Mandy D

Yes, we've been to that region and stayed at Zurgena near Albox, so not a million miles away from you. I'd love to visit, but am unable to drive at present due to an eye injury. If not for that an astro holiday could well be something we would do. I know how dark it is at night there and how clear the skies are.

Looks lovely!

Sounds great. Some photos would be nice, please.

Yep, my objective may as well have been made of wood! 🙃 Thank you, I'll look forward to collecting my trophy. Should I prepare a speech? Not my best image, but given the circumstances, I am more than happy with it.

Wait, what? You got five minutes? Nope, I really cannot allow this to go unchallenged! 🙃 Monday night provided me with clear skies, horizon to horizon, with but a wisp of cloud near my target, the Moon. So, I set up to photograph it. That took two whole minutes. I then focused and grabbed a test shot. By the time I had examined the image on the camera's LCD, the whole sky had disappeared behind clouds so dense I could not even see the Moon. End of (30 second) session! I proudly present my resultant image!

Brutal, but effective! I've always used a zener diode to control the gate of a large SCR to crowbar an errant PSU.

An RC will give more aperture and put the eyepiece in the same place as a refractor. I'm not sure how the focal length would suit your requirements, as the iOpton RC6 is 1370 mm and the RC8 is 1624 mm, but you can get focal reducers for them.

@great_bear it must be one of those new space telescope versions.

I'm not sure the younger members would recognise what an MFI mount is! I had to think for a moment. Maybe we should call it an Ikea mount, now. 😃

Close focusing requires the lens to be moved further from the sensor. We add spacers for macro work. So, if you are not reaching infinity focus, you would need to remove spacers.

There is a big astro dealer in Bordeaux who are extremely helpful and have large stocks. I have visited the shop in person when staying in France. Have a look at their website. The person we spoke to did not really speak any English, but was still helpful. https://www.astronomieespaceoptique.com/

@petevasey Very nice earthshine. I got a lovely sharp crescent Moon last night, but rubbish results on the earthshine.

Plenty of detail visible near the terminator last night. This was my first image of the evening, but things deteriorated rapidly from that point onwards with clouds coming in from the north, so this image was the best I got. Nikon D800, 600mm, f/8, 1/25s, ISO-100.

This is Jupiter photographed with a 135 mm lens on my Nikon D800, which has a very similar pixel size to the 500D. Obviously, Jupiter is over-exposed, as the intention was to capture the moons, only two being visible at the time, but Jupiter is clearly showing a disc. Clearly, a much longer focal length is to be preferred and all the other planets will appear even smaller.

Nice results. I was using the same scope with Nikon D800 and didn't really achieve better than you after stacking 60 images. In fact it was hard to see much difference between the best sub and the processed stack. I didn't even try to get in closer like you did. I posted my pics in the imaging section on Tuesday.

@mog3768 Yes, my garden is a bit of a jungle and the trees to the south certainly do not help with imaging and I am often surprised at how even with leaves on they often don't cause too much problem, even though you can see that the Sun or Moon is partly covered. It's only really like an extended obstruction in a Newt, I guess. I re-processed this morning's image and made it a bit brighter and sharper. I tried to grab Jupiter tonight whilst the 200P was still outside and covered in frost, but no chance; the sky was so wobbly!

Well, that explains why Jupiter's moons are sloshing around in a swimming pool these past few nights. I've tried a couple of times with the 200P to image Jupiter, but cannot get anything other than a messy blob. I got much better results on the Sun today, than I've had on anything for more than a week. This was the best I got tonight with the D3200 on the 200P.

@mog3768 That's an interesting place to set up for solar. I was shooting through the branches of trees in my garden with the Sun directly behind a large branch. Makes little difference to the final result though. Unfortunately, you can't see the trees in this photo of the 200P!

I finally managed to drag the 200P out onto the patio, today and captured some images of our own star showing some very nice sunspots.

In the bottom photo, it looks like the focuser is wound right in, as I think I can see a silver tube extending into the main telescope tube in front of the mirror. If so, then your eyepiece is sticking out a long way which makes me suspect you have a Barlow innstalled between the eyepiece and focuser. If so, remove the Barlow and insert your eyepiece directly iinto the focuser. Then point the telescope at something brightly lit like one of those outside lights and see if you can focus on that. If the above works, you are all set for trying it on the sky, but will need to refocus. If not, I suspect the telescope needs collimating. That is what the six screws on the closed end of it are for. You will need advice on doing this properly, but it really is not terribly hard. BTW, I found a link for the shop in Bordeaux that I previously mentioned: https://www.astronomieespaceoptique.com/ They were really helpful when I visited and the shop is huge.

Marks made in early cave paintings may be a system of numbers used to count lunar months for the purposes of hunting. Is it possible that humans became numerate, literate and advanced technologically because of the consistent period of our large Moon? It certainly gave them a better sense of the passage of time, was something with which to measure longer periods than the day and was simpler to observe than the movement of the constellations which defines the proper year. Both require a system of counting, but given the smaller range of numbers needed for observations of the Moon this would be the simpler system to understand and develop from. So, it would appear that it is not just in the field of astronomy that amateurs have something to contribute. https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkg95v/a-total-amateur-may-have-just-rewritten-human-history-with-bombshell-discovery?utm_source=pocket-newtab-global-en-GB

Looks like he has discovered a parallel, mirror universe, too! 🙃

I was trying to work out how you could drop a hex key onto the primary mirror. It never crossed my mind to have the tube in any position but horizontal when collimating. Adjusting the primary, this can't happen anyway, so this must be the secondary?

From yesterday's session, as this morning resulted in nothing worth sharing. I reprocessed the stack and saturated the colour to bring out detail.

Now, that is art!