josefk

Absolutely brilliant. I've really enjoyed Venus this spring so i've taken the liberty to nick your composite for my desktop background for a bit. i hope you don't mind 👍. I haven't observed every phase you have captured (especially the last couple/couple of weeks) but this is a lovely record of the season till now. Thanks for posting.

Small boxes have always got cheap things in them. 😂 TBH I am honest domestically it’s just that some things are harder to explain the need for than others “haven’t you already got…?”

I was hoping to grab a super low contrast sketch of the moon this morning - i perversely quite like a ghostly moon against a bright blue sky. Sadly it was too hazy for anything decent today. It was a pleasant hour in the park nonetheless...

Very nice Siegfried - two of my favourites.

Speaking of my experience Alan @Alan White I feel there is zero difference in stability between before and after. The planet always felt like it was set in concrete. I only did it to widen the footprint so a longer scope couldn't take its center of gravity outside the footprint no matter were or how carelessly i pointed it. TBH i'm not sure it could have done that even before the mod so it was a purely belt and braces exercise for me. A small change i did feel made a massive difference was adding spikes. A huge benefit that perversely i only noticed when i temporarily went back to the standard feet.

Super achievement and a great adventure. All the best for the next big target list whatever that it.

I would find this very difficult to justify to my better half if i get caught. Nothing wrong with the stock focuser at all but i'm hoping if this is a 1:7 gear reduction its also 1/7 the amount of turning force required and therefore less transfer of finger wobble to the scope while approaching sharpest focus...

get well soon Mr Spock.

These are wonderful - it's great tracking the phase changes via images posted in this forum!

i did the identical mod at the start of this year 😇. Easy but quite satisfying and increases the circular footprint quite effectively. i keep meaning to get some little black screws to put in the original holes to finish the job off.

it strikes me there is a huge amount of capability there packaged in such a way that it will always be easy to get out and utilise it (low deployment effort and easily mobile). Brilliant!

It gives me motivation 🙂 . Lovely

Considered observing there @MalcolmM. Good stuff.

That sherwood observatory link is a nice resource @wookie1965 - I can see myself downloading and printing a few of those to a binder for use on purely analogue nights. Many thanks.

Thanks @Captain Scarlet TBH i was fine Saturday and I've paid the debt back little by little during this week. With recent cloud you have to grab the hours when you can!

100%

Though the descriptions are OK my tongue was firmly in my cheek when posting @SwiMatt To your original question if i sort my observing notes by 'calculated surface brightness' in MPSAS (quite imperfect in lots of ways but better than nothing) and then "eyeball" the list, then there are several hundred entries for Planetary Nebula, Open Clusters, & then Globular Clusters before even bright Galaxies make an appearance...(or not as the case may be 🤣) The first bright galaxies then in the list are with only a few exceptions Messier objects. Obviously thats a very subjective comment based on what i attempt to observe but it chimes with what others have posted above.

funny you should say that... averted-vision-scale.pdf

Yeah. i get it it. Definitely. I could fit the motor kit to my current mount and I've heard myself at PAS how unobtrusively quiet it is but even in terms of only my astro shopping list it's quite far down the list at the mo...😁

i have only a five minute walk to my grab n go location and i regularly make that walk - from that experience i would strongly suggest you do a practise run or two to your local site carrying a dummy of the weight you are contemplating in kit. I grossly misjudged how much weight i thought i would be happy carrying a few hundred meters and have reverted to very light GnG kit (small refractor, carbon tripod, video fluid 'alt/az' head) in the meanwhile while i have a rethink about what is really manageable really easily... Avoiding the need to carry a mount and tripod altogether and aiming for an eyepiece height that needs only a tiny stool to sit at comfortably is worth putting thought into unless you can load up some kind of hand cart or sack truck as @Mike Q suggests above.

i'm too lazy for this time of day to ever be early for me - i can't get up. Its not too bad as a late one though - the sleep debt only needs paying back bit by bit over the following days 😴 ...and i've come and gone over the topic of a tracking mount - there are times when i could really see the benefit!

A beautiful dawn chorus accompaniment too @mikeDnight - i was very well compensated for the time of day because even while only at 17 degrees the air was brilliant after a cold night. i'm stoked myself for more of the same!

i kind of knew it @IB20 - i can make 4mm with an 8mm Ethos and 2x Powermate BUT i have found the 3.3mm TOE quite remarkable and love the 5mm 5LE so a 4mm TOE between them now feels inevitable. i actually wish there was a 6mm TOE as well because that would be a great focal length for me too.

So over here https://stargazerslounge.com/topic/410225-a-spring-catch-up-venus-luna-sn-2023ixf-familiar-pne-and-fabulous-seeing/#comment-4383394 i described observing from evening blue sky to post dawn blue sky on 26th/27th May - it was a great session and ended in what was for me a quite a specular view of Saturn in incredible seeing and against a beautiful pale blue sky. I made a few thumbnail sketches at the scope and have been like Richard Dreyfuss in Close Encounters of the Third Kind over this past weekend - obsessively (and frustratingly) trying to transform those thumbnails into something that matched what i observed. My drawing skills fail me and my renderings have been either too subdued or too dramatic and i can't render exactly what i saw in both subtlety and clarity. Nevertheless i am least unhappy with this one below: ...though in sheer frustration with pen and paper i also tried an electronic sketch which is probably the most accurate capture/rendering/version of the observation: There are several firsts for me in this observation - shadow on the rings, shadow of the rings and such a prominent ruddy band. Kit was the TOA-130, Tak 5LE Ortho and TOE 3.3 'Ortho'. It was probably a super expensive observation because now i know i "need" the TOE 4mm for Saturn later this year...

if you set something up Martin would you post it on here? I'm miles away from Chesterfield but my parents live there and i've promised i'll take my Dad up into the peak district for some stargazing at some point soon - it would be nice to to do it with fellow SGLrs. Cheers