Starwatcher2001

Welcome aboard SGL, and welcome back to astronomy. It's good to have you with us. I spent 20 years away from astronomy but it's great to see your old friends back in the skies have been patiently waiting for you. Have fun.

Love the report, and like Stu, the enthusiasm. Brings back memories of my first glimpses of Saturn's rings that looked more like ears in my cheap 60mm frac, but boy was I excited to have found it by myself and seen it with my own eyes. Sketches are a nice touch, really brings things to life. Thanks for posting.

Welcome aboard SGL Ian. Good to have you with us. Very nice images fella.

Welcome aboard SGL, Cloud. Good to have you with us. Binoculars are fine instruments for enjoying the universe. Enjoy.

That's some eyepiece, John. I had the ES82 18mm but didn't get on with the 13mm eye relief and sold it. That 92 degree make it look like a tiddler, and much better e/r too at 22mm. Pricey, but worth keeping in mind. Might be able to try one at the club when we can reassemble.

My thoughts entirely Stu. I'm currently doing a lot of lunar observing, which involves frequent looking at the maps to identify craters and features. Swapping glasses on/off is a real pain. The XW eps are the only two in my collection that let me see the whole field with glasses on and hardly a head movement. Also works very nicely with the Teleview 2x Barlow, which retains the eye relief.

Welcome aboard SGL. Good to have you with us. Consider yourself connected with arguably the best and most friendly astronomy site on the internet. I'm purely visual and wish you well with your new journey into the dark arts of astrophotography.

I have the XW 10 and it's one of my favourite eyepieces: good field of view and sharp. It's a very comfortable eyepiece to use with glasses, having a 20mm eye-relief. But it's equally comfortable without glasses as the eyepiece screws upwards. The XW range are expensive (to me), but are worth every penny and with care will last a lifetime. I plan to get more as finance allows.

Welcome aboard SGL Trevor. Good to have you with us.

Nice one Victor. I was looking at Plato and Sinus Iridum (my favourite lunar feature) a few days ago during daylight, but couldn't spot any craterlets with my 80mm. I'll have to have a go with the 925 when the evenings are dark enough to warrant setting it up. @John, great link on CN, thanks very much. Victor, if you've not come across it, this is a great interactive site for looking at the moon in detail (posted here on SGL by some kind person, I forget whom): https://quickmap.lroc.asu.edu/layers?extent=-13.3059512,49.8523329,-6.032996,53.4861116&proj=10&layers=NrBsFYBoAZIRnpEoAsjYIHYFcA2vIBvAXwF1Siylw4oNEQBmOORxBLPAk8y8oA

Welcome aboard SGL. Good to have you with us.

Welcome aboard SGL Osvaldo. Good to have you with us. Please, there is no need to apologise for your English. It is very good. That's a fine looking setup!

Emdeejay, if you try your focal reducer during daylight with a long f/l eyepiece, don't worry if the middle of the field of view looks dimmer. Mine does that with a 40mm e/p. I don't see that at night and the wider views are very nice. Cheers, Mark.

