KevinPSJ

If you are both really new to the hobby then I'd suggest binoculars over telescope to start with. If your budget is £300 then you could probably buy binoculars first and if you both really enjoy things, you will still have money for a telescope - these https://www.firstlightoptics.com/all-binoculars/opticron-adventurer-10x50-t-wp-binocular.html are £85 at the moment. Jumping in the deep end with a telescope straight away may put you off - unless you have support from a friend or an astronomy club who can show you how to use it and crucially, get it pointed at something cool quickly to get you hooked. Binoculars are great to start out with - with something like a 7 x 50 will give you a gentler learning curve but still be very rewarding when viewing Jupiter's moons, the big craters on the moon and deep sky objects like Andromeda M31, Orion Nebula M42 and the Pleiades M45 - https://www.space.com/stargazing-with-binoculars-beginner-tips The other advantage with binoculars is they are supremely portable. I find it key in this hobby that the less obstacles there are to getting under the dark skies with the right kit the better - remember you will end up standing in a dark field or garden in the middle of the night so more complicated equipment like telescopes will be doubly frustrating when it's cold and dark. To start with I recommend naked eye and binocular observing - learn your way around, get familiar with the constellations, the planets and the moon. That way, adding a telescope into the mix later will be building on a body of knowledge/experience you've already gained - making it easier to make sense of. Finally, don't feel like binoculars are the poor relation to telescopes. Many astronomers enjoy using binoculars more than telescopes and you can certainly spend a lot of money on them and on dedicated binocular mounts. One of my favourite things to do in the summer time is just sweep the milky way with binoculars. Nothing beats the majesty of that dazzling carpet of diamonds!

I use https://stellarium-web.org/ to find jupiter and then zoom until I can see jupiter's cloud deck. make sure you are centered on jupiter so that adjusting the clock forward or backward will keep jupiter in view and then the app will easily allow you to find the time when the spot transits. Rule of thumb seems to be it's about 10 hours between transits - so you may get unlucky and pick a night with no spot visible. For example I can see right now that tonight (2022-Sept-12) the red spot won't be visible until after 3am on the 13th and it crosses the jupiter "meridian" around 4:30am. However, the following night (2022-Sept-13) it's best placed around midnight. I had a peak at the weekend coming and 2 am on Sunday morning looks particularly interesting with GRS and a shadow from Io visible

Highly recommend naked eye and binoculars to start with. If you have not done any astronomy before and especially if you don't have someone with you to talk you through things like using finderscope, starhopping and generally finding your way around, then jumping straight in with a telescope will be very challenging and more likely to lead to frustration and disappointment than joy and wonder If you are starting with no experience then I definitely think a pair of 10 x 50s or even 7 x 30 binoculars and a tripod will be money well spent. You can get some really quick wins - the moon looks amazing and is very easy to find! Scanning the milky way on a summers night with binoculars is always an amazing experience - I never get tired of that. Spotting jupiter's moons is easily within reach. You can see globular clusters, open clusters and, if you have a dark sky, galaxies and nebula. The other advantage is you don't need to worry about finderscope or inverted or mirror image views so locating things is considerably more straight forward. If you are still interested after a season or two then adding a telescope to your equipment doesn't mean you won't stop using the binoculars - they will always be useful and enjoyable for astronomy. And if you lose interest in the hobby they are still a handy thing to have whenout walking or on holiday - same can't be said of an EQ3-2 mount

stellarium-web.org thinks it's PGC2003403 - see screenshot

Was camping in Dorset last weekend and caught a glimpse of Venus shining bright in the red sunset about 30 min after the sun had gone below horizon. It was only about 10 degrees above horizon so not easy to spot but once seen was very bright. Venus is easier to spot when at greatest elongation (angular separation from the sun as seen from Earth) because it will be shining in darkness. However, greatest elongation needs to coincide with highest elevation of the ecliptic (the plane of the solar system in which all the planets move) for it to be really striking. So it's a combination of the Earth's seasonal tilting (which varies the altitude of the ecliptic) and the relative orbital position of Venus/Earth which together give the most favourable views. You won't see the same exact positioning of planets/moon/sun play out every 365 days. In fact, the venus cycle repeats every 584 days https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus#Observability - which is not the same as our annual cycle.

