josefk

Thanks @Mr Spock - TBH i have @mikeDnight to thank for triggering me to get out in daylight. Why of why i have never tried that before i have no idea. In daylight it has been very rewarding.

Thank you @Nicola Fletcher - these are my own aide memoir so the blue triggers the memory of the view through the eyepiece. I am probably going to get a bit of red card too for filtered views! Tongue only half in cheek.

Thank you @mikeDnight - i wish i could have gotten closer to just a day or so either side of the conjunction but i value my eyesight too highly to take any chances and befroe the conjunction i couldn't arrange things safely and just after it was cloudy. I think the engagement is greater following a series of something and enjoying the progression or development of something over a shortish period of time. It will be variable stars next 🙂 !

A very funny thread and definately not funny hahaha. I would one day like to do the entire Herschel list (not just the H400 which i am anyway totally stalled on); but where i live currently i have to hump my gear about to observe whether on foot or in the car so the 12" or 14" i would really need to make the project feasible looks a bit daunting - i would practically need to move house to make it possible. I see night vision in my far future if i don't move to the Norfolk coast first! if i could physically carry the mounting arrangements of the larger scope to a photogenic spot without needing to break it down it would take an equally "amusing" pic. There is easily >20kg difference and a three hands versus one hand difference in mounting arrangements between the 130mm and the two little ones.

Thanks for that book recommendation @F15Rules - i used to use transparency film many years ago (not for astro) and so i still have the kit to view slides. A few slides being included with this book has caught my attention - i hope they are still attached to the book when it arrives later this week. Depending on how they are mounted i may be able to project these pretty big somewhere; even "just" under a loupe they may be quite immersive versus a printed picture. 🤞

Thank you @Kon for the kind words and also the validation of your image from the same period. I really like that back-up because these “details” to the eye are brightness on bright so easy to wonder if they’re optical illusions! Your image is also great. Cheers

i really like the atmosphere that shot on film is creating. 👍

...and we're back on the other side 😃. I haven't had daylight opportunity for Venus since the inferior conjunction till today but today was great and it's great to be able to continue a series of observations - somehow the whole is greater than the parts and i'm having a blast. This observation is at 11:00 - 12:00 BST. No cloud detail to see today but a lovely soft terminator, bright limb, bright cusps and hint of thicker brightness on the North East quadrant round to the cusp. Quite breezy (shaking my lightweight tripod a bit) so x169 was a good middle ground magnification but it was steady enough 90% of the time to be really useful and the sky itself was very steady. Using filters with the TOE eyepieces; #15 Dark Yellow really emphasised the cusps, #23a Light Red felt like the best aid to observation and really revealed/emphasised a very slow graduation in brightness from the terminator (not just a soft edge to it), #82a Light Blue was very naturalistic and gave a very steady view. #38a Dark Blue and #47 Violet were way to dark. Too much for this aperture maybe? (3.3").

Another cheeky hour on Venus during the daytime. Not so much by preference as by opportunism - just taking advantage of the clear sky (day or night).

Very very nice @PatientObserver. You have a powerful combo there!

They slowly spin too - energised by ambient light - v. cool.

Stacked and de-rotated and flats and err...

My son bought me this fabulous Jupiter Mova globe for father's day :- I love it so much i treated myself to Mars this week as a reward for a bunch of decorating just finished but that has been tediously taking up weekends and evenings 😉 I could pursue a bit of a collecting urge for globes both celestial and terrestrial - i particularly like older ones and spent ages admiring these ones in the Whipple museum Cambridge this spring...

100% - it has become my right hand at the scope and a total bargain as it becomes fractions of a pence per use and actually a really nice product not just a really useful one.

Clouded out here but good luck!

Cracking read and sounds like a cracking session. Great finder arrangement at the top there.

You made me check the small print @RobertI “apparently” the explanation is you have to adjust NELM (down) at the same time otherwise the calculation assumes you are becoming superman as you age. 😁 that’s definitely a bug because I only ever input SQM and that’s objective rather than subjective so remains fixed as an input versus the age variable.

Superbly poetic Richard. Love it.

if you don't know it @Mr Spock the diet app "MyFitnessPal" is very good for keeping an honest eye on things diet wise. The free version with ads is annoying, the paid for version is expensive for what it is but it is a brilliant tool for managing portions and, if you do want to get into it, also for managing things like carbs and proteins and fats etc. I had and have a "relatively" healthy diet in composition but always ate too much of it overall - with the app and weighing some foods to get my eye in for portion sizes it all became very controlled in a good way. This screenshot shows part of my breakfast today - even multiple parts of meals can entered with one button press after a few days of using the app and it beginning to store your regularly eaten foods (so it isn't too tedious to use). i'm using it to keep the weight off i "lost for free" in the last few weeks of my Type-2 being undiagnosed (the only silver lining to the experience).

cool approach - i also like those smallrig weights...very useful.

i think semi rural is a fair description - i'm not super clear on the Bortle scale re. differentiation between 4 and 5 but i am probably in Bortle 4. I use the "dark sky meter" app on my phone and 20.5 SQM would be a long term average. Nearer 21.0 SQM with a favourable late rising or n/a moon and nearer 20.0 SQM with a decent slice of moon. i pay way too much attention to these things - you could put your scope and sky in here to see if "you're on" or not - https://www.cruxis.com/scope/limitingmagnitude.htm

I will definitely have a crack @badhex if (lack of) cloud cover usefully aligns with Enceladus' position and with having a larger scope out. I have Sky Safari at the side of the scope mostly and always have a good look for what i can see/should be able to see in this regard. Last year i managed Enceladus with the 185mm Cassegrain and using binoviewers - i remarked it in my notes as very faint indeed and not held with direct vision the whole time. Winding back time in SSP i think the separation of Enceladus from Saturn was 20" at the time and if its the observation session i'm thinking of i remember using my slo-mo controls on the mount for "a long time" holding Saturn out of the FOV to hide it's brightness while looking for the closer moons. Good fun.

I achieved a small victory last night observing the Veil complex more completely than i've managed till now. Using 85mm of aperture but only 15x and 19x magnification for quite large exit pupils w/ filters (nearly 6mm with UHC and 4.5mm w/ O-III respectively) i observed the Eastern Veil [NGC 6995], the Western Veil [NGC 6960] and "the bit in the middle" NGC 6974. I still couldn't definitively "claim" NGC 6979 Fleming's Triangular Wisp confined toi the middle and to the North only. The Eastern part was always brightest (and the only part that showed with UHC only). It was always the bit that revealed itself first after using any kind of red light between looks. In the Western part the brightest single fragment was a "plume" "rising" to the North from 52 Cyg. I didn't detect much extension to the south of 52 Cyg in the west. NGC 6974 in the middle was least bright but was quite extensive as puffy/wispy nebulosity running North South between the two named Veil parts and being grouped with a concentration of stars similarly running north/south. This has only taken a year to see as a complex so i'm pretty happy this morning. Now i need to work out how to get a dim red light dim enough to be able to try and commit some of it to paper. As faint references for the sky conditions last night i could see M110 and M33 with this 85mm scope but not M74.

How do you make your aperture mask @John - i'm pretty clumsy for this kind of thing and was having a wonder what i could use myself to join this fun project. I don't have a spare end cap to put a circle drill through - that was my first idea... I have been eyeing up 2l drinks bottles wondering if i could cut the bottom half off - cut a hole in it - and and paint it maybe?

Simple set-up last night enjoying a few Messier and three parts of the Veil whoo hoo 🙂 What a beautiful warm night to be sat out too.