Hi Emdeejay, As Stu mentioned, have you actually moved the focuser all the way from one end of the scale to the other? On an SCT it's a ridiculously long distance and far further than you might imagine. On my 925 SCT it more than a minute to get from one end to the other and makes my hand ache. The first time I did it I thought my scope was broken as it just kept turning and turning. Keep winding until it stiffens up, it won't fall off the end. Thankfully the actual range that's needed in practice isn't that big, except when I put my focal reducer in or out, in which case I've got to wind the hell out of it again*. You might try a little experiment. It's a bit of a faff, but worthwhile and quite educational. 1. Set the scope up during daylight, fairly horizontal and looking at something distant. 2. Set the scope height so that you can sit down to look through the eyepiece. 3. Aim and focus on your object using a long focal length eyepiece. 4. Wind the focuser all the way in until it gets stiff (I believe that's clockwise) (from Rod Mollise - Author of Choosing and Using a Schmidt Cassegrain Telescope) 5. Remove diagonals, extensions etc. 6. Temporarily attach a metal ruler, straight piece of wood or similar to the bottom of the telescope's visual back (that's the threaded adapter on the back of the telescope tube). Use a strong rubber band, duct tape or whatever. 7. Hold your eyepiece on the ruler/wood, using it as a slide and view through it and the scope to the object. 8. Slide the eyepiece backwards until you finally reach focus. It's a bit tricky to hold everything in place, but easier sitting down. 9. With a bit of care you should reach focus at some point. Mark the position of the front lens on the ruler, and measure it off (distance A). If you can't reach focus, restart from step 4, but wind the focuser the other way before you start. 10. Repeat steps 7,8,9 with your binocular. Mark the distance to the front lens of the bin, and measure the distance (distance B). If you reach focus, that will prove to yourself that it's possible with that scope/bin combination. Distance B is how far you need to achieve in total once you put the diagonal and any extension tube back in. The difference between A and B will tell you how different it is between your eyepiece and bin, and whether this is more, or less, back focus. I think most of us are convinced that you should be able get that difference using the focus knob alone and shouldn't need any extensions/barlows etc. Good luck, you will crack this. (* As the change in focus was... erm... winding me up, I bought a motorised focuser. It still takes a fairly long time to move from one end to the other.)

Nice report Richard and good to see you had an enjoyable evening. Mizar and Alcor were the first double I ever split, and it was a few weeks later until I realised there was another double in there. I like the "to do" list. Sometimes it's fun to go out there and just play, but given the dodgy weather in the UK it's more productive to have a plan of what you fancy observing. It's also worth logging your observations so you can look back and see how your observing skills have improved over time - and they will! Doing drawings is a great plan. I must admit I'm not doing any observing at the moment except lunar and solar, as the lack of proper darkness at a reasonable hour doesn't play nicely with my body clock. My wife thinks I'm nuts to be looking forward to the cold dark nights.

Welcome to SGL Nick, good to have you with us.

Welcome aboard SGL Richard. Good to have you with us.

Welcome aboard SGL Alessandro. Good to have you with us. Well done on the observatory. I hope you'll share some of your images with us all when you get underway.

Welcome aboard SGL. Good to have you with us.

When I first put "bob's knobs" on my C925, the resulting collimation was all over the place. "Eyeballing it" during daylight as described above got it pretty close. Moving towards and away from the scope helps you check if everything is concentric. Mine looked pretty good under the stars and just needed a tweak to get it right. I do a quick test most sessions, but it holds collimation pretty well and rarely needs touching.

I'd leave it alone. Each time you wash it is an opportunity to scratch it.

Welcome aboard SGL, Someblokius. Good to have you with us. Cheers, Mark (born in York)

So many approaches and all of them right for the individual. My method is to plan my observing by constellation in a Word document: target, mag, separation etc, interesting facts about the object, the odd screenshot and notes from my last observation. Outside I use Skysafari to navigate. Like Rob, use a small dictaphone which lets me ramble on whilst looking through the eyepiece. It also helps preserve night vision. I then write my notes up later, again in Word and add new observations to a spreadsheet. It's funny how listening to my voice notes brings back a memory of what I've seen, this seems to be more powerful to me than just writing things down.

Jupiter is over 5 times further out from the Sun than we are, so has a slower orbit, and given its distance from us (686 million km - says SkySafari), the angular distance moved from night to night isn't very large. Had you been looking last saturday between 02:41–03:33 GMT, there was a double "shadow transit" where the shadows of Ganymede and Io could be seen against the planet. It blew me away the first time I saw one. I wonder if there were any local Jovians watching their own eclipse on Saturday? https://www.space.com/16149-night-sky.html

Looking at Stellarium, there were a couple of bright stars in the same field as Jupiter this morning: HIP 109998 and an undesignated one. One clue is that they are not on the same plane as the planet and moons. Centering Jupiter in the software and scrolling the date shows that you're right, they have been in the same field for several days as Jupiter drifts very slowly. Pretty nice view though, and worth a look for the next few days!