Captain Scarlet

There is a piece of free software you can easily get for your PC which will tell you the “shutter count” of any camera connected to it. Your friend should certainly be able to tell you that anyway. I have a bunch of white lenses, but the ones I tend to use for night time wide angle are all Samyang (aka Rokinon), including the 24/1.4 and 85/1.4 . At 1.4 they esp the 24mm tend to be a bit flarey on very bright point sources but at f/2 they are superb. Manual focus so I’ve taped the infinity position. So yes I do have lenses suitable for the Aurora but sadly down in West Cork I don’t have Aurora suitable for the lenses!

I have a canon 6D. Superb camera, and full frame - if it’s in good condition I’d take your buddy’s one from him

Well I am part Finlander (half) and I must admit I’ve never seen the Aurora. Amazing. Magnus

I could but I'll have to wait nearly a year before I get the chance, I fear

The message I get from that thread about being able to resolve it is “highly unlikely”. Certainly not in my 140, and the combination of factors that need to come together to make it possible in my 12” are too much I think. I’ll try though given a chance.

Excellent information, thank you. I too only recently found out about Ceres at a talk I went to just over a week ago. By luck, a couple of days later was a clear night and I was able to observe it. It's more or less at opposition now, so a perfect time to see it. It's just off the tail of Leo, and will pass "through" the M100 galaxy around 28/29 March.

I think he’ll do whatever tube size you want. I initially ordered a tube to replace the one on my SW 300p, and he said don’t worry about specifying the size, I have just such a SW cell as a template. Unfortunately SW must have slightly changed their 300p cells at some stage, as the tube was 2-3 mm too big in diameter (I did ascertain with him that it was indeed two slightly different cells, not his craftsmanship). Luckily too big rather than too small! So I shimmed it. Eventually I replaced the SW cell entirely with an OO cell which I knew in advance I was going to have to use 9mm of spacing on each of the three corners. The 200mm tube I ordered to fit my VX8 cell, and that fit pretty well straight up. The only other suggestion I’d make is give it extra length, effectively dew-shield and long baffle in one! I did that for my 200mm you can probably see from one of the pics. M Edit: to answer the extra questions I’ve just noticed. Yes I did all my own holes after the original SW-cell ones. And I was actually able to re-use all the spiders too. I used some modified flat-plate door hinges to give me extra circumference for the 200mm tube, which as @ONIKKINEN says below has a larger external circumference because of the thickness of the tube.

Indeed yes I have two of his tubes. One for a 300mm mirror and the other for a 200mm mirror. They are extremely stiff, and I cannot fault them. I went for the carbon tube lined with 6-7mm of hardfoam, which in addition to helping the stiffness, provides better purchase for accessories bolted on to the tube such as focuser, finders, spider and main cell. The only stipulation I would recommend is to drill your own holes. You can do yours at leisure going up 0.5mm at a time, whereas he does them more quickly. Re the focuser hole, drill a pilot hole of course, but for the main event use a sharp hole-cutter _backwards_. BTW I didn’t regard them as that expensive for what they were. But it was 1.5-2 years ago. Cheers, Magnus PS @ONIKKINEN also has a CH tube I believe.

I can easily see Uranus as a disc, it's 3.5 arcsecs. I can just about detect that Neptune is a disc, at slightly over 2arcsecs, but that may be difficult because it's also so dim. But I reckon Ceres at <1" might be beyond my disc-detectability. I'll try with my 12inch at high mag the next time I try, and see what I see.

