Tiny Clanger

I was going to link from here to your thread on the subject, but didn't get round to it . For me that was an object lesson in waiting for something good to come up second hand 🙂 Heather

Happily my local council does exactly this : every other street light off after midnight, it was a money saving option they initially tried out a coupe of years ago when they needed to save money, and after the trial period the population were OK with it, so it continues. I'm hoping the domestic 'insecurity' lighting might be affected by the increases in power bills, as folk realise that even a few tens of watts run for hours each and every night eventually add up . Gov. page on the subject of light nuisance, applies to England only : https://www.gov.uk/guidance/artificial-light-nuisances-how-councils-deal-with-complaints Heather

According to both the met.office and clear outside, it might well be cloud free round here in Leicestershire from 6pm until midnight-ish , altho' how those sites deals with the BST/GMT reversion at 2am I have no idea. Moonrise appears to be near the end of the forecast clear spell too . So thanks for the heads-up Craney , I'll be looking north and engaging my boundless enthusiasm and optimism yet again ... Heather

Yep, and that sparse info will be spread well out and with inbuilt 'natural' pause moments between them , because even the ad free beeb will want to sell the series on to lucrative foreign markets where ads will be inserted . They'll be hoping Cox will make them as much money as Attenborough has. I don't bother with much of the spectacular vista style of documentaries, the thinness of material , constant recaps, and reliance on the celeb. character doing the presenting , rather than the material itself annoys me.

You do know this is a 10 year old thread ?

B5, the best.

There are adaptors available specifically to put a red dot finder on a photo hot shoe , I've not used any, but here are some : https://www.widescreen-centre.co.uk/blitz-hotshoe-dslr-camera-adapter-for-red-dot-finder.html https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/283165189806 I recently bought a Baader skysurfer RDF, and it comes with a range of attachments, maybe one of them might be adaptable ? There's an image here https://www.baader-planetarium.co.uk/2020/07/09/baader-sky-surfer-iii-now-back-in-