That was a great account of your successes on Thursday night. I was out on Thursday too and also stayed up late as no work next morning. Glad I did - it was really clear and dark in my garden. I was busy setting my telescope to take some photographs for the first hour or so but around 1am I had time to stop and just look up In the east the summer constellations were on the rise but I struggled to recognise quite a few at first because there were so many more stars visible due to the pristine darkness. Hercules with his keystone body and wibbly wobbly arms (at least in my head) usually jumps out at me but it took a good 10 minutes of looking before I could see him clearly. Getting familiar with the shapes is especially useful for when you get really dark skies - otherwise you will be completely lost. As it was, I found Hercules and then corona borealis and then I was away ... What was especially nice was seeing the milky way hovering above the trees in the east with the big cross of cygnus bang slap in the middle. Those familar shapes from summer reminded me there's something to look forward to in the coming months - even though the faint fuzzies of galaxy season will be almost impossible to find in the bright summer nights, there's always the spectacle of milky way from horizon to (almost) zenith to enjoy. With still time to kill while my DSLR snapped away, next I went looking for Corvus - easy to locate below Virgo with it's sail shape and so with my binoculars (25 x 70 beasts) I tried to follow a star hop I had read about from the right hand star at top of sail (gamma Corvus) north and east to M104 - the Sombrero Galaxy. Low down in the south but it is still very bright in my binoculars and the line of stars from gamma Corvus lead me straight to it. Really large, bright galaxy and certainly one I will revisit with the telescope again.

Love that chart from @Zermelo. I think combining that with the star hopping instructions from Turn Left at Orion will be a great combination to get me started. Can't believe I managed M101 then. But it really was nothing more than a thin mist! And I think that gives me more appreciation for the Bortle 4 sky I have - but makes me itch to get to even darker skies when possible

I have very similar gear to you - skywatcher 150p with 10mm and 28mm eyepieces. I don't have a computerised goto, so rely on star hopping to find my targets. I live in a semirural village (bortle 4) but even here I struggle with being certain of identification. I do a mix of visual and astrophotography so I have set my 28mm eyepiece up with something called a parfocal ring so I can use the eyepiece to find things and then if needed/desired I can swap to the camera. I use the Stellarium app on my phone sometimes to confirm star hops. To help keep my dark adaption I set my phone up to use an app called twilight that can dim the screen really well no matter what I'm looking at. I also use Turn Left At Orion (a great book) reading by a red light headtorch. But getting really well dark adapted is key. Given all that I thought it might help you if share a few of my experiences with galaxies. The other night I was looking for the Leo triplet - I was fairly certain I was in the right place and I could see 2 barely visible smudges that I felt were M65 and M66. I just wasn't convinced I was really seeing them though. So I checked against Stellarium app and it did look like the right stars in the right places. But the real clincher was a satellite that happened to pass through the field of view and that Stellarium confirmed! Again, I went hunting the whirlpool galaxy in the big dipper. I tried 3 times over different nights and finally on 3rd night felt I must be in the right place but could barely see more than a hint of something. I had to swap my eyepiece for my dslr to take a photo of M101 before I was sure I'd seen it - that one looked like nothing more than dark grey smoke on a black background! Not until I had 20s of exposure with the camera did I see an image showing a faint but wide spiral. I've still failed to see triangulum galaxy even though I've tried 4 or 5 times - even successfully taken a few images without seeing anything in the eyepiece. In summary I'd say (1) galaxies seem to be the most challenging visual objects to find (2) more compact ones are much easier than wider ones and (3) I've yet to see any detail in any of the ones I've seen.

