Captain Scarlet

I've finally arrived to where these were delivered. 3 Items. Thanks belatedly to @moriniboy, @WbRaDy and @Richard_B. A Baader SkySurfer V; a SW Evoguide 50ED and an AZ-GTi, one of which which I've wanted for a long time. I now have 3 Baader SSVs, each one dedicated and dialled-in to a scope. And oddly all 3 are slightly different in their details. They're a real pain to zero in for a new scope, especially in the dark, so I can understand why people might not get on with them. But once dedicated, they really are the last word in RDFs. And I have two Telrads too, not in the same league in my book. The Evoguide 50ED I plan to apply a little surgery to, to turn it into a mega-finder: I'll shorten the main tube to allow a small RACI diagonal to be attached. Cheers, Magnus.

Yes indeed. I do need a step or two for the higher elevations but I like the setup. The pics below are of my old steel-tubed 300p, nearly 28kg all in and no slewing problems. My current 12” is carbon tubed and comes in around 21kg. I’ll be using that tonight I think. Magnus

So are the mosquitoes!

I seem to be in the minority that uses a newt on an alt-az mount. And at the big end of things too: a 12” on an AZ-EQ6. Although I now have reduced the weight of the OTA with a carbon tube, it used to be a full-blown SW 300p with steel tube, coming in at over 27kg including eyepieces finder etc. I was and am able to attach it to the mount without risk on my own: I attach the rings first, then with clutches locked and OTA horizontal held with one hand at each end, I “walk” the tube into the open rings, close the rings whilst gently holding the tube in place with my body and I’m done. A 10” being so much more wieldy should be even simpler should you go down that route. Cheers, Magnus

After a total fog white-out this morning, the evening turned into a night of beautiful transparency. And the forecast seems to suggest the same for 3-4 nights! So this night I quickly set up my nearly grab-n-go set-up: LZOS 105 on AYO2 mount, with Nagler 31 and Ethos 13, giving me 21x and 50x. definitely a wide-field session! I also had a pair of 10x50 binoculars. The 21x allowed me to take in the whole of Kemble's Cascade, though I couldn't get any colours (the stars are supposed to be a mixture of colours). Kemble's Cascade "ends" in NGC 1502, a rather lovely small open cluster which at 50x was very nice indeed. It contains a "ladder" of several pairs of stars that I couldn't tear my eyes away from. I spent most of my time looking at NGC 1502. Also M52 funnily enough was more visible in the 10x50s and at 50x than at 21x. Odd. A quick tour also of M13, M92, M27, M57, M44, M103, Double Cluster (mesmerising at 21x and 50x), Algieba and Castor, both last just about split at 50x. Bright stripe of MW too across the East. And nice to see little Delphinus rising in the South, along with Altair in Aquila: Summer is coming! Looking forward to getting the 12" out over the next couple of nights. Magnus

Actually starting off at Full Moon is not at all bad. Full Moon means it's diametrically opposite the Sun. Which means at Full Moon, the Moon rises when the Sun sets. Which further means that from that point, the Moon rises about an hour later each night thereafter. Just 2-3 nights after Full Moon, you'll get 2-3 hours of pre Moonrise darkness, and each day gives you an extra hour. In my book, Full Moon means dark nights start really soon. I've appended a chart of key times based on Tenerife location and those dates... Cheers, Magnus

Superb, well done!

Two of those will be moonlit of course 🙂

The chart showing the data I posted a bit earlier in the thread shows “darkest nights” regularly a little bit darker than that suggested by the Atlas 2015 layer on lightpollutionmap.info . The Sunbury-on-Thames data show best values of around 19.15 whereas the website suggests 19.05. And my dark location is a suggested 21.80 and only a few weeks ago I recorded 21.97 . So two locations at opposite ends of the scale agree reasonably well with that website (which incidentally is where Clear Outside gets its data too I think. Magnus

Yes they are streetlights, but about 6km away as the crow flies. They’re quite useful actually as the rightmost one is precisely due North from the house. There are streetlights in nearby Baltimore too, about 2km away, but I still get 22.0 sqm values at zenith around Easter. The odd lights here and there seem to make little difference, it’s whole city-fulls that seem to do the damage

Superb write-up and what sounds like great sessions. May I make a suggestion? Copy it into its own separate Obs Report so we can comment on the lots of interesting things you’ve said here… Cheers, Magnus

I would second Charles Bracken's Astrophotography Sky Atlas. Although it doesn't feature doubles, it has just the right map size and scale for me to choose any of the other targets. Also the way it denotes the objects on the chart, PNs, Globulars, OCs, galaxies and of course nebulae is just right for me. And I'm not an astrophotographer, I'm purely visual. Magnus

