Captain Scarlet

I’ve just returned from a “summer holiday preview” long-weekend trip to our place in SW Ireland. No family, no cats, just my astronomical toys and me. And with luck, some clear nights. Luck was with me. I flew into Cork airport on a heavily-delayed flight late on Wednesday night, collected my little hire car and drove for 90 minutes or so. Arcturus was my lodestar, constantly in my vision as I drove West. The contrast between driving in SW Ireland and the outskirts of London is sharp: there were fully 10-mile stretches on the main-road N71 where I didn’t see a single other vehicle. To be sure, it was the early hours but even so. I arrived at 0234, stepped out of the car and gasped. I’d deliberately looked up when collecting my car at Cork airport, and the difference in sky blew me away, as it always does: the Milky Way bright through the zenith, most of the asterisms lost in the mass of stars. It was too late of course to set anything up, so I spent an hour or so with my binoculars (Nikon 12x50), whetting the appetite for the following night, Thursday, which was also forecast clear. I finally crept into my pit at 0400. I have two telescopes that permanently live in Ireland, a 12” Skywatcher Newtonian and a Mak 180 together with the AZ-EQ6 and Berlebach Planet. My eyepieces came in my luggage, along with a Lacerta dual-speed upgrade kit (thanks @niallk – an old post of yours inspired me to that) for the single-speed focusser on the Newt, my APM 50mm finder, 2 pairs of binoculars, a DSLR with 300mm and 24mm lenses, a laptop, a set of craftsman’s screwdrivers (Facom 6-piece kit – superb) and the TS-Optic SCT focusser that nobody on this forum seems to want to buy off me. I’d stretched the hand-luggage allowance to the very limit and needless to say, my bag was set aside and inspected. Thursday 1st August 2019 In keen anticipation of the clear night I spent the lovely sunny Thursday afternoon, when not swatting away Painted Lady butterflies, setting up and lining up: Mount in AZ mode , 12” Newt on the main saddle, Kowa 88mm spotting scope with 20-60x zoom on the other side. APM 50mm RACI plus RDF on top of the Newt. From my patio, I have direct line of sight to the radar domes atop Mount Gabriel 20km distant, so getting everything lined up was easy. Also, I noticed that the 12” Newt needed no re-collimation from the last time I’d used it 4 months ago! I’d prepared a list, but didn’t entirely stick to it. It included M31, M57 ring, M51, M63 sunflower, M13/92/3/53 all globulars, M64 black eye, M81/82, M106. The night didn’t disappoint. My SQM-L gave me 21.5, not too bad but not like the 22.0 I had here at Easter, and the Milky Way was more or less directly overhead. My list was a mix of galaxies and globular clusters, with one planetary nebula, but I was really looking forward to the globs: these seem to be my “thing” at the moment when it’s dark enough. M13: I started with Great Hercules Cluster. My goodness, what a beauty (again). From this dark location, I’ve probably spent more time on this object than any other. I returned to it time and time again between other targets. And I finally actually “saw” the propeller. It really felt 3-dimensional, as though I was inside its outer limit. Also, with the rig I had that night, the progression from naked eye to 8x50 finder to 88mm birding-scope 60x to the 12” was really rewarding. Naked eye, it’s a “not-a-star” hazy blob. With the APM 8x50, it’s a less indistinct version of the same. Through the Kowa 88mm at 60x, it’s clearly got some structure and you can see it’s an aggregation of stars with distinct brighter ones away from the centre. But it still doesn’t prepare you for the view through the 12”. I also hopped across for a quick look at M13’s little companion, NGC 6207, which was readily visible. I took a picture of M13 a year or so ago and NGC 6207 and featured in that, but this is the first time I’ve actually observed it. M13 is the object I shall use to shock and amaze newcomers with just such an aperturical progression from meh to amazing. Most layfolk have simply never heard of a globular cluster. M92, M3, M53: these were all similarly beautiful, but I was obsessed with discerning the Propeller in M13 so I didn’t give these others the time they deserved. Plenty of time for that I hope. M57: the Ring Nebula. Again, the difference between 88mm (3.5”) of aperture and 305mm was interesting, but 60x magnification wasn’t really enough in the Kowa for a proper comparison. A bright polo which I spent a while staring at. M81/82: a quick look, just to tick off the list. The diagonal slash in M82 was quite evident. M51: two rather bright cores and some evidence of more structure. Early Perseid: in between all the Messier objects, as I was looking North-Eastish, I saw what must have been an early Perseid, quite the most spectacular meteor I have ever seen. It started off in the usual way, a thin bright streak which quickly got thicker and brighter, then suddenly became enormously bright and exploded in a huge flash. I was lucky enough that it appeared exactly where I was looking. I wonder if anyone else saw this one, it was at 2336. To finish off I decided to point the scope at the densest part of the MW I could see and just cruise around. I used the RDF to point at a random spot, looked through the eyepiece and found myself looking directly at what was clearly a well-defined open cluster, perfectly centred. It was distinctly rectangular on 3 sides, comprising lots of very similar-magnitude stars and straight-line voids-and-stars, with just one significantly brighter star inside. It was M11, the Wild Duck cluster, I think. Lovely. That was it for the night, I packed up and retired eventually about 3am. Friday 2nd August Thank God clouds were forecast, I needed an early-ish night. Saturday 3rd August The forecast kept changing during the day. In the end it was a cloud-dodging night. I’d decided to try to use the AZ-EQ6 in EQ mode for the first time, having during the afternoon calibrated for and marked Home Position and 0-up-6-down polar-alignment position. With just my Mak 180 mounted up, I first tried for a 3-star alignment to see how far the SynScan reckoned my Polar Alignment was, but after successfully getting Arcturus and Vega, Capella was suddenly covered by low cloud which wouldn’t go away. So I just guessed for Capella and carried on. I was very tired so it was only going to be a short session. I quickly skimmed through Albireo and Almach for a comparison (Almach my favourite such lovely colours); had a brief look at the Epsilon Lyraes (really sharp and clear); and noted that M13 through the 7” aperture was nowhere near as good as the 12” obviously. My tiredness overcame me at that point and I had to go to bed. All in all a very satisfying long weekend, and I’m back in the same place in 2 weeks for a fortnight weh-heh! Bring on 2nd half of August. If you’ve got here, thanks for reading. Cheers, Magnus

