Captain Scarlet

Just in from a nice shortish session with the LZOS 105. I’d decided it was to be a DeLite evening, so I had the 13, 7 and 3 in my pockets. Giving me 50x, 93x & 217x. Moon and Jupiter were over Baltimore village so the seeing for them wasn’t good. But watching the Moon set behind Brow Head was beautiful. Seeing further east was better but there was thin cloud everywhere. Almost exclusively in Orion, I saw M42, Trapezium E but not quite F, Sig Orionis with the faint C beautifully evident even in the 13mm, Rigel. I “discovered” iota Orionis, the bottom of Orion’s sword, to be a nice Polaris-like double too. M1 and nearby a stunning orange star which I think was 119 Tauri. Colour quite extraordinary. I really like the DeLites. The 7 and 13 seemed extremely pure and sharp. The 3 at 217x possibly a bit too much mag but showing nice diffraction rings. Sirius might’ve been a goer given the conditions but sadly it was behind branches. Great to get a run of clear nights, even if the fingers drive you back inside! Magnus

Oh dear I have so many issues with this post. 1. Fur-lined Crocs are a Thing I believe. My wife has just thrown a pair out because they STANK! 2. Hair-drying duties. Last time I saw you, that didn’t seem necessary? Have you become Viking? 🤣 3. Cup of tea to thaw out, hmm really 🤥 😁? Whiskey perhaps? 4. Serial killer I can believe 🤣🤣 Seriously though, sounds like a great session and lovely scope. I couldn’t get out tonight but will tomorrow 🤞. M

Just in from a session with my SV140. It’d been out to cool from late afternoon. It was First Light for my DeLites 7 and 13 (courtesy of @The60mmKid ). Jupiter was nice enough, several subsidiary bands to see but not much was on show except one large black spot, which was obvious. Io was pleasingly close to the disc. Thereafter I took in M42, where the nebulosity seemed to defy the aperture (in a good way), Trapezium, Sigma Orionis, Beta Mon, Sirius and Rigel. Puzzlingly after a certain point nothing faint was evident: no E or F (or even D at one stage), no C in Sigma Ori, certainly no Pup. I couldn’t understand the problem, there was no cloud. Then I took a look at my objective. Totally condensed over 🙄. End of session. Fingers were freezing anyway. Still nice to get out though. Magnus

With the “new normal” of severe Atlantic winter storms arriving one after another merely days apart, I haven’t had the chance or inclination to get my 12” newt, or anything else, out. Yesterday was the day, though, especially after I’d recently cleaned off a series of mould-grown pollen spots I’d been incubating. Light winds and clear sky were forecast, although the wind was to be from my only no-shelter direction (NE) and COLD. It was that combination that eventually drove me inside after a shorter session than I’d have liked. Setup was 300mm carbon-tube Newtonian on AZ-EQ6/Planet, controlled tonight by my Nexus DSC. My regular finders for this scope are a dedicated Baader SkySurfer V and my SW ED50/FF/Pan24 mega-finder, a worthy scope in its own right. I hadn’t done any target planning, so I restricted myself to mostly usual suspects, with a couple of novelties thrown in. Transparency was superb, in between a few bands of passing cloud, and by the time I packed up I measured 21.64 on my meter, and 22 stars naked eye within Orion’s head and shoulders, not including the corners. Seeing was less good, it came and went, varying from terrible to perhaps 6-7/10. After aligning on Polaris and Procyon, I headed straight to Jupiter. Sadly, Jupiter was already behind a tree, but without leaves it was worth a go. The resulting very soft image obviously precluded any “12-inch-level” detail, or in fact any detail other than two main EBs, but I’m glad I looked. Io, Ganymede and Europa were in familiar positions on jupiter’s Ecliptic, but there was one very bright dot directly “below” Jupiter (rel. to Jupiter’s ecliptic). A most unusual sight, I had to look it up and indeed it was Callisto, either at its nearest or furthest to us on Earth, nearly-but-not-quite occulted or transiting. I switched to Sirius which was still too early and not high enough, and seeing appeared terrible. A quick in-and-out-focus revealed some mis-collimation. Odd, since I always collimate at the outset of a session. I quickly re-did it and amazingly the “seeing” became much better 😊! Perhaps the mirror had settled during slewing at the start. In spite of this, no Pup was on view. I returned to Sirius several times during the night, but uncannily every time I settled down on my chair to stare in comfort, the wind would pick up and shake the scope around just enough, at 183x mag (anything higher was too much) to deny any possibility of the Pup. So no Pup was seen, though Sirius was reasonably stable. I’ll have a go with my 140 refractor next, hopefully it’ll be calmer too. Rigel was an easy split, but it was moving around a bit. M42 was next, such a treat through the 12” in any conditions. And at the time I observed it, seeing had momentarily improved to allow E and F plainly, though the ABCD were rather untidy. Sigma Orionis “C” was easy too but once again the whole vision very far from refractor-like. I think I was seeing the faint things through brute-force aperture rather than optical purity. Alnitak was also right on the edge of splitting, at 183x. I was tempted to go higher but my hands were getting so cold I wanted to keep my metal-touching down to a minimum. So far, so much revisiting old friends. I suddenly remembered reading mention of Beta Monocerotis, which I’d not observed yet. What a beauty! My go-to slightly missed it, so I had to pan around, not really knowing what I was looking for. When it hove into view, there was no doubt. Lovely. A string of three yellow-white equal-brightness bright stars. Knowing that time was short, my fingers having only so much feeling left, I wanted galaxies. I chose first M81 and M82. Easy to see in the 50mm finder, in the 300mm they were superb. Evident shape to M81 and the diagonal dust-gap in M82 quite clear. Whilst panning from one to the other, I stumbled across another obviously-a-galaxy. Using the nexus DSC’s “ID” feature, it was NGC 3077, a “small disrupted elliptical galaxy” and indeed it did appear mottled, to averted vision. New to me. I was able to positively identify it due to a nearby double that I could _just_ split, at 3.6” and 7.9/9.8 magnitudes. Scope-wise, I finished off with M51. Through the finder I could just make out a blotch, through the 12” again impressive. Two obvious cores and lots of detail. De-packing everything, I was barely able to unscrew the finder-bolts so weak were my frozen fingers. Despite winter gloves. Once everything was safely inside, and reluctant to finish drinking in the lovely transparency at 1:30am, I had a quick scoot around with my 15x56 bins, taking in M1, M31/110, Mintaka “S”, Beehive, Pleiades (with Ally’s Braid the most vivid I’ve seen it for ages) and M101. Also the Coma Star Cluster, Melotte 111, was clearly Trident-shaped to the naked-eye. And a bonus meteor streaking vertically down from near Betelgeuse. Thanks for reading, Magnus