Just looked at more information about NGC 5053, a glob near M53. Now I understand why I couldn't find it; it's dimmer (mag 9.6) and spread across a larger area than NGC 2419 aka The Galactic Wanderer at mag 9.06. I have observed NGC 2419 through this scope, but it was extremely faint. With the non-perfect transparency of the other night no wonder I couldn't see NGC 5053. A challenge for the future. Magnus

Since I've got into astronomy I've spent a lot of time at two very different places, different from a light-pollution viewpoint. One is 20 miles from central London, say Bortle 7/8. The other is about as far South West Ireland as you can get, nominally Bortle 3. I have an SQM-L meter, and have taken data readings on almost every possible clear night for the last 3 years or so. The attached graph shows this data plotted by SQM reading vs Sun altitude. The "upper limit" curves agree quite nicely with the lightpollutionmap.info Atlas-2015 modelled data, modelled from an observer's viewpoint based on the 2014 VIIRS satellite "look-down" intensity readings. Magnus

In a run of grey, windy or excessively Moonlit weather recently an unexpected gap in forecast appeared, suggesting Wednesday night (18th May) might be clear. It was! Dark enough to start collimating by about 10:20 pm, Moonrise wasn’t due until 1am. I find the time of Full Moon counter-intuitive. You imagine that being a full Moon, you won’t get dark nights for ages yet. A full Moon means that as soon as the Sun sets, the Moon rises, being diametrically on the opposite side of Earth from where you’re standing. So what that means is that the next night, the Moon won’t rise until approximately an hour after sunset, and each day a further nearly-hour. So, at just 2-3 days after full Moon, I found myself with nearly 3 hours of full darkness to play with. That suddenness of dark nights after full Moon always surprises me. Anyway, it was still a bit breezy from the South West so I set up on my more sheltered North-facing patio. Scope of choice tonight was my 300mm Orion-Helmerichs newt on AZ-EQ6 controlled by Nexus DSC. A quick collimation and alignment on Polaris and Arcturus. My novelty feature this night was First Light for my freshly centre-spotted 300mm mirror (Orion), which had been originally about 1mm off-centre, juuuust too much for my OCD to tolerate. I made up a triangular centre-spot and set it up so the apexes point directly to the collimation knobs. It allows me to predict which direction the Barlowed-return-shadow will travel. Not having had much notice of the clear spell, and my perma-list of target objects being once again well out of date (I really need to create lists in advance), I cobbled together a short list, all in more or less the same area: the environs of Coma Berenices, mainly a mixture of galaxies and globulars. I did have one double on the list, WZ Cas (gleaned from, I think, @Nik271). Seeing was not bad except for some above-building regions, but transparency was not perfect: there was a sheen of high thin cloud, and a few instances where a thicker band moved in and luckily out again. Sky darkness started off at SQM-L 15.0 at 10:20 pm, where I could just barely discern Polaris, reached 21.65 just before 1 am, and when I packed up just after 1:30 am it was back down to 20.95 and sinking fast with the 89% Moon starting to rise. And, once again amazingly, no dew! Mostly I used my Ethos 13, giving me 141x and a 0.7 degree field. I’d occasionally move up to the Delos 10 for 183x and did a bit of star-testing with the Delos 3.5 at a crazy 522x. Anyway, the observing. I initially checked conditions on Epsilon Lyrae, the Double-Double, which was superb as it should be in a 300mm. First on my list was a Coma galaxy, NGC 4872. At 11.7 mag, it’s one of the brighter members, or shall we say less-dim, of the Coma Supercluster. Certainly there was a galaxy fuzz-patch, and another slightly brighter one further East of it (below-left through the eyepiece), which would have been NGC 4889 (mag 11.4). There are dozens and dozens of others packed into that region, but I’ll need a bigger scope to see them in due course. It’ll be a treat when I do, Sky-Safari makes the field look like a globular of galaxies! Next on my list was another Coma galaxy, NGC 4725. This was mag 10.0, much brighter, and so it was through the eyepiece. It’s more or less face on, with a bright core and a definite spiral structure, nicely symmetrical and clearly so with averted vision through the eyepiece. Lovely. Wikipedia’s photo of it is worth a visit, and I definitely “got” that shape. Now I went to M64, assuming from memory it was a bright featureless elliptical, so I found it, took it in, moved on quickly. But on investigation it’s called the Black Eye Galaxy, and has interesting features that I might possibly have been able to discern had I spent more time on it. Dammit, next time. My first globular of the evening was not in Coma but not far away, M13 in Hercules. Oh my God. I’d had a recent superb view through my 200mm newt, but this was a view apart. So big and so bright. I’ve observed M13 many many times obviously, and have seen the Propeller before but fleetingly. Tonight the Propeller was obvious and prominent. I spent a reasonable length of time at M13, returning to it a couple of times too. Never tiring. Another glob, this time in Coma, M53. A third of the size of M13 and less bright, but still well resolved. I tried upping the magnification from 141x to 183x, but it became less satisfying, a little too dim. There’s another glob nearby, NGC 5053, which for some reason I couldn’t find. Perhaps it’s too loose, more like an OC, so I gave up. Certainly I think I should have been able to see it in this scope, but another time. I chose M3 next, another large bright globular, not dissimilar to M13. I tried to study it and make out some features but by now patches of cloud were intruding, and from time to time it would disappear entirely! I abandoned the Coma area and turned completely around to look at WZ Cas, a widely-spaced double in Cassiopeia, a random entrant to my list, but my goodness what beautiful colours! Deep red and bright blue, entrancing. No doubting where they were in the star field once you’re there! I finished off with Albireo and that was that. Cloud was now almost everywhere. An entirely unexpected dark few hours and a few new objects. I used Charles Bracken’s “Astrophotography Sky Atlas” to select my list. It has just the right layout and scale for me to pick a page and choose targets. It doesn’t have any doubles, but for PNs, Galaxies and Clusters (and nebulae obviously) it’s very good. Thanks to @PeterW for introducing me to that. Cheers, Magnus

