to see the differences the different filters produce with this planetary.

Wow!! Wonderful! You don't see that many images from M24, I love the Barnards appearing like holes in the star clouds.

Most deep-sky objects require less magnification than planets, so with a 2x barlow in your stable you have 30x, 60x, 83x and 167x magnifications available. That's a nice range to choose from. A 2.5x barlow will give you a higher magnification on your 9 mm eyepiece (208x), but with the 25 mm essentially gives you the same magnification as your 9 mm alone - so no nice 'in between' magnification.

I'm glad that you posted this, it's an experience all beginners have to deal with and they might get discouraged reading all the 'hopped to this, hopped to that' reports on the forums. Star hopping, getting the right expectations based on magnitude (and magnitude differences) and navigating around the sky are all crafts that need to be mastered! A great report. I second @Whistlin Bob's advice to get an app to help you locate objects. If you set the correct date/time and location, these apps will show you the correct altitude above the horizon and current direction, so you don't have to 'convert' the (equatorial) charts to the sky as it is at that moment - making the hop a lot easier and more intuitive (at least for alt/azi mounts like dobsons).

That sounds like a wonderful night, a very enjoyable en recognisable (the blackbirds!) report! Thanks for sharing.

In theory, yes. But it also depends on the atmospheric conditions. Here in NL, seeing rarely allows me to go much over 200x. What kind of objects would you like to observe with the barlow? For planets, 150-200x is often sufficient in my experience. Very close double stars may require more magnification, maybe some planetary nebulae too, but I can't think of any other objects that benefit from magnfications up to 300x (but maybe others have other experiences!)

High clouds are mostly cirrus, if the layer isn't too thick it's possible to look through them to observe brighter objects, like planets and open clusters (and they cause wonderful halos around the Moon). Low clouds, like stratus, most likely hinders observing more. Cumulus interference depends on the amount of cloud cover, the sky between the individual cumulus clouds is often remarkably clear so I'm not bothered most of the time when there are a few clouds drifting by while observing.

😂 Doesn't sound too bad to become his personal Doug. I'm in (although I'm way too Dutch to be called Doug). Must be quite a scope he's got in the shed if a regular Doug isn't able to operate it 🤔.

Welcome to the world of Newtonians 😉. It's even worse with dobsons. If you have a suitable finder bracket, maybe you can buy a RACI finder. Much easier on the ergonomic side and corrects the view too.

Tonight, the (very) thin crescent of the Moon is a few degrees east of the pair Venus-Mercury. A beautiful sight! Edit: oh, and C/2020 F8 (SWAN) is in the neighbourhood too. But that's a tough one probably.

What a wonderful, beautiful, colourful and detailed image! Thanks for sharing!

Where? On that website? That's right, it's just ratings and descriptions but very informative.

Take a look at this interesting website comparing the effect of different kind of deep-sky filters on a number of well-known objects. As it turns out, a UHC type filter performs really well on both the Veil and the Ring. This matches my experience with the DGM NPB. The UHC is more of an "all-rounder", the OIII only excels on certain kind of nebulae (mainly planetary). H-Beta is another specialised filter, performing really well on an even smaller number of objects (De Mairan, California and Flaming Star for example).

Another amazing fact is that this 6-star system is actually part of the Ursa Major Moving group or Collinder 285, a stellar association thought to have a common origin and similar age. Most other stars of the Big Dipper are also part of this group, as well als 'stream stars' like Alphecca (CrB) and Menkalinan (Aur). They are not gravitationally bound anymore, but share their motion in space and chemical composition.

There are many apps around that forecast cloud cover, but they are all based on just a few weather models so many apps will basically show the same data in different ways. Most use the global GFS weather forecast, because it is easily available and free to use. It's not that bad when it comes to predicting clouds (source), but its grid size is quite large. It's best to combine the forecast with actual cloud cover satellite images to get the best idea of the conditions for a given night.

Hi and welcome, congratulations on your first telescope! I'm pretty sure you'll have lots of fun with it. It would be helpful if you posted a link to the telescope you've got, so we can see the specs and give you more in-depth advice. For now: the 10 mm magnifies more than the 20 mm (twice as much). A higher magnification is mostly useful for observing planets, details on the Moon, double stars or small deep-sky objects like planetary nebulae. Lower magnification gives a wider field of view, so this is usually better for larger objects like other nebulae, open clusters or some galaxies. But it's best just to try them both out and find out what works best for you. The finder scope gives you even less magnification, so you can use it to point your scope. Usually you aim a manual scope by matching the view through the finder with a star chart or app. Then, once you've found the correct location, you look through the eyepiece so you can observe the object you're interested in. Yes, the barlow magnifies the view even more, in this case 3x. You insert the barlow in the eyepiece holder, and the eyepiece in the barlow. Your 10 mm eyepiece then effectively becomes a 3.3 mm eyepiece. The actual magnification you get depends on the focal length of the scope (we can find out if you provide a link 😉). If it's 600 mm for example, a 10 mm eyepiece magnifies 600 / 10 = 60x, with the barlow 600 / 3.3 = 180x.

The summer Milky Way has a lot of treasures worth observing during the nautical darkness. And don't forget about noctilucent clouds. Not really astronomy, but very beautiful!

I think your post would be a bit easier to read for a non-native speaker like me if you inserted a line break or punctuation here and there. I'm really interested to understand the point you're trying to make.