Mandy D

Buyer to collect.

Looks amazing! This is in Lanuéjols, Gard from their website? Great skies down in that part of France. We once drove down from Nontron to Marseille to take a flight to Rome in the winter and went through the mountains where we had some amazingly dark skies, but unfortunately we did not have time to stop for more than 10 minutes to enjoy them. We keep saying that we really must go back , so perhaps this event next year might be just the thing. I bought my Skywatcher 250PX from a supplier in England whilst we were in France and had it delivered to a UK address. The next time we took the Land Rover down to the house, we took the telescope with us and it has been based out there ever since. We made the crossing by ferry and a nasty customs official asked me to open the back of the Land Rover for inspection, then lifted the back end of the box containing the telescope and deliberately dropped it from about 30 cm before asking what was in the box. I was so angry with him and told him how stupid his actions were. "Uh, sorry!" was all the apology I got. Luckily, no damage done and even the collimation survived.

Is that why BMWs don't have indicators?

A truck sized incoming at 25,000 mph? Nah, not dangerous! 😂

It's Icarus falling back to Earth after the wax melts ... 🤣

I like the idea. Perhaps extend it using the available statistical weather data, which appears to be available here: https://www.ceda.ac.uk/blog/uk-weather-station-records-now-freely-available-to-all-midas-open/ You have to register, but it is free. Then your app could be used to help observers decide where to view (say) an eclipse from with good chance of clear skies, months in advance. Obviously, this would make it a much bigger project, even just for the UK, but a lot more useful.

I only realised it was the eyepiece and not the scope the first time I put a DSLR on one and was confused to see an erect image in the viewfinder!

For reference, here are the photos I took when playing with my Newt in daylight. The first pair are with the camera aligned with the tube. The second, with the camera rotated 45° which corrects the orientation and the third shows what a normal eyepiece does to the image. If we rotate the eyepiece view so that the image is correctly oriented, everything will be the correct way round. i.e. no lateral inversion.

So, I am doomed to cloudy skies for weeks, now! I guess it must also apply to the seller of used equipment, too, so we're both in for cloudy skies! 😂

Well, if you think about it, your camera does nothing to the orientation of the view, so what you see through it's viewfinder will be oriented exactly as per the scope without an eyepiece. So, yes, the Moon will be upright and non-inverted, subject to the 45 deg rotation I mentioned previously. I did take some photos when I was checking all this earlier and may post them tomorrow.

Because a Newtonian reflector has two mirrors, there can be no lateral inversion of the image at the focusser. However, because of the location of the focusser, there is an apparent rotation of the image. With the focusser in the normal location, this rotation will be 45 deg to the axis of the tube. An eyepiece will normally rotate the image by a further 180 deg, whereas a camera at prime focus will not. For imaging it is normal to rotate the camera through 45 deg anti-clockwise wrt the main axis of the tube.

I have an autographed copy of one of his books of paintings. We met him at Autographica in Northampton(?). He was a very nice man and a great artist. We also had photos taken with him.

I recently bought a Skywatcher tripod with 50mm stainless steel legs secondhand in here with the intention of mounting my iOptron RC6 on it with a D800 dangling off the back end. I decided on a Benro HD3A 3 way tripod head as the mount, because it has an advertised payload of 12 kg (not 10 kg as stated by some suppliers), which I bought from Park Cameras. It should also work with this AZ mount from FLO: https://www.firstlightoptics.com/ioptron-mount-accessories/ioptron-alt-azimuth-adjustable-base.html The only problem was that the tripod has an M12 male thread to go into the mount and the tripod head has a female 3/8" UNC thread, so they were never going to co-operate with each other. Now, I could quite easily have drilled the head and re-tapped at M12, but that would have made the mount incompatible with other camera tripods, which I didn't want. The solution I decided on was to machine a custom spacer from a piece of 4" diameter aluminium bar. It was drilled and tapped M12 in one side to match the tripod and 3/8" UNC on the other side to match the tripod head with a cut-down bolt fitted to screw the head onto. This will eventually be replaced with a grub screw which will be bonded into the spacer with threadlock compound, but for now the bolt will do. The whole set up is very rigid and now all I need is clear skies to test it with the RC6. Hopefully this will be a much better solution than my existing camera tripod! The first two photos show the top and bottom, respectively, of the adapter. Photo 3 shows it fitted to the tripod. Photos 4 and 5 show the whole arrangement and the final two photos show close-ups of the adapter in use.