Very nice indeed, I'm impressed. I've gone a similar route with 2 Newtonians now. One started life as a blue-tube Skywatcher 300p, the other as an Orion Optics VX8. The SW now has an Orion primary, a Hubble Optics secondary, a Helmerichs tube and a Steeltrack focuser. Only the SW primary cell and spider remain. I plan to design and build my own primary cell as its inferiority to the rest of the set-up now really bothers me, for example the 6 radially-spaced and far-too-short M4 cell-tube attachment bolts are inadequate, and one has stripped its thread, so really there are only 5. The VX8 now has a Helmerichs tube and Steeltrack focuser. The original Orion 8" primary cell is I think quite good and the spider is fine too. The secondary is 63mm which is too big for my visual use so I plan to get a Zen 50mm (as you suggested from another post ). They are both a utter pleasure to use though, I had the 300 out last night. I can feel your joy in making the very best of what has clearly become a really fine instrument. Magnus

Thanks Stu I’ll draft up a paragraph to fit in before that section

What's not clear from the pictures is that there is an O-ring sitting in a groove on the inner baffle tube precisely to stop the outer baffle tube (and primary) going past a certain point and coming off. I do refer to it in step 15, but you're right it should be mentioned it earlier by suggesting that one checks if it's actually there. Unfortunately that post is too old now for me to edit, though I shall edit it on the version on my website. Good luck with your repair. Magnus

Of all these options the only one that suits is the 47.5mm Zen secondary. The others are either too small or too big. 47.5mm is right on the small limit for me, but just about inside my window. Unfortunately it's not clear from their website how I go about actually ordering one, but I'll admit my understanding of Italian is not good! Can anyone help me howto make an order? Thanks, Magnus

That reminds me. I must re-read Day of the Jackal

Indeed. I looked for it just the other day and found it still there to my surprise. I should’ve mentioned it.

One scope in that corner especially with a wooden tripod looks very Galilean. I cannot imagine for a moment that it had gone unnoticed, but I can imagine that Mrs Stu wasn’t going to admit she approved even though she probably did. But two? With a carbon tripod? Playing with fire…

@markse68 @Dan_Paris thank you … exactly the information I was looking for. Between those I will certainly get sorted. Magnus

I have a need for a high-quality secondary mirror of 48-50mm minor axis. It’s to replace the current 63mm one I have on my 200mm scope. Aside from the obvious UK optical outfit, whom I’d prefer not to trouble with my business, are there any other convenient, say, UK sources? I did buy a high quality 70mm Hubble Optics from astroshop.eu last year which now adorns my 300mm, but that took 5 months to arrive. Or perhaps someone has a VX8 or CT8 with a 50mm and would like to swap up to my 63mm for AP purposes? Win all round. Cheers, Magnus

Crikey they didn’t keep us waiting long did they! There’s a slightly more extensive account here https://phys.org/news/2022-05-astronomers-reveal-image-black-hole.html