I have a few cheapo RDFs, which I like. I've also had a new Telrad for a few months but only recently got around to taking it out of its box and using it. Like @JOC I like to set up and align everything during the day if possible, and I find it annoying that the Telrad illuminated rings are invisible in daylight. Whereas with the cheap RDFs I have, the red dot is easily visible in daylight.

a bit of reading comes up with this "Prisms used to be the standard for the secondary in telescopes back in Russel Porter's day, [early 1900s] but they are never used today."

Yes thinking about it it makes sense, fast scope will have much more oblique angle of attack, not good in a prism. I wonder if anyone's ever built a scope with a prism secondary?

Interesting, I hadn't been aware of the potential for prisms to be noticeably better than even expensive mirrors. See here https://www.cloudynights.com/articles/cat/articles/mirror-vs-dielectric-vs-prism-diagonal-comparison-r2877 key quote "... As more and more field observations were conducted with the 80mm APO on Jupiter, it became apparent that the prisms were providing another level of performance that the mirrors were not."

I recently imaged the Moon, which is more or less the same size as the Sun, using an 800mm focal length combination onto a Canon 7dmk2 crop sensor. On the basis of the images I got, I could probably stretch that to 1500mm focal length before cutting off some of the disk... Magnus

I work for a South African company, and they're forever "sure, let's make a plan" . Which I've learned to roughly translate as "not now" .

Here it is from UK I think

Very nice from my top window in Sunbury too...

superb, I love it! Did you design what you needed re focal lengths spacings etc or was it just trial and error?

If you try to use their site to order a new Uni tripod, one of the mounting-plate options is that for EQ-6, so they're definitely available separately. But I can't get the site to show me one separately. It looks as though you'll have to wait until August to find out the cost M

I’ll be trying for Jupiter a little later, it’s too low behind some flats for me right now. For the short time before it disappears behind a Magnolia. Need to eat first though...

They are definitely real objects at varying heights that respond to changes in focus. One or two have had visible structure, and with a wide field at 30x-ish there will often be 3-4 in the same field of view, travelling different directions at different speeds. Now I know what to look for, I might try to get some video in due course...

With a spare clear sunny afternoon today, I decided to set up, mock-polar align and generally fiddle around. I found myself looking up at random blue sky about 15 degrees away from the Sun, and seeing small rather bright white seemingly fast-moving objects crossing the field of view constantly. At 30x mag, I would see one perhaps every second. As I travelled up through the magnifications in the hope I could make out some shape, they remained too small to discern any shape, even at 108x. They were at different heights as I needed to use the focusser, mostly traveling South-ish but not always, and st varying speeds. But all the same objects as far as I could tell. Have any of you done this and seen the same? i have no idea what they were. Migrating birds? Satellites? Space Junk? Dust particles at just the right angle to the Sun? Looking forward to reading your ideas... Cheers, MAgnus.

