Nik271

I looked for T CrB last night in the twilight, could not see it as the sky was still too bright. I could see down to mag 8 stars around epsilon CrB so the wait continues.

I use my 100ED F7 refractor  with AZ5 mount head and it is fine at low powers. My tripod is an adapted surveyor aluminium tripod, so lighter than the steel one. I also own the steel tripod (for my EQ5 mount), that tripod will be very solid under the AZ5. Your main source of vibrations will be the mount head. An F7 100mm refractor is about 800mm long with dew shield and draw tube extended, With 2 inch diagonal and eyepieces this creates a large angular momentum force on the Altitude axis. Basically high powers (above x100) will be shaky, and of course they are the ones that require regular adjustment with the slow-mo knobs. Below x100 the views should be stable.  

Had a brief look at the 6% Moon and Earthshine with my 70mm F6 refractor. Seeing is pretty good. Can't stay late tonight, so just surveyed a few classic doubles that I can point to in the twilight : Mizar, Izar and Polaris. Could use up to x140 with the little scope, showing very nice airy discs! Finally checked up on T CrB but couldn't see it all in the still bright sky at 11pm. So not yet exploding. I'm sure it will pick a cloudy night.

No. More detals in a PM, so we don't hijack the thread.

I've seen it briefly with a 127 Skywatcher Mak. It was not a clean split though. You just have to be lucky with the seeing.

Here is the full report:

Antares is hard only for us further north because it's so low to the horizon. In good seeing x240 is plenty to split it. The  pair has similar separation as Izar, about 3 arcseconds but 5 magnitudes of brightness difference.

I looked at TCrB last night at about midnight and estimated it at between 10.1 and 10.5. To my eyes it was brighter than the double of 10.8-10.6 magnitude stars south east of it.

Intriguingly the B band magnitude observations from AAVSO have dropped down to mag 12, so the dimming continues. Eruption should be soon... Hoping for a long clear spell!

I don't think many journalist give enough thought to distinguish between 'far side' and 'dark side' of the Moon. In fact the 'Dark side' has more mystery in it so goes in the title, just as Pink Floyd did 

I had a quick look at some bright doubles in the twilight with my 102 ED refractor. Izar was great at x180, the seeing is good. Transparency not so much. Before packing up looked at T CrB again. Still dim at 10-th mag. Oh well, another time then. 🥱

Magnificent! Set the controls for the heart of the sun...

Interesting. The previous estimate  for the distance to Polaris was about 400 ly and this has been revised up by 25%. I wonder how it will affect the cosmic ladder calculations further up and potentially even the Hubble tension. It is looking more and more likely this is due to measurement uncertainty of cosmic distances rather than a gap in the model. 

I'm watching Sol in Ha at the moment. There is a bit of everything: huge filaments, prominence arches, active regions with occasional M- class flare. Take a look. here is a nice GONG image from Australia:

It takes soo long to get dark now, about 11pm is when I can see the brighter stars. I checked up on T CrB. Still at mag 10. I'm sure it's waiting for  long spell of thick cloud during which to blow up 🥱

Imagine the moment as it brightens some night, it's supposed to be very quick. It will be awesome to see that!

It was revised for 2024 based on dipping of the light curve:

https://www.aavso.org/news/t-crb-pre-eruption-dip

I'm all clouded 😞 This bright region must be an X-flare currently going on:

The variable star event of the year will be the eruption of T Corona Borealis, predicted sometime between now and September.  Barring a galactic supernova this one is as good as it gets for us visual observers - from magnitude 10 to magnitute 2 for a few brief days. With the sorry weather we have this year I expect I will be clouded for the main event and so used a brief spell of clear sky tonight to shoot several images of Corona Borealis with my Canon 250D. Just for the record to compare before and after.

20 x 3 second frames, no tracking, stacked in DSS. 

The Liverpool wins but not by as much as the 7 fold difference in aperture suggest. It shows that the limiting factor is mostly the atmospheric seeing. The image scale being similar the Liverpool is expected to be about  50 times faster which is compensated by the 6hrs/6mins ratio of integration times. So my take on this is that the seeing in LaPalma is much better than in the UK. Had you taken your scope to LaPalma probably the images would be much closer. Astrobiscuit tried exactly this some time ago and discovered his  8 inch reflector is not big enough, but something a bit larger will be very competitive.

Sometimes these YT suggestions are spot on. Lots of good stuff here.

Welcome to SGL!

Same as Ags here: I have the Hyperion and it's great in my Maks I use it as the default wide field EP. It is very comforable to use with plenty of eye relief. At F12 the view is sharp to the edge. In my refractor at F7 it is so-so - starts to gets soft about 70% out from the centre, not terrible but for example I also have the 17.5mm Morpheus and that is way better at F7 than the Hyperion. In your Nextstar the Hyperion will work very well.  I have not used the UFF my guess is that it is more future proof, i.e. it will work in faster scopes if you decide to change in the future.

Seeing here was mediocre last night, I could not use more than x140. No sight of the vent. Some nice views of Aristarchus though.

Indeed, and a few others in addition that look very pretty. The view in my Quark is much better than this image from GONG:

BTW today is  the 19-th, not 18-th 🙂

It was another evening of Moon watching for me, mostly rimae. The seeing was very good in early evening and with my Skymax 127 I observed rimae Hyginus, Airadaeus, Triesnecker, Reaumur and Oppolzer. They were all near to the terminator in an area running north-south from Mare Vaporim to Hipparchus, in almost ideal illumination. Rimae Triesnecker was showing extensive network stretching almost all the way to Hyginus A and B. 

Very detailed, Kon, well done!  I saw it passing overhead at dusk last evening and for a moment was tempted to try to follow it manually with my Skymax 127 but I just knew I wont be able to keep up with it. The Moon is much easier 🙂 

In Oxford it was mostly monochrome to my eyes with a hint of red and purple in the west at times.

We need a very very strong geomagnetic storm so that those of us who live in the  south can enjoy the brilliant colours normally seen beyond the arctic circle.