PeterW

Scopes larger than around 6” will be progressively more affected by atmospheric turbulence. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronomical_seeing (r0 parameter). That’s why laser guide stars are used by professionals and (almost) no one bothers with big scopes looking at the sun. Your best comparison would be a night with no jet stream interference when the stars aren’t twinkling. PEter

See how many Jupiter’s/mars/Venus you have.... much easier test of poor collimation. If other binoculars give you a single image then these ones are at fault. If all bins give you double then maybe it’s you. You can get bins recillimatednrkr around £30, or you can try various online DIY options, though you would be very lucky to do it as good. hope you get it fixed. PEter

Tinfoil, blocks alpha. Also alpha tracks are about an inch long onlymas the air absorbs them. PEterW

Vaseline glass marbles and thoriated welding rods can give you some activity. Radon, are you in an area where it is prevalent? http://www.ukradon.org/information/ukmaps the trails tend to waft very rapidly after formation, we used a demo Americium source do a dense number of short “hairy” traces that you could block with tinfoil (alpha). Good rig. PEter

I used a commercial plexiglass one aimed at schools for an outreach course we used to run at work. Seemed to be a shallow black bottomed area for the detecting and an insulated volume below for the cooling, was circular, about 6” across or so from memory. Fill the top with solvent and pack the base with powdered dry ice. Seemed to work fairly well, at least on the demo source we had. Never looked for background radiation. I know a school has built its own radiation from space detector. PEter

Can be tricky to set these up, with a source in the thing goes crazy! PEter

Ask Santa for a copy of.... https://www.amazon.co.uk/Astrophotography-Sky-Atlas-Charles-Bracken/dp/1517687802 the NV users skychart (apart from the reflection nebulae). Cygnus has too much nebulapus fluff in. Pity you didn’t get across to ngc7822 /ced 214 in Cepheus, rarely ever mentioned even by imagers. cool stuff, seems like you’re a convert now! PEter

And if you can find some and print the mount bits you can make your own (no focus adjust like the real ones, but much cheaper). https://www.cloudynights.com/topic/536652-home-built-nikon-2x54-widefield-binos/ Like normal vision only a little deeper. peter

The range of stuff he’d pushed the boundaries was impressive. His recent exploits with the Lodestar were enjoyable, especially when they ruffled American feathers. One of the old guard of Ewell AS, I should get along there more often. my condolences to his family. PEterw

We should also be looking for other camping sites (especially ones with roofed accomodation) in very fark locations for new star party locations.... PEterW

Think the mob need their horizons expanding... PEterW

@mapstar I’d glue your socks on for when you take a wide field look around the sky in hydrogen alpha... there be a lot of big and diffusely fuzzy stuff! PEterW

But with the -L you can move it about tomsample light domes and avoid/sample the milky-way. Both have advantages. PEter

The Geoptik meter looks like the older mom-L unihedron... even days unihedron on the box in this image... https://www.astroshop.eu/miscellaneous/geoptik-sky-quality-meter/p,8850 looks like Geoptik are resellers of the Unihedron and people assume it is made by them. If the box has the clear raised plastic button protector then I believe it is the wide angle unit (not the narrower angle L version). Anyone else have other information?? PEter

The L version from unihedron is the one we all use. Interesting to see there might be another option... be interesting to calibrate them together! Maybe we could look to provide binocular advice to those in wild camping communities... show them great skies and hope they can help in the fight against light pollution. More people getting access to good skies can only be a good thing, if we can get useful data from them then even better! Peter