Captain Scarlet

I have one of these, It’s superb. https://www.apm-telescopes.net/en/apm-finderscope-50-mm-90-erect-image-24mm-reticle-eyepiece-55 Magnus

NGC 1999. Stolen for my list, thank you. A fascinating (non-)object. Which list I’ve been compiling since mid November for my “next” session, which the weather has not yet allowed!

1 light-second away now 😮

Perhaps just a tiny little stretch to a companion 12” why not? 😃

So satisfying bang on projections. What were the flakes floating around just after telescope separation? Carbon Dioxide?

Excuse me I need to point this out. That is not a handle. These are handles:

Interesting. My one is not far from yours in the production run: yours is No 048, mine is 026.

Luckily, being Suomalainen, you are a perfect fit! 😁 full disclosure: I am half Finn myself 🇫🇮

It seems as though my current weather, in SW Ireland, has been exactly the same for weeks: 10-15mph SE avg gusting to 20-25mph and solid low cloud, day in day out. And before that when there were clear spells, it was positively stormy. So anything other than a grabngo or bins hasn’t been out for a couple of months.

Another vote for Kowa. I have a tsn-883 and love it. 510mm FL and 88mm aperture. Kowa also supply an adapter to allow 1.25” eyepieces, shown here. It quite happily takes 150x mag. Though swapping eyepieces is a bit of a faff, you have to unscrew and loosen some hidden Allen-grubs, as opposed to the native bayonet-fitting for their own eyepieces (which are also very good). Magnus

fair enough - I should learn to read

Are you talking AP only? If so, how would, say, a Canon 400mm f/2.8 fare? The early non-IS ones can be got quite reasonably, I think, although they are very heavy. 400/2.8 = 143mm aperture? M

I assume it's cloudy in Novi Sad?

… or maybe he wouldn’t wait for the explanation and would simply prune it as would be his right 😄😄

I have 3 Maks, a skymax 180, a skymax 150 and an Intes M603 (150mm). Whilst I agree with @Nik271 that once collimated, the skymax line are unlikely to need collimating again, if one does need collimating, the mechanism skywatcher provide for these scopes is crude and not especially easy: 3 pairs of “push-pull” threaded bolts at the back for the primary only. Other Maks, such as my Intes (which is a Rumak-Mak) can be much more difficult owing to adjustable primary AND secondary. In certain circumstances they can be impossible to collimate, where for instance the primary has been seated tilted relative to the focuser, which might also be the case in a bad example of an SCT or CC with unadjustable fixed primary mirrors. If that focus-tube-vs-primary-axis tilt is not adjustable, which most small ones are not as I understand it, and it's out, you’re in trouble from the start. With mine, that was indeed “out” when I got it, there was no native adjustment mechanism, so I had to shim the primary on its seat around the baffle-tube before even starting on the 6 collimation-adjustments proper. So collimation can be a problem with Cats, and can get horrible sometimes. A situation you’ll rarely get with refractors. Cheers, Magnus

Yes lovely picture. Last night was due clear and at 7pm it was indeed, so I took the Intes out to cool. When I went out a bit later it was blanket cloud and stayed that way. Haven’t been out with anything but bins for 7-8 weeks now. M

I’ve just read the Wikipedia article on JWST. A review in 2018 revealed 344 single-point failures, any one of which could doom the whole. Which means that if they are all independent, each one has to be reduced to an average 0.2% chance of failure (1 in 500) just to achieve a 50% chance of none of them failing. Looked at another way, if each one has a 99% chance of success, 1 in 100 of failure, the chance of none of them failing reduces to a bit over 3%. On that view, I have to say I’m more pessimistic 😟 . I sincerely hope they’ve mitigated them all 🤞.

No chance. Can’t let pursuit of an expensive hobby get in the way of something as important as Christmas Dinner!

I too have an OO VX8, unfortunately I don’t have immediate access to it and I didn’t check it when I was last near it. I shall check it as soon as we meet again. M

Almost every Newtonian secondary mirror I have ever seen has a short section of straight edge in the silvering where the mirror has been grasped by a holder during the silvering process. That will produce a spike. M

Haha we’ve all been there, glad no serious damage. I tried attaching a scope to my then quite-new az-eq6 without realizing I’d forgotten to bolt the mount to the tripod. I pushed it off the tripod 😱😱 luckily mainly onto grass not my foot.

Haha I’m only drawing on my O-level too so highly unreliable also 😁😁. I did get an A and to this day I have no idea how. I was rubbish at it, hated it, and found the exam very difficult. I think they must’ve got some papers mixed up!

If Latin it’d depend whether it was 2nd declension or 4th declension, in which case the plurals would be Morpheii or Morpheus respectively. If Greek, I have no idea 😃 … the things one remembers from 45 years ago 🙄

Haha that is more ridiculous than my SW 300p plus Skymax180 on an az-eq6! Was it a usable set-up? M

Wow good for you Joe! A number of us have had their dark-sky Epiphany moments while exiting the pub, myself included and @niallk from memory. A common theme seems to be "where have all the constellations gone?". I recall someone else saying looking up was almost vertigo-inducing, looking up you felt as though you could fall into the sky. I had a quick check to see actually what your sky would look like from Mount Magnet. Orion completely upside-down, he must have a serious permanent headache ! And M42 more than 50 degrees up! I also learned that Western Australia (all Australia?) abolished daylight savings a few years ago. Cheers, Magnus