After weeks of drizzle and fog, not surprising at my heady altitude of 93 metres (air’s pretty thin too) Saturday night was suddenly forecast clear. The Moon well out of the way too, so ordinarily I would’ve set up my 12” newt to take maximum advantage of the dark. But I’ve been itching to get some more use from my latest toy, my SV 140 refractor. I went for maximum convenience, setting up on the patio right outside my door with a Northerly view but spanning 180 degrees left and right over the creeks and Islands. I also cobbled together a quick list. As mentioned, I had my new Stellarvue SVX140 on an AZ-EQ6/Planet. The night ended up measuring 21.7 on my SQM-L. Seeing seemed OK, transparency good to start, but deteriorated later on. I aligned using a DeLite 18.2 (52x) and settled for most of the session on my Delos 6 for 156x, occasionally rising to my DeLite 3 for 313x. Towards the end I used my gorgeous Nagler 31T6 for 30x. A week or so ago, I drove to Cork (90 minute drive) to listen to one of Cork Astro Club's members give a talk about Sundials, his speciality, and I hadn’t realized it also doubled up as the Cork Astro Club’s monthly meeting. So I also sat through another talk, given by their observer-in-chief, about what was going on in the night sky this season. I learned that 1 Ceres, the brightest (by far: Ceres is mag 6.9, the next is in the teens!) asteroid/dwarf planet in our Solar System, was near opposition and eminently observable. Thus my first objective was 1 Ceres, which I’d never heard of before let alone observed. I now know that 1 Ceres is an asteroid, but last night I knew it only as a dwarf planet, and none of the 60-odd catalogues available to me in the Nexus DSC seemed to fit the bill. It does have a couple of asteroid catalogues but like I said… . So I resorted to a fancy new modern technique that I’ve recently heard about called “star hopping”. Looking it up in SkySafari I found my way from Denebola to Messier 88, hopped up a couple of viewfinder-widths North and West a bit (IIRC) and matched the star-fields: Bingo! Mag 6.9 so it was the brightest thing in the immediate vicinity, but no disc discernable. I’ll have to do the calcs to see if a disc was too much to expect. Maybe someone can chime in to the flood of comments after this 😊. I wanted to see Herschel’s Garnet Star, aka Mu Cephei, and remind myself just how red it is. I found it easily enough, and yes I could see it was a bit orange-ish but that was it. Perhaps I should have treated it like a planet and looked at a bright white screen to activate my cones to get the colour better, I might try that next time. Next was another red star I rather like, the central star in M37. Again, underwhelming, the same could be said for the whole cluster, actually. It turned out there was a reason for both this and Mu Cephei being a bit dim. I could see Vega and Lyra were now possibly far enough up to be worthwhile, so I went for Eps Lyrae (The Double Double) at 156x, to be greeted by two pairs of tiny but perfectly separated dots, and no discernable diffraction rings. One of my favourite targets, I stayed for a while here. Whilst still in the region, I quickly and casually star-tested on Vega: perfection as far as I could tell. I had M35 on my list, not sure why, it was nice enough if I recall. At this point I changed to the Nagler 31 to give me my widest field of 2.7 degrees and 30x magnification. M35 suddenly looked much more compact! I love the wide fields a medium refractor gives you. At this point I decided to finish off with NGC 1502 and Kemble’s Cascade, to see if I could identify any star colours in Kemble’s Cascade – it’s supposed to be famous for those colours. NGC 1502 is a small OC at one end of the asterism, and it was dim and slightly underwhelming. I “got” the Cascade, but not impressive and certainly no colours. Hm. I looked up and suddenly the mystery was solved. I could, naked eye, barely see even the Cassiopeia “W”. That northern aspect was veiled with cloud, explaining as well my earlier view of Mu Cephei. So that was it, time to pack up. I’m still very much enjoying this scope, and it was good to get anything out even for a short session after all the solid cloud we’ve had recently. I was especially pleased to see 1 Ceres. Thanks for reading, Magnus.

Curt welcome back, I feel you’ve been absent a while? Or is it simply there haven’t been any noteworthy events lately? I observed Ceres last night through my SV140, first time ever seeing that asteroid. I looked for a disc-like shape but without having done the calc I daresay it’s far too small to expect to see a disc. I hopped up from M88 to locate it. Cheers, Magnus

Just in from a moderately satisfying night with the new Stellarvue 140, curtailed in the end by creeping haze, everything suddenly seemed to have developed nebulosity. Highlight was a new object for me, Ceres, the brightest of the dwarf planets, currently a bit north of M88 which is how I managed to pin it down. Only third light for the new scope, full report tomorrow in that section. Magnus

I very recently took the very same risk, and bought a Stellarvue refractor directly from SV in California to me here in West Cork. Luckily it arrived in perfect condition and it's a peach. The costs, which perhaps you know as you have done your own research) were: USD cost of (scope + shipping) (I exchanged my EUR to USD using Revolut, and used Revolut to make the USD payment - all went fine) VAT on import (23%) Customs (4.2%) Customs clearing fee (2.5% of Customs value IIRC) Luckily all is fine so no need to return anything. Cheers, Magnus

I have the Nagler 31T6 and I _really_ enjoy it, especially on my 105mm f/6.2 . @Stu swears by it on his TV Genesis I believe. Around or slightly under £500 is the going rate in the UK I believe. Cheers, Magnus

Finally! A clear night beckons. Out and acclimatizing for the new toy. A quick cruise around looking at terrestrial daytime high-contrast objects and edges at (an amazingly perfectly usable) 586x showed no fringing whatsoever (for the benefit of those familiar with a certain other thread 🙃). Northerly targets tonight.

@PeterW?

How do you use your AZ-EQ6 in manual mode, Gerry? Just keep the clutches at a certain light tension (or totally loose?) and push it around? I occasionally use it that way but it’s irritating. I would guess it needs to be extremely well balanced in alt and the tripod head perfectly level to use without any friction at all. Jealous of your weather, Magnus

Fantastic vivid report. SO jealous of your SH objects. And all at Bortle 6/7. Well done. Magnus

Very, very good. You must’ve been waiting years for the right moment for that one

When I do it there’s also a little cross bottom right of the post which allows it to be revealed or otherwise - do you get that small cross?

If you put your phone into landscape mode the sig should appear. I learnt that today from @Littleguy80 .

I must say ED102SS is a decidedly odd name for a reindeer 😄

And so they do! Thank you for that. Magnus

I’ve wondered for a while about telescope “nomenclature“ in general, but Japanese scopes in particular, especially Takahashi. E.g. TSA, TOA, DF, DC, DZ etc. From looking at and drooling over the pics of the Japanese store above I’ve discovered that “TOA” stands for Triplet Orthoscopic Apochromat. “D” stands for Doublet. So what is the “S” in TSA? Short? M

Very nice read. What size is your dob? It may well be in your sig but I don’t know how to see a sig on my phone. M37 is a favourite of mine. I always look out for the prominent bright red star in a darker patch right at the cluster centre, a lovely sight. Cheers, Magnus