Tenor Viol

Sorry - house move got in the way... I'm in Penrith...

Thought I'd better say 'hello' as I've not posted for a while. I made the questionable decision to retire then become a full-time student for the last 3 years. I graduate next week with a 1st for a BA in digital imaging and photography. Sadly, in no part due to the weather, I was unable to introduce much in the way of astro into my project work (apart from a GIF of lunar phases). I did fair amount of film work as part of my course using 35mm, medium format 120 film in 6x7 format, and cut sheet 5x4 film. I also made photobooks and have been doing my own bookbinding. I'm about to move further north from Shropshire to Cumbria. Although skies are meant to be 'similar' I will be much further away from large cities, so I think will be darker. Once I've moved, I hope I can get to do some imaging. I have changed my camera kit recently so it's not done any astro at all - I'll talk about that on the photography thread.

If all you want to do is use a camera, then the two suggestions are fine, there are others out there too. You might want to consider a more rigid tripod, particularly if you use longer focal length lenses. If you wish to attach a scope to the camera, then you can get away with a small one with those mounts, but anything larger will need to move to a full equatorial mount.

hmmmm.... distance selling rules apply and the procedure outlined by szymon.

Affinity is similar in many ways to PS. If Affinity had a catalog I'd ditch PS, but because of a major project kicking off next week (which I will report elsewhere) I will have to keep using PS for the time being as I need the catalog (I have about 30k images).

I'd agree that if your primary aim is lunar and planetary, then you need to look at much longer focal lengths as that affects the image size.

On the HEQ5 you can adjust the brightness through the utilities menu

That's half the price of a Redcat...

I see AN has a review of the 180 - interesting piece of hybrid kit.

I do think this is were both satellite/cable broadcasting and public service broadcasting such as the BBC, Channel 4 and 5 fail miserably. About the only hobby activity that gets any coverage on any channel is fishing on one of the Discovery channels. There is enough space for there to be at least some sort of community broadcasting aimed at people's hobbies, interests, pastimes. But they'd rather focus on glitzy productions with travel budgets so they can set up a scene, then do the set-up, then a short spiel which lacks any real content, then move to the next scene and repeat. They seem to be afraid of having talking heads providing solid content.

Just to confirm for UK the time zone is 0:00, but at the moment 'daylight saving time' is Y. You'll be out by 15 degrees or more if one or the other is wrong

Parallax is measured by observing the position of a star against its background. Traditional terrestrial based astrometry you'd then make another observation 6 months later and measure the position again. You can now use simple trigonometry to work it out. You have the base of the triangle - the diameter of the Earth's orbit, you now have the angle that it seems to have moved so you can now work out the 'height' of the triangle. You need to look up 'astrometry'. A 'parsec' is the distance represented by a parallax of one second of arc. It's about 3.2 light years I think.

My view - dismantle and pack. I regularly go on music summer schools and consequently have to travel with instruments. You never know what weird things can happen when travelling - things move, you have to make an emergency stop, go round a bend and something shifts...

OK, it could be in a very high orbit

No, it's a satellite. The sun is still north of the equator for a few more weeks. and Andromeda is relatively 'north'. It's probably a wretched specimen of that which shall not be named.