IB20

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.

Uranus looking splendid! Those rings…

I’d also say the Starfield and iterations are only going one way in price, the current £899 is a very good price for what you’re getting. If you find a well loved one on the used market, you are getting a real bargain!

First clear night I’ve had opportunity to try out the new 4” APO and whilst at it I thought I’d compare it to the Takahashi 3” in 76Q configuration. Firstly, in a grab n go sense, the Tak took 30 seconds to take out on the Starbase AZ mount, a real one handed job at around 7kg. The Starwave on the other hand was taken out in two pieces; a hefty 9kg AZ4 mount on steel tripod and 4.5kg OTA. Still, all set up after 5 mins though so not too bad. I have seen such set-ups described on SGL as grab and groan, which I’d probably agree with, it’s certainly up there with the 8” dob. After 15-20 mins cool down it was time to test them optically (aesthetically they both look the business might I add). So trying to be fair and keeping to similar eyepieces, I opted for the 7XW in the 102 @ 102x and the 10XW in the Tak @ 96x. With the moon dominating it was really the only target to aim for first, so turned both OTAs towards our closest stellar neighbour. After focussing around the SW placed terminator and much to-ing and fro-ing between both scopes, it was fairly noticeable that there was more to see in the Starwave. What I mean by that was the ray patterns and lines were a bit more etched, the mare looked a bit richer and had a touch more depth and craterlets seemed to pop out a bit more. There wasn’t a huge difference between the main craters on show between their walls, shadows, nooks and crannies. Neither scope showed any false colour and the perfect contrast between whites and blacks were seemingly on a par with each other. I’m not certain there wasn’t anything I saw in the 4” that I didn’t see in the 3”; whereas switching that comparison around, I’m certain of it. After increasing the magnifications, it was only at the maximum I could get the 714mm Starwave, 286x with a 2.5mm TOE, where the little Tak started to get the upper hand. More atmospheric turbulence started showing and the image was a little softer in the Starwave, the 76Q on the other hand, happily ploughed on to 381x with the same eyepiece despite the appearance of some floaters at a now 0.2mm exit pupil. For some reason floaters don’t seem to bug me as much on the moon as they do on planets and white light solar. Realising I’d only checked out one target, I turned my attention to a double star that has impressed me in the shorter 76DCU configuration. Turning both scopes to Izar showed a beautiful golden and steel blue double, truly stunning and one of the best targets in the night’s sky. The Starwave showed a thicker and brighter first diffraction ring and larger gap but I’d say overall I preferred the views through the Tak as it was all just slightly better controlled, the colouration of the secondary is just mesmeric. So, about 2.5 hours of comparison and I looked at two target, 😅 but it was lots of fun. To summarise, I don’t know what I came away being more impressed with, that the Starwave is as good if not better for some things as a 3” Tak or the 3” Tak is as good if not better than a 4” APO. One thing is certain, more comparisons will happen soon! Some gratuitous iPhone snaps and a sketch attached.

First light for the 102ed-r and the new ScopeStuff phone holder to try out some rough push to.

I desperately want to compare the Tak 76Q and the 102 Starwave FPL53 for a bit of fun. Not blummin’ likely with the current weather though, March has been honking! Not even a glimmer of solar either.