Duck, actually. Yes I slit the skin and rubbed salt in. 3 hours at 125 then up the temp to 155 for an extra hour or so once the potatoes and parsnips have been added. I don’t bother with basting, there’s enough fat under the skin to stop it getting dry. Utterly, utterly divine.

A 90 minute twilight session with my SV140. My first session of any kind for weeks and weeks of storms. We’ve had a run of clear nights lately but I’ve only been able to take advantage now. The Skytee2 seems fine with the 16-odd kg of SV scope. Jupiter showing multiple bands and some detail, spots and hints of festoon. Saturn very low now, and looking through a tree, but Cassini Division evident, plus Titan and Rhea. So good for the mental health to finally get a session in. After dinner though it looks as though cloud has moved in so glad I set up earlier! Magnus

It is very cool to easily see dust lanes in M31 with the 12”. And some deep-sky objects within M31 are also possible, such as globular clusters, though you need experience and patience to get those (I haven’t got any yet). Its satellite galaxies are also quite bright, M32 and M110. Magnus

Thanks Phyllis. Those very bright spots left over in the final photo were actually drops of water left over from the final rinse, not quite having dried off. There was also a bit of leaching of the centre-spot adhesive from the quite powerful ROR solution, but that’s in the secondary shadow so I’m not too worried about that.

Every now and again I look down into the murky depths of my newts to see how dusty the mirrors are. My 8” I cleaned recently and was due a clean. My 12” didn’t really seem to warrant it but there were some white spots I’ve been monitoring and been concerned about. With today, New Year’s Day being grey, high wind and driving rain, I decided to give it a go. Those white spots were nasty! I first rinsed it with warm water, added a few drops of Fairy Liquid and fingertipped away the biological matter, which just dissolved away. Very satisfying. I followed this up with a dash of Residual Oil Remover (home-brew: ammonia, liquid soap, isopropyl and salt) and fingertipped again. All rinsed off and finished off with some laboratory-grade distilled water. I’ll now store them vertical but mirror facing down, and see if that helps. Cheers, Magnus

I would counter by saying that if you like the Delos, you'll like the DeLite. They both have 20mm eye relief and are each to my mind superb. I have 5 Delos and 4 DeLite and get on with them extremely well and equally. I used to have 2 Ethos but the eye relief was just too short for me with glasses. I sold the 4.7 and am considering selling the 13, which is hanging in there by its fingernails. Magnus

Likewise. Big storm just building up this afternoon peaking tomorrow.