Hi Brian I have done precisely this for myself fairly recently, also because I wanted to build “my own” tool rather than use the various available apps. I found the most accessible (actually very accessible) guide was that by Paul Schlyter, at this link https://stjarnhimlen.se/comp/ppcomp.html There’s also another version of the same page with more worked examples IIRC. After finishing that project, I got the Jan Meeus book, and in retrospect I think I did it in the right order. Schlyter’s merhods get you to around 2 arcminutes of accuracy, and are quite easy to follow, whereas Meeus is a bit more involved and benefits from one having done some slightly simpler groundwork. Meeus will allow you to get as accurate as you like though, and I’m using it to refine my own project. Good Luck, and keep us informed how it goes... Cheers, Magnus

View North West from our patio near Baltimore Ireland... ... and South (Mars visible about 12degs up at the time IIRC):

Thanks - I'll keep an eye open. Hopefully this is such a simple matter of plain fact it won't come to that...

For the first time ever I’ve edited Wikipedia. One of the regular uses for my home-grown “skymap” spreadsheet, aside from using it to learn the heavens and plan observing sessions, is to check out astronomical events when they come up in my reading. Just now I was reading about Otto Struve in Wikipedia, and apparently in June 1914 Struve made preparations for the upcoming Solar Eclipse of 8th August 1914. So I automatically checked it out, if for no other reason than to test my spreadsheet’s accuracy. Imagine my surprise when it suggested that there couldn’t possibly have been a solar eclipse on that date. But there was one on 21st August that year. I mentioned this to a colleague who said “why don’t you edit it?”. I hadn’t realised that anyone can edit Wikipedia, so I did. I expect that plenty of people on here are Wikicontributors/editors? Cheers, Magnus

... I’ve thus temporarily evicted my Astrotrac to accommodate them plus my new 3.5mm...

My understanding, from someone who used to work in a related area, is they all get their UK raw data from the Met Office, who obviously have first dibs on their own data, but thereafter they do their own modelling. And she also says the Met Office has the biggest and best models with which to forecast. Personally, that bears out with my own empirical feeling, that the Met Office’s forecasts seem to be the most reliable. But I realize I’m risking treading on sacred ground here... Magnus.

My eyepiece collection has grown a little. Finally my APM-LZOS 105/650 can give some nice magnification, 186x. And of course my Mak 180 can now bring a highly useful 771x 😂

Seeing that you're on the Isle of Man, with quite close access to enviably dark skies, and given that you have high magnification (for planets etc) covered with the Mak, I reckon you need as much aperture as you can. Cheers, Magnus

Not having had time to set up an actual telescope last night, I went outside around midnight to get some advantage from what appeared to be a really clear night. My SQM-L showed 19.00, which with the 80%-odd Moon and Sun only at -15 degrees was remarkable. It appeared to be a beautifully transparent night. Naked eye, Alcor was not just visible but easily evident, certainly the clearest I’ve ever seen it from here in Sunbury-On-Thames. For the first time ever, two extra stars aside from the usual 3 in the Little Dipper were just about discernible too: Yildun and Zeta Ursa Minoris. Also, I could make out the Double-Double naked eye, completing a clear triangle of Vega, Zeta Lyrae and Epsilon Lyrae. With my beloved Nikon 12x50 SE bins, I had a scan around, wondering if I’d be able to see M13. Not only did I see it, it positively leapt out at me, I was very surprised, having had difficulty making it out with my Mak 127 from here in the past. Possibly the clearest I’ve seen it from here, albeit at low magnification. M92 was nearly as clear, though I had to hunt around for it. I was able to make out Ludwig’s Star between Mizar and Alcor, remember I’m only using 12x bins handheld, and finished off with Jupiter, which only served to disappoint me that I didn’t have a scope. Big even in the bins, with 3 Moons attending. I’d be interested to hear if Jupiter was worthwhile last night for anyone else? Just about to set up a scope proper in the hope tonight might be similar... Cheers, Magnus

I have three Berlebach tripods, a Report for general photography, a Uni for my London viewing supporting an EQM-35 mount, and a (monster) Planet for my dark sky currently supporting an AZ-EQ6. Aside from any other (obviously far less important) considerations, their beauty makes the difference between GCHQ allowing them to stay “out” and visible, as opposed to packed away and more difficult to deploy. M

Although I have occasionally stuck a camera on a mount and taken the odd picture, I'm no imager, so can't comment on that. All I can say is that the EQM-35 is specifically aimed at imagers. Which begs the question, why did I get it? The answer is that it's small enough to be reasonably portable from living room to patio, and has a 10kg payload capacity. Uni vs Planet. Uni, with its 60kg ability, is an appropriate match to the EQM-35. But the Planet. It's a monster. I knew it was going to be big, but I wasn't prepared for just how big. If you're going to upgrade to an EQ6-series mount, then the Planet will cope, but it's way over the top for just an EQM-35. Herewith my Planet "in the field" with an AZ-EQ6, my mak180 and my 12" newt...