Nik271

It is TAL -1T. It was a hugely poplular model of telescope in USSR in the 1980s. The letter confusing you is the cyrillic letter 'L'. These telescopes are made in Russia, hence the name. There is a lot of the history in this thread:

Finally managed to see the brightest visual quasar 3C 273 Thanks to @John for pointing this one out! I tried two nights, on Friday night with my 127 SW Mak, and it was on the edge of visiblity with averted vision. Last night I brought out the big brother 180 SW Mak and the quasar was much easier to pick up. Amazing, to see an object 2 billion light years away! I found it manually with the help of 9x50 finder and this chart from Stellarium. Once I got to the 10-th magnitide star (circled) I navigated with the scope using 12mm BST giving about x230 magnification to darken the sky. It was 11pm so not proper astro-darkness yet. It's rapidly getting very late in the season to see it as it starts to get lower before it gets truly dark.

Good review by Ed Ting here: Ranger is the more basic version of the Pronto (main difference is the helical focuser, I believe)

I just had a look this morning, the seeing is not great (but not too awful either). There are three very big proms and a M flare ongoing at moment. worth a look, spaceweather says 25% chance of an X flare!

Oh no! Pennywise from IT has moved to Venus 😀

Have you considered a wind generator? There are some small propellers of the type usually installed on canal boats, rated at about 200W which deliver 12 Volts DC current to a battery. Wind is generally a lot more reliable than sun in northern Europe in winter.

I kind of agree with Ed Ting that two eyepeices end up most used, but with the correction that you need two EPs for each telescope. There is a vast difference between a ST80 with 400mm FL and a C8 at 2000mm FL. And the slow scopes will not reallly need a TeleVue, the brand is all down to personal choice.

Have no fear, glass and coatings are pretty robust these days, occasional clean with care will not damage them. Some basic principles: Blow as much dust away with a blower. sometimes just this is enough. Then gently brush away any remaining large specs with a soft brush. If this is not enough then finaly use an alcohol/water mixture designed for cleaning lenses (Baader fluid is just fine) with cotton pads or clean lint-free cloth. Don't press hard, just spray liquid on the pad and genly drag over the objective from the centre outwards. If the residue is very old and stuck to the glass you probably will need to do multiple passes before it gets clean. Always replace the cloth/pad with a new clean one for each pass. I clean my objectives on average every 6 months, after the summer and after winter, some dust and pollen inevitably accumulates on the glass despite regular applications of the blower. Nik

Clouded and rained all day here. Gong record shows it quite well at 17:15. Must have been very impressive to see it live, it seems to lift off in just a few minutes.

I believe that at 5 inches and above the Newts are just shorter and save weight on the tube. They can even be truss tube desigh like the Heritage, unlike refractors which have to have a tube to hold the focuser in good collimation with the objective. It's also very hard to make a well corrected 5 inch doublet refractror faster than F/7, whereas a Newtonian can be made at F/6 or even F/5 comparatively easer. So the Newts end up being much shorter.

There is a M class flare on the sun right now which looks like Gandalf's rune. Maybe he's looking for a burglar.. 😀 .😀

Welcome to the Ha world! I got into it recently (with a Quark from FLO) and am still amazed how much can be seen and how fast changes can happen on the Sun. You probably did. 2993 was flaring every two hours yesterday with significant M class flares. If you recorded the time you can check the solar activity here: https://www.spaceweatherlive.com/en/solar-activity/solar-flares.html The biggest flare was M7 around 11:45 (UK summer time UTC+1) After a big flare it is sometimes possible to see rapid changes in the sunspot, filaments appear as arches of plasma get lifted into space. Even more impressive event (which I have not yet observed) is a big flare on the limb, then we should see these arches as fast moving prominences. I enjoy the sunny side of astronomy! Nik

You could stack the continuum and the polarising filter if at least one of them is threaded on both ends. Btw an OIII filter is very close in performance to a continuum one. For me the main advantage of the wedge over the film is not the resolution but the fact that the wedge is about 2 times brighter, so it allows more magnifiication with binoviewers.

I use a solar wedge and even with the x2 an x3 GPC lenses which came with the binoviewer I could not achieve focus. There is a way around this too provided the default nosepiece of your binoviewer is threaded for filters (which I guess they all are nowdays). Screw in a x2 or a x3 barlow lens insead of a filter to the nosepiece. In my case this works. You can even put the barlow further away from the nosepiece to accommodate longer and longer light paths. The distadvantage of this being 1. No idea what magnification results. You can esitmate the size of the sun compared to a known field of view of an eyepiece to get a reasonable estimate. 2. No place for a filter after the wedge. I have found that in small apertures (up to 80mm) you can put your colour filter in front of the wedge without any adverse effects, the focal plane is so far away and the aperture is small, so the heat of the sun is not strong enough to damage the filter.

Yes it was very impressive, I estimate the 'V' bit that lifted off travelled almost 10% of the sun diameter in a couple of hours!

Rima Sharp in Mare Frigoris on the Moon. Looked for it many times with 5 inch Mak, but just barely got a glimpse of it once. The illumination has to be just right, and the seeing needs to be excellent, both at the same night do not seem to occur for me.

It's a fast achromat, F5 and naturally suffers from chromatic aberration (CA). The Sun in white light at high power does have purple fringing, unless you use some colour filter.

Thanks! I just had a look with a 70/420 refractor and a Quark. Lots of action indeed, I liked in particular the two pronged small prom in the north.

For grab and go white light solar my current favourite is ...the Celestron Astromaster 80 (!!) and a wedge. Seriously it works well,the OTA is just a 1.2kg, I can lift the whole set up one hand . There is a bit of CA at higher powers but who cares, the sun can do with a bit of colour anyway 🙂

I just managed to take a look in between clouds. The big northwest prom is still going strong: a massive cloud above the limb, part of it detached. There is a big prom in the southwet as well, like a two wavy candle flames. Lots of other proms all round the dics. This gong image does not do it justice, it's magnificent!

I hope to catch it tomorrow in a break in the clouds if the forecast is to be believed. Gong data is showing the prom is still going strong:

It looks that you have captured the light ray over Hesiodus crater in @Nyctimene 's post:

I have been in dark sites several times with just a pair of humble 10x50 and they showed a lot more of the extended nebulae than my telescopes at home ever do. I think 70mm aperture for hand held bins is a sweet spot, still just light enough to hand hold. But also note that the more premium binoculars tend to be on the heavier side because they don't cost cut on prism sizes and glass. You may be looking at the prospect of hand holding a 2kg binocular for a long time, at least consider bringing a folding monopod. I'm my experience you won't need filters for the more conventional targets in dark site, eg Veil, NAM, milky way dark lanes. If you try for the horse head well that's another matter, I've never even tried it but from I hear a Hbeta is very helpful. But honestly any binoculars will do a great job in such dark location.

I have used my Mak 127 with Baader's solar film for a long time with no issues. There is nothing in the design of the Mak that stops using front mounted solar filters. But note that backend filters like solar wedges are not compatible with the Mak design as the heat will build up inside it. My advice is to reuse the purchased mounting cell but replace the solar film with Baaders one.

I found this test afocal image of a quark filter by Christian Viladrich: http://astrosurf.com/viladrich/astro/instrument/spectro/Quark/Quark-1/Quark-1-Alim-9h-23juin2022-Fluo55-collimate-105macroS-DSC-2171.jpg It looks just as bad as mine and Christian says this is not unusual for mica etalons. So I guess I'm being too paranoid and this picture is normal. Anyway I did write to Daystar today and I will report when (if) they respond.