IB20

I thought those might be through your f8 dob, cracking images. The FS must be some scope!

Fantastic, thanks for the heads up. Been having a good gander at Rima Hyginus, Rima Ariadaeus and Rimae Triesnecker. Ukert, Murchison and Pallas also captivating. Really rewarding lunar session. Some more iPhone snaps for the pile!

Fantastic sight! Grabbed a quick phone snap.

Gonna be a great day. 😃

Especially those TOEs!

Great pic! The 15mm BST is a fantastic EP. Probably the best of the range.

Playing around with exposure levels of ProCamera app with iPhone14 pro. The exposure and PST sweet spot is quite small but some decent surface detail can be captured. Combining both prom exposure and surface exposure gives a decent final concatenated image. Not bad for a phone and a 40mm scope! Ps, looks better on a phone!

A lovely young slender moon sitting alongside a blazing Venus.

Blimey, this is hard to spot in daylight with thin cloud around! I don’t recall having seen a younger moon or attempting to observe it purposefully anyway. Didn’t take kindly to being imaged either!

Had the 4” Starwave ED-R out last night on the AZ4 which hasn’t seen much action so far. Had to use it as a giant finder with the 25mm BST which actually worked really well, all that straight through finder practice with the Tak must have helped! Despite a lingering sky brightness it gave most pleasing views of globular clusters M56, M13 and M92, surprisingly bright too. In the latter two, single stars were resolvable at the edges; showing noticeably more than a 3” - probably the targets I’ve seen the biggest jump in resolution on so far! Tried for more messier globs M10, M12, and M107 but they were all lower down and swamped by the background brightness. As it was too bright for Galaxy spotting and not having a finder on the scope, I turned the scope to Zeta Herc which at 102x gave no indication of a secondary companion. Dialling up the mag with the 4mm TOE to 178x, occasionally showed an imperfect disc popping into view. Stretching the mag even more to 286x with the 2.5 TOE now showed a blob on the first diffraction ring around 4 o’clock - wonderful, pretty sure I haven’t managed this double with either dob or Tak before. Turning to Lyra, the first constellation I explored with a proper telescope, pretty much around 3 years ago to the day. The double double giving up its splits at 102x as perfect white discs; this scope is real quality, it doesn’t quite beat the Tak 76Q in its diffraction ring control but it does a very close job of matching it. Back to it and M57 was showing as a faint smokey ring and a real favourite of mine, open cluster Stephenson 1 looking marvellous as usual; to my eye delta lyrae has a greenish colouration to it that I’ve seen in no other star. No sign of M56 in the glare of the night so dropped down to Albireo for the famous orange and blue show, terrific! Finished the night cruising the star fields of Cygnus chorused by the hoot of a nearby owl but it was reaching time to pack up and head to bed before being rudely awakened by a toddler at a criminal hour of the day. Great session despite the lack of darkness and really looking forward to the reappearance of the gas giants for the 4” to have a go at and to compare to the little Tak.

Superb set-up. 👍🏻

The sun is properly kicking off today. Just an awesome morning viewing some huge proms and a flare around AR3312. The flare was extremely bright and probably lasted around 15-20 minutes. I seem to be exclusively Ha viewing at the minute, night-time Astro and white light has fully taken a back seat.

I’ve been very impressed with it. There are obviously bigger and better Ha scopes out there but I’m having a great deal of fun with mine and it is so useable. You’re right, seeing the prominences and filaments is thrilling!

A lovely big filament on display and some huge prominences yet again; a huge spire was visible around 2 o’clock ish which seems to have receded since. I love this scope! Afocal handheld shot on iPhone 14 Pro with Pro Camera and processed in LR.

Welcome to the forum! 🔭🪐

A new addition to the stable. 😁

It’s a fantastic bit of kit, really simple and a joy to use. Shows plenty for its very modest aperture. l picked a great time to dip my toe in Ha!

A prominence buffet currently on display. More surface detail visible too, as there is less high hazy cloud about, although not completely clear. Some lovely dark filaments are observable, snaking from AR3297. A quick iPhone snap attached.

I recorded the image I took 14:45 BST, spaceweather has an M class flare at AR3293 at 13:43-13:54 UTC. Fab! 👍🏻

Well, what an absolute triumph this little scope is. Been after a Ha scope for some time and couldn’t resist when I saw that @FLO had them on a Spring promo. Boxed like a Matryoshka doll and in a super supportive foam surround, after a quick unboxing it screwed directly onto the L bracket that luckily came with my recent AZ4 purchase. The inbuilt solar finder is fantastic, for WL solar I’m usually faffing around for a while to get it in view, not the case with the PST. After a few minutes of getting my eye and fiddling with the focus knob I started to see a large prominence on the limb near AR3285, just wow. Then after a bit of etalon tuning I saw so much activity, particularly 3 massive proms near the large sunspot cluster. But also sunspots, surface detail, a detached prom and two very short lived bright spots around AR3293. Wondering if I caught a flare?! Just all afternoon I’ve been nipping out savouring the views, it’s so easy to realign with the sun. I’m incredibly happy with the scope and can’t wait to have more fruitful sessions with it. I’ve seen so much with it today already. I love WL observing but this is another level, just sensational stuff. It works really well with every EP I tried too, although the seeing didn’t really take to the 6mm. I think FLO’s offer is still live if anyone was interested…

With the sun out, it’d be rude not to give a whirl! 😁

I have the 76DCU and have the M56i clicklock scope side into a clicklock 1.25” reducer. The Tak prism light path was too short for my EPs though (XWs) so I needed to extend the light path with a Moreblue camera rotator. I think the Baader prism’s light path is slightly longer than the Tak’s though.

I have the 4mm & 2.5mm TOEs and they are absolutely sublime. The 4mm is my favourite eyepiece. I use them a lot more than I thought I would; lunar and planetary views are sensational but I think double stars are my favourite with these eyepieces. I need and want the full set, if they ever get discontinued it’ll be a sad day! I should add if the Vixen HR line did ever make a reappearance I’d be sorely tempted to try one!

This thread is really making me want a 3.3mm TOE.

What I do know is that my 3” scope is affected less than a 4 and my 8” scopes when seeing is challenging. When seeing is complete garbage then it really doesn’t matter what scope I pull out.