I’ve had this with both 8” newts I’ve had. A 200p was terrible, I could see the laser dot move around as i changed altitude. It wasn’t the springs: I could alter the collimation just by applying finger-pressure to the tube around the focuser. I partially solved the problem by getting big air-conditioning ring-clips and positioning them around the tube one near the focuser one towards the primary. And an OO VX8 showed the same. Again, not the springs. It had one of their new (very, very good) cells which have almost thread-strippingly strong springs. I solved that one by buying a Helmerichs carbon tube to replace the aluminium.

Good quick guide. Some people suggest that for visual, the need for accurate collimation is exaggerated. I strongly disagree, and unwittingly demonstrated this to myself a couple of weeks ago. I collimated my 12” in my usual way (using a tublug rather than just a laser but that doesn’t alter my point). I got on with observing, and noticed that everything looked far worse than I’d been expecting. I put it down to poor seeing, but just in case I pointed to a bright star and immediately saw the classic “pointy stripy oval” shape indicating bad coma. Very odd. I put the tublug back in and it seemed ok. I then rotated the tublug in the holder and the shadow started to move in a circle across the angled tublug screen! Something wrong with the collimator! I actually have two tublugs, so I put my other smaller 1.25” in, and it showed collimation to be out, by half the width of the angled screen, i.e. seemingly not grossly. I centred this shadow, and it stayed put when I rotated it. Subsequent star test showed all good. Next day I inspected the errant 2” tublug and found the angled-face insert to be loose, so it had been at a random angle. Anyway, my point is that even with the return shadow/laser dot only halfway away from “disappearing down the hole”, the view produced was noticeably poor in an f/5.4 (6.2 with paracorr) Newtonian. Poor enough for me to have considered abandoning the session had I not fixed it. Magnus

Fantastic

You only use those crosshairs to aim the centreline of the Cheshire at the centre-spot of the mirror, I.e. collimating the eyepiece/focuser tube to the primary. Even if bent you should be able to estimate where the proper crosshair centre should be. For the primary, they don’t come into it: you use the reflection of the angled-illuminated face, which might have its own cross-etchings: you line that up also with the primary’s centre-spot using the primary’s adjustment screws. I’d still return it, though. Cheers, Magnus

I'm no expert, but when I open the larger version of the image and bring my eye close to the screen, I'm drawn in by the details and cannot stop staring. Seeming supernova remnants all over the place. Exquisite. Magnus

I too get similar white dots on mirrors that I keep in the only-slightly-heated utility room. They don’t come off with cleaning or any solvents I’ve used including acetone. But they do come off with a fingernail I’ve discovered. I too would like to know what it is. Can Lichen get started under such conditions I wonder? Spider excrement has also crossed my mind. As a result I keep my newts vertically mirror downwards-facing now. Magnus

Courtesy of @The60mmKid and my sister in law network, these finally arrived yesterday:

Keep the unused ones, you never know they might come in useful. For example I refurbished a friend’s 10 year old 130p recently, and it turned out it doesn’t have springs, only (useless) rubber washers, making collimation a real chore of “push-pull” adjusting. I still had my old SW 300p springs, so I cut them in half and installed three on his 130p. Worked like a dream. Cheers, Magnus

I put this to my cousin, and I’ve screenshotted her reply. I tried to copy/paste her response but the app went haywire. Any of her phrases/words ring a bell? (Bear in mind for pronunciation the letter “y” is pronounced like a short “oo”, it’s sort of a vowel.

Like you having lately moved to a dark but more weather-prone site, I find the biggest visual difference to be the naked eye views: they are the ones that blow me away, even now three years later. If I can get even a brief naked-eye view of the myriad of stars and MW that were impossible from SW London, like I did tonight in 30-40mph winds, I'm not too unhappy at not having the opportuntiy to get a scpe out. Just as well, as we (and you) are due a very stormy week ahead... M

This has reminded me of my own (non-) project. I have a 20” mirror-set sitting in a box taunting me about not having embarked on it yet. The beauty of designing a truss OTA is that if you get it wrong and cannot focus, it’s no disaster: you only need adjust or replace the poles. M

Your description of Rigel perfectly describes my own view of it last night.

Just in from a session with my 12”. Stunning transparency, pretty poor seeing. M42 nebulosity three-dimensional but Trapezium stars fuzzy. That said, E was visible and F came and went. Sigma Orionis C star I could see but all bright stars were disappointing. Jupiter had moments of amazing clarity, the reddest I’ve seen the GRS, but only moments. Definitely worth setting up and getting out but far from the best session I’ve had. A handful of meteors. Magnus

It’s never the right time when a rare opportunity arises. Do whatever you can to keep the 102 and most certainly get the FS128. It’ll hurt for now, but that will subside. M