Based on my experience of sharing this wonderful hobby with others and hearing the "Wow" reaction, I suggest as a really simple first step get yourself a pair of reasonable binoculars - 10x50s are always popular. Then point them at the moon, the 7 sisters (Pleiades), the Andromeda galaxy or even jupiter and it's moons (if you have a steady hand). I defy anyone who has not done it before to not have a "wow" reaction the first time they view something like the moon for themselves. The advantage of binoculars is that if you lose interest (hopefully not, but it does happen) you still have something that's portable and useful in lots of other situations/hobbies. On the other hand, if you keep going, then binoculars are a great way to experience some amazing sights and start to learn your way around without really needing much more than patience, interest and a warm coat. Telescopes allow you to achieve much more but they are like musical instruments - if you don't know what your doing they can be very frustrating and there's a bit of "tuning/learning scales" kind of stuff that you can't avoid. The other really easy way to dip your toes in is naked eye star gazing: just go somewhere really dark near you in the summer time and if you stay up until midnight you'll witness the wonder of the milky way in all it's glory. There's nothing to beat that sense of wonder of being under a sky sprinkled from horizon to horizon with stars! With some patience and luck you can spot a galaxy (M31), a nebula (M42) and all the bright planets (I still recall the excitement the first time I spotted mercury with naked eye).

Clear skies are just the first step for a good night of star gazing. As you get more familiar with the subject you'll hear about (a) the varying degrees of darkness - in summer time there are lots of nights without astronomical twilight when it never gets truly dark (b) seeing and transparency - aspects of atmospheric conditions that affect viewing and can limit how many dim stars are visible (c) dark adaption where your eyes need to adjust gradually to darkness before you start to be able to see the really faint stuff. My son has recently started joining me in the garden to do some star gazing and while we do use my telescope the key thing I'm introducing him to at the moment is basic familiarity with constellations and guidepost stars. I'd strongly recommend learning the major constellation through the year so you can recognise the progress of the seasons, watch the moon move each night and spot the planets as the wanderers they are among the fixed star patters My son has already observed the shift from the beginning of winter in November with Orion rising in the East after sunset to March with Orion in the west going down as the night begins. My recommendation would be even before binoculars, learn to recognise the key shapes - the big dipper, Orion, Leo, cassiopeia, hercules and others - and the bright stars like sirius, arcturus, capella, spica. That knowledge will allow you to search with confidence for the harder to find targets and will give you a sense of familiarity so scanning the night sky doesn't feel like being lost in a forest. Adding binoculars or a telescope into the mix just makes it harder at that stage (unless you've splashed out on a computerised mount) And of course the main thing - take plenty of time to just soak in the wonder of it! No matter how long we've been doing this hobby I think none of us is tired of just enjoying the simple wonder of looking up at a sack sky full of stars!

Wow - very impressive. What did you use to find it - binoculars? By the way, I'd love a clear western horizon like that.

Bumping ISO up to max to find stars for a quick framing shot and then (pleased with the framing) immediately doing an hour of imaging that all needs to be thrown away due to wrong ISO setting.

I've found startools works really well - it's not free but would definitely fall in the "great value for money" bracket. I'm getting much better colours out of my data now ... using siril for calibration, registration and stacking and startools for stretching and colour balancing.

I was using my telescope the other evening for imaging with DSLR so switched to my Celestron binoculars (25×70) to have an initial browse around Auriga. I realised it's a great way to get familiar with the layout of the sky without all the frustration of inverted views and slewing. I found M36, M37 and M38 really quickly despite this being my first serious visit to this part of the sky. I don't know why I've not investigated this constellation before though - it really is glorious! Having had great success with the binoculars on unfamiliar territory I turned to Leo to look for the triplet as I've always struggled to locate them and can sometimes spend 30min looking in the telescope. Located them in 5 min through the binoculars with averted vision - M65 and M66 at least. I think the wide field and straight through view are great for getting to know the sky. I'll have a lot more confidence in my search next time I go hunting with the big guns if I've scouted first with binocs.

Thanks everyone for the helpful suggestions. Since this is an experiment to see if I can get longer exposures on my mount using a borrowed lens I think I won't modify my finderscope - I'll be putting it back to it's intended use soon (bolted to the body of my 150P). In the meantime I will try the hot-shoe piggyback approach for now and just be extra careful not to snag the finderscope ... Longer term (based on my results so far) I will probably invest in a star tracker for my DSLR - at that point I will still want a finderscope side by side with the camera. I may come back to to the modification route at that point. Just using polarscope alignment I can currently easily get 1 min subs with DSLR and the telephoto lens at 200mm on my EQ3-2 unguided. I'm going to try some drift alignment next to see if I can improve that.