Nik271

Oh yeah, that was a great book, so many memorable quotes. Makes the end of the universe so entertaining. 'where shall we have lunch?' is the Age of sophistication indeed 😀 I think the end was supposed to be a big freeze in the book....

Dear Andy, Just to put it again at the start: a decent mount is a must, at a minimum EQ5 with RA drive, but for long exposures (above 60s) you may decide later you need some guiding and HEQ5 at least. I have a Canon 250D and have used it with a 200mm F2.8 prime lens, with Skymax 127 MakCas and with a 6inch F5 Newtonian, each time mounted on EQ5 just with RA drive. Here is a quick summary of my experience: Easiest for imaging is the camera+ fast lens combination. This is best suited for large objects: The Milky way, the Andromeda galaxy, Veil Nebula, the Orion Nebula complex. You can get very good results this way with minimal investment just with the lens and the motorised EQ5. The 6 inch Newtonian is a cheap way to start looking at and imaging smaller objects. It's great visually for all DSO objects, and somewhat harder to do imaging than the telephoto lens, but its worth the extra work because it can frame the Eagle, Swan, Dumbbell nebulae and similar size objects very well. As your experience grows you will probably find that Newtonians have drawbacks for imaging: lack of flat field, diffraction spikes, prone to wind, need regular collimation. I still like mine: it's a light bucket and visually beats all my other scopes at DSOs. The Skymax 127 is great for planets and the Moon. It is F12 so very slow for imaging. I managed to image the Ring nebula with it and the M13 cluster in Hercules but it needs super long exposures and I will not recommend it for imaging DSOs. Visually it is a very capable scope even for DSOs but as you know aperture rules and the Skymax 127 is actually only 120mm, so my 6inch Newt is a better light bucket. I don't have refractors to compare but I know they are also excellent starter scopes. The above is just my experience so far. Cheers, Nik

I think its too early to tell. I think the shape of the economic recovery rather than the name of the president will probably determine the direction of NASA. And if not NASA perhaps the current crop of billionaires and space tourists may continue the human presence in Earth orbit and the Moon. Beyond the Earth/Moon region I expect the space probes will rule for quite some time - I just don't see human flight to another planet in my lifetime happening, there are too many difficulties to overcome even if the money is found.

I agree with Mr. Spock this is not a fault of the scope, in fact the secondary is visible at low powers in all obstructed scopes. The reason is the large exit pupil: In a 35mm EP the exit pupil is massive 7mm of which the secondary is close to 2mm, so you can easily see it in daylight. In fact during the day the eye pupil is smaller than 2mm so you can get a blackout if you eye is positioned dead center on the EP axis. This also shows that to get the full benefit of the full aperture at such low magnification you need to be fully dark adapted so your eye pupil can cover as much of the 7mm light cone as possible. This looks like a great versatile scope! My largest one is only a 7inch MakCass, I'm getting aperture fever Nik

NiceI I quite like the colour. It's interesting to compare the size and detail of the southern polar cap, latest images show it is significantly smaller now.

Just luck probably. Long winter nights are here and this hobby is well suited to the lockdown, so makes a good story right now. Also I guess most people, BBC reporters including, are impressed that one can take pretty decent pictures with such modest equipment. They probably expect a giant 10 inch refractor in an observatory or something like that. Nikolay

Wow, what an amazing catch in just a day! Mercury is a tough one for me, I get to see it just once or twice a year (my horizon is full of trees and houses both east and west).

Nice report, Mark! Mars is rapidly dwindling now, but there are still great views to be had, we will miss it when it's gone. I try to observe it as often as I can. The Pup is eluding me as well. Clear skies! (maybe the transparency will get better with less traffic these days... ) Nikolay

Indeed! Which makes is very strange that Galileo did not record M42 in his observations even though he saw the four stars of the Trapezium. He must have used too way much magnification. Or perhaps he cared more about stars and not nebulae, which must have been completely unknown at the time.

Hi Adam, Great images! I agree with you about Longomontanus and Bullialdus. I used https://quickmap.lroc.asu.edu to check it. There are all sorts of layers that can be added over the map, including the names of all features. Nikolay

This is a very nice image! I like the green colour, shows much better in the image than visually. Ganymede is 1.3 arcseconds and Uranus is about 3.5, so considerably larger. Ganymede usually comes out as a tiny spec by comparison.

Actually for imaging the planets and the Moon you don't need a fancy mount because the technique is 'lucky imaging' : you take hundreds of short exposures, in a video which are then stacked together with software. As long as you keep the image of the planet in the field of view the software can do the rest. For DSO the mount becomes more important. The ring nebula image is just a single exposure at 15 seconds, using the motorised version the celestron mount and this was the best I can do before the stars started to trail. (Celestron calls this mount CG3, which is really equivalent to EQ2 I think). At F/12 the Skymax is not very suitable for imaging DSOs. It can be done but ideally you need longer exposures, minutes instead of seconds and then you need precise tracking mount which is very expensive. Personally I stick with visual and take pictures only when I want to show friends who can't be bothered to stay cold and late at the eyepiece

