About 10 minutes to SQM 21.5 - 21.6. My garden hits 21.3 on a good night but doesn't have much open sky. The frequency really depends on the weather and my daytime commitments - I'd say once every month. Kit: my dob, most of the times, but a clear, dark night with my 10x50 is just as delightful.

The Bortle scale is a measure of sky brightness. It has nothing to do with the weather forecast or the amount of cloud cover.

Your location has two decimal places, that's about a kilometer accuracy. Maybe there's a dark location near the town that you live in? Not really sure what the source of the sky brightness is on Clear Outside, most likely a calculated value based on nearby light sources measured by satellites.

Lovely report, thanks! The Virgo cluster is mesmerising, all those distant smudges, each hosting billions of stars... Beautiful.

Reminds me of an AT from Peter Dunsby a few years ago: http://www.astronomerstelegram.org/?read=11448. And the follow-up: http://www.astronomerstelegram.org/?read=11449

Mars

One important thing to learn when you're using a telescope is the surface brightness of deep-sky objects. This is a number that represents how bright that object is. Counter-intuitive, a larger number means a fainter object. The Orion Nebula has a low surface brightness 'number' and is therefore very bright. I assume you mean IC 443 with The Jellyfish Nebula, if so, this is a very faint nebula from the IC catalogue. It may be visible with your scope, but don't expect anything bright and eye-catching like the Orion Nebula.

Best is to start with objects from the Messier catalogue (starting with an M, like the ones @domstar suggests). These are usually the brightest and are mostly easy to find. The light pollution filter is not very helpful (or useless, depending on who you ask). Here is a useful chart that orders the Messier objects by difficulty: begin with the green ones and work your way down to see how many you can find. Good luck!

I like it! Not the sats, the timelapse. The trees give a great idea of size and perspective, well done.

Great report and some wonderful targets, congratulations! If you think of M13 as "amazing" and M3 as "still good", I'm very curious what your opinion would be of M92 🙂.

Not really. The light pollution filters available are not very effective against modern LED lighting, and they are not magically turning your skies to Bortle 1 anyway. It's sad, but to avoid light pollution you need to travel.

Another approach is to change your targets. Planets, the Moon, double stars, carbon stars and some open clusters for example withstand light pollution very well and they are lovely in their own right.

*double post*

1 hour ago, Soligor Rob said:

I can't help myself going to have to ask the question, what is the difference between the  Cambridge Double star atlas and the Cambridge Star atlas apart from the price that is.

This will be my first book on the subject.

Thanks.

It's more or less in the name: The Double Star Atlas is primarily focused on double stars, it shows designations of binaries on the map for example. The Star Atlas is more of a general star atlas, with different colours for different deep-sky objects. It has symbols for double stars, if I recall correctly, but no designations.

10 minutes ago, Spile said:

I would definitely recommend the finder safety harness

This. I always wondered why it was designed this way.

For deep-sky observation, the bigger the aperture, the better. It will give you the ability to use more magnification so you can enlarge faint objects to the threshold of detection. Additionally, it will give you a higher resolution so it will be great for planetary and lunar observing too. The simplest/cheapest way to get a large aperture, is to buy a dobson. GOTO is a matter of taste/convenience but not really necessary in my opinion and adds more compexity.

Astrophotography is another branch of the hobby, and usually requires other equipment, and a whole other budget.

There's no issue! You have a great scope and you've found Mars and the Orion Nebula: congratulations! The links in this thread are great to get an idea of what to expect, and as said, don't let the pictures you find online fool you, things are different when looking through the eyepiece - but you'll appreciate these views soon enough. Just keep on practicing, you will see more detail and fainter things as you build up experience. Enjoy and don't hesitate to ask questions here if they pop up.

The Interstellarum DSA is great. Large pages and easy to read under low (red) light conditions. I have the Field edition, it's very expensive but well worth the investment in my opinion. The pages are firm and waterproof, and the atlas 'stays open' on the correct page (if you understand what I mean, the English term doesn't come to mind 😬).

I have the Uranometria 2000.0 too, but I never take it outside. It's a work of art.

15 minutes ago, moonsat said:

Skywatcher Skyliner 200P Dobsonian Telescope - Mint

Is this a decent one to buy it comes with a Super 10 and 25 eyepieces 25 says wide angle eye relief and it is under 300 £ hardly used

Yes, excellent telescope. Those eyepieces are the plössls I mentioned. Not high-end of course but good enough to get started. Not familiar with the British prices on the used market but I'm sure others will chime in.

On 02/03/2021 at 12:38, moonsat said:

Just joined the group i have been playing at this for a while now and just have a cheap supermarket Dobson 76/350 with a H20 mm and sr 4mm (What does the H and R mean ) i want to progress now to a better scope any advice ?

Hi, and welcome! Excellent explanations in this thread when it comes to the eyepieces. Both the Huygens and the Ramsden are fairly basic designs, and the 4 mm SR is next to useless (although my first wonderful telecope experiences were with one of these years ago!). If you'd like to progress to a better scope, you might consider a larger dobsonian, a 6" or 8". They usually come with plössl eyepieces, they are basic too but a lot better than the ones you have now.

Still, your next telescope also depends on your budget, primary observing targets and some other considerations as ability to lift weight and where you'd like to observe (back garden or required to travel). So, enlighten us, so we can help you - but above all - enjoy your stay! 🙂

Yes, that sounds conspicuously like a satellite. Perhaps not the ISS, but there are a lot of other satellites out there.

Lovely, nothing like spending a still night Struve hunting. These are some challenging doubles, great results!

Double cluster! But there's so much within reach of a good pair of binoculars that it's hard to choose. I always like to find out how much Messiers I can catch with my 10x50 on a nice, dark night.

There are strange characters in your alt/azi position too. Looks like an encoding or language issue to me. Perhaps a partly translated foreign language selected in CdC (Setup > General > Language)?

Roughly once every two years, but the distance between Mars and the Pleiades varies. Wonderful picture, the colours are great. Thanks for sharing!

These sketches of field stars in the field of view are actually quite useful to get an idea of where to look for the pup. I noticed during my last attempts that I wasn't really sure where to look relative to the drifting Sirius A in the field. I guess that knowing exactly where to look greatly improves the chances of detecting B. So: thanks all!

Yes, that would be a very interesting eyepiece. I'm looking forward to read about the optical performance. 75 deg over the whole range is great. Pricepoint expected to be around the € 300 mark. 

15.4 mm is not really low power but I don't think many people use the Baader in in 18-24 range anyway because of the small FoV. Would complement nicely with one or two low-power, widefield eyepieces. 

Congratulations, the 37 is a lovely cluster and very aptly named indeed.