Pixies

Was -7C last night, apparently. Everything was frosted-up when I went to bed. Electric radiator and electric blanket did the job. Nice dark skies but a little haze. Was good to look through a 16" dob, although not sure I could handle having to use a step ladder to observe! Really fascinating to see an EV scope in action, too.

Getting breakfast at Tebay. Should be there for 1pm, fingers crossed. Have forgotten stool 🙄

Et voila... Lens caps are off, to prove it's not just a collection of lens caps.

Stopping overnight in a little campsite in Penrith, on the way down to Astrocamp. The stars are out and so are nextdoor's motorhome's led lights! 🤬

It's all busy over on the Facebook page. Some people are planning to arrive today! It'll be chilly, mind. Don't forget your thick socks!

This arrived today: Which is a pretty good fit for my 8" dob. Will suit a 10" too. It will NEVER go back into that bag again, though!

A red dot finder might help here. All I do to find M44 is point the scope at the imaginary spot exactly half way between Regulus (Leo) and Pollux (Gemini) and you should be pretty close to it. Just a quick jiggle 5 degrees to the right and you'll find it. Same with binos.

If you can get a 9x50 RACI finderscope, it'll feel much closer to using your binos

1). That's what I did anyway! I used naked-eye and binos for old favourites. Well - perhaps I did cheat and look at a few old faves, but that now means they're spoiled for me when I'm back at my usual home spot!

Have been suffering from poor transparency all week and last night was no exception - although it was an improvement from the previous nights. Tried the Leo triplet in the dob, but saw nothing. So then pointed it at Theta Origae and could only just make out the faint secondary as it came and went in the pretty mediocre seeing. The Jetstream was supposed to be well away, so I guess it was local conditions. It had been warm all day and the temp was dropping rapidly. In the 80mm F10 refractor, I tried the same double star, but nothing was seen. So then on to some other doubles around Cancer, Leo and Bootes. It was obvious that the poor seeing had less of a detrimental affect on the little 'frac. For example, Izar (epsilon Boo) showed the secondary in the 80mm at 120x as an obvious bright spot in the first diffraction ring, but in the 8" dob, it was a fuzzy mess although visible at 100x - not the usual "hot-air balloon". 2 more clear nights coming up. Hopefully some better conditions soon.

Clear tonight (for now) and transparency look much better than the rest of the week just gone. Seeing looks pretty poor, though - with everything twinkling away. No moon - so faint fuzzies tonight!

His following tweet was a little more 'sweary', so I won't link to it and break forum rules!

I agree with a lot of the previous comments, that AP lends itself to more copious posts. Whether it's for technical advice or just down to the image-based nature of the hobby. I love visual for the calm and meditative nature of it. It's a form of mindfulness, if you like - especially planetary observation. I doubt that many astrophotographers would say that! Now, I'm not a luddite in any way - I have a masters degree in computer graphics and spend my working life up to my ears in tech, but AP just doesn't appeal in the same way! I must admit, I am considering dipping my toe into AP later this year, but only in as simple a way as I can find, so that I can have something running nearby while I observe visually. As for the 'what did you see tonight' thread, I'd like to think it's a running list of observers' experiences and an overview of what has been seen, with fuller individual reports for detail. That's certainly how I'd approach it. I wonder if the drop in individual reports is just down to the rubbish weather recently!

Haar here!

Just type the '@' followed by the username and a notifiable reference will come up, like this: @M40

Another clear night but both seeing and transparency are poor. When I was out walking the dog, even Capella, up near the zenith, was twinkling away! And I could also see a slight mist being illuminated by the street lights. So - census filling for me tonight!

The Super Polaris motor controllers were 9v centre negative, 5.5mm. Which is handily the same as a guitar effects pedal power supply!

Skysafari for me. Searched for objects in Taurus.

Beat me to it:

Ironically, the code version control system GIT, is actually named after the friendly insult: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Git#:~:text=core maintainer.[22]-,Naming,-[edit]

Just trying to save my back while I fiddled with electronics. No serious observing tonight.

Testing the motor controller. A bit too much moonlight!

Yes- it was under the rings (but not the screws): If I slide the scope back so that the rings cover the marks again, the scope is well unbalanced. I could try adding weight at the objective end to balance it out, but I'd rather be able to slide the tube about freely. I will get some new felt, though. Good call.

Turns out that the OTA hadn't been moved within the rings for quite a while! So when I first tried to move the tube within the rings to balance it on the mount, it took a little bit of paint off as well as revealing the discoloured paint beneath the rings. Unfortunately, since I'll be using a larger diagonal and Eps that the little 0.96" ones the previous owner had, plus I don't think he'd done much in the way of balancing, so it's not going to be sitting in the rings anywhere near the old position. I thought T-Cut would be suitable to restore the faded colour, but I'm not sure about the missing paint. The OTA is aluminium, so I don't think that car chip repair kits would be suitable. Does anyone have any experience of this sort of fix, or any advice? Also, I'll be looking to replace the material on the inside of the rings. Any suggestions? Cheers.

Just done some Googling - apparently in about 150 billion years, the light from these galaxies will first become so red shifted that they will appear to freeze in time. I really need to retire and do that degree in astrophysics!