Thanks, John and Chris! Its encouraging to know it's doable. My skies are Bortle 4/5 (I can see the Milky way vaguely overhead in summer), the main difficulty is dark adaptation as there are lots of streetlights everywhere where I live. Some day I'm planning to take the scope and set it up in a field nearby to give it a proper change at dim objects. Nikolay

Dear Nair, I second the option of the 5inch Mak on eq3-2. I used exactly this set up all of last year (Skymax 127 on the Celestron mount for Astromaster 130) mostly for visual and occasionally took some images with a Canon camera in prime focus. I was very happy, it can resolve a lot of classic double stars (the double-double, Izar, Castor, Rasalgethi, basically anything up to 2'' is easy with this scope subject to seeing conditions). I saw globular clusters and galaxies and took photos of the planets. It's a very portable set up and hard to beat for this aperture. I'm attaching three photos I took with this scope. Note that my imaging skills were at beginner level in 2019 so somebody more experienced can get even better results with this set up. Nikolay

Thanks! This image is pretty close to what I was seeing in the moments of best clarity. Visually I use between 150 and 300 magnification and then Mars is reasonably large: at x300 it looks like an orange at arms length. But normally I stay within 200-250x because of the seeing. I was imaging at the native focal length, i.e. 2700mm. Magnification is irrelevant when imaging, the relevant notion is image scale. My Canon has pixel pitch of 3.7 microns and I was imaging at .28 arcseconds per pixel. Mars is about 22 arcseconds so the image is about 80 pixels wide. On the sensor the projected image is ridiculously small : 3.7 x30/1000 mm so just 1/10 of a mm. My camera sensor in 4k crop mode is 3840x2160 and at 80 pixels Mars is tiny on the screen of the camera, just a little red dot. I use Pipp to crop the movie frames to 300x300 pixels and center the planet before stacking. Nikolay

PS. I forgot to say, that I rarely use my telescope for more than 2 hours in winter, as I mostly do visual, so my experience may not be relevant for imaging which can take the whole night. Eventually every part of the scope will get cold and once it reaches below the dew point of the ambient air it will dew up irrespective where it is. Nikolay

Telescopes lose heat at night chiefly by radiating it into space, So the part which gets coldest is the one facing the sky. This is why the correctors of Maks/SCT get dewed up so quickly. In open tube designs the secondary is protected in it housing and is pointing away from the sky so it will be very unlikely to dew up. The primary will almost never dew up. In winter I tend to use my C6N Newtonian and it has never dewed up. Clear skies! Nikolay

I like those craters which were flooded with magma like Schickard and Plato, the dark colour really stands out. Judging by the number of craterlets Schickard must be considerably older than Plato. And of course some of the mares are actually huge fllooded craters. I recently realised that Mare Imbrium is one such, Plato and Sinus Iridum are one rim and the whole of Montes Appenninus is the other. Now there is no Moon for a few days, time for DSO! Clear skies, Nikolay

Hi! Yesterday was quite windy and I thought I would only do a bit of visual, but suddenly around 10pm the seeing improved and I decided to try imaging. I attached my Canon 250d at the diagonal to increase the focal length a bit and took 4min video. Then Pipp, As3! and finally Registax for wavelets and dispersion correction. Came out better than I expected, in fact this is the clearest I've managed so far of this side of Mars. I think the faint bright spot on the top right is cloud over Olympus Mons. This is a first for me (Scope: Skymax 180, camera: Canon 250d in 4k crop mode) Thanks for looking! Nikolay

Lovely detail there. I still have to capture such a good image with my Skymax 180. At least your image shows its possible. Thanks for the inspiration!

Hi Marv, The polar cap is very small right now and hard to see. I just could see it yesterday (14/10) around 10pm at 270x with Skymax 180. The main problem is that the planet is too bright and your eye has trouble resolving the subtle features. I found that a filter to cut the glare really helps. I personally like the neodymium filter, but have also tried orange and light red and they made the features stand out a bit more. And Mars became very red of course... Good luck! Nikolay

Nice photos! If you want to capture the Earthshine you need slightly longer exposure. I used 1/2 sec at 200 ISO with Canon 250d. The sky becomes brighter as well. This was from 7am on Tuesday: Actually with longer exposures you can even see the mares on the dark part. But then the rest is blown out. For best results one can do a composite shot. Clear skies! Nikolay

Nice report, Doug! I was observing at the same time and also had good views of the Moon. Did you spot a massive crater on the south west limb, with very uneven floor and a small crater inside? I think this is crater Bailly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bailly_(crater) I checked it up later and it turns out that it's the largest crater on nearside, 300km wide, bigger than Grimaldi and Clavius. And one of the oldest. There is always something new to see on the Moon...🌙 Nikolay

Yeah, it was a pun attempt More seriously if the 6''CC is as good as the 8inch CC it will be a killer for the Skymax 150: they have almost identical specs, but the CC is so much cheaper and may turn out to be slightly better optically. As far as I see the Maks have just one advantage: no need for regular collimation. Compare to the advantages of the CC: fast cooldown, better focuser and no mirror shift. Skywatcher should up their game!

Well there is this one too as a back up to the launch http://www.shipspotting.com/gallery/photo.php?lid=2695109 (sorry couldn't resist - it just came on my google search)