I spotted Jupiter hanging out with our Moon in the early morning sky today and grabbed my camera to get a few shots. Jupiter, it's entourage of satellites and our Moon fitted nicely within the frame, but to show Jupiter's moons I had to over-expose the Moon. So, this image is made up from two photos to get the exposures right for everything. Io and Ganymede are present, but you will have to zoom in fully to see them.

The ISS has provided many opportunities for sightings over the past week and, so far, I've seen it six times over four nights and had two sightings of the SpaceX supply mission to it. We have now begun to notice that we can discern the T shape of the craft with naked eye. Has anyone else noticed this?

SpaceX CRS-25 went over at 22:47 on a supply mission to ISS. Not as bright as ISS but still unmissable. It is back again10 deg above WSW at 12:17 Saturday morning.

Your capture is impressive. This near-occultation of Altair was seen from Northampton and North Derbyshire. Given how close the ISS is to us, I think the path would be quite narrow.

Yes, definitely Altair - Beta Aquilae was to the west of it. Thanks for confirming this. I spent ages on Stellarium trying to get the ISS in my sky at that time, but my location was bizarrely in the Middle East! Very dodgy. It is now back where it belongs, somewhere on the edge of the Derbyshire Peak District, between Derby and Sheffield, so not a huge distance from you. Great to know we could both see the same thing.

Just watched the 23:07 passage of the ISS from North Derbyshire. It grazed a bright star in my SSE and near max elevation. Rather cool to see.

I've used a D3200, which has the same sensor as the D3300, for lunar imaging and get respectable results. The attached image was acquired with a 600 mm focal length. It's not the best that the camera can achieve and was at ISO-400, so there is plenty of scope for improvement. My iOptron RC6 has a focal length of 1370 mm and I can fit the entire full Moon on the crop sensor. I think you should get good results with your camera.

My newly acquired Skywatcher 200P photographing the Supermoon last night.

Boys, huh? Because girls really would not have been interested in talking to each other back then and, of course, electronics would not have been a suitable interest either! Thankfully things have changed. V1 and V2 are some strange looking transistors!

Last night's Supermoon was my first chance to try out my newly acquired Skywatcher 200P. Unfortunately, the collimation was so far off, the telescope could not even bring an image into it's field of view, so I spent yesterday afternoon learning how to properly collimate a reflector! Thankfully, a cheshire was included with it! I only got 18 minutes for imaging, but the telescope proved itself quite nicely, although I'm sure focussing could be a touch better. The D800 made the telescope a bit front heavy, but the mount handled it well after tightening it. All photography was at a site near Chatsworth House in the Derbyshire Peak District. As we were leaving, I spotted Jupiter and Saturn rising, but with everything packed up they will have to wait for another night. Now, if only I can get similarly sharp images from my iOptron RC6!

Antares and our Moon were hanging out together in the sky last night. This image captured at 21:19 UTC shows Antares (bottom left) as a deep red colour, whilst the Moon is somewhat over-exposed. The photo was taken at the side of a main road as the Moon, low in the sky, was obscured by trees in my garden. I certainly managed to slow down the traffic as I was near traffic lights with a 300 mm lens on my camera and I'm sure some thought it was a speed or traffic light camera! The two fitted nicely on the crop sensor of my D3200 with the 300 mm lens. D3200, f/8, 1/100s, ISO-400, 300mm. Processing in GIMP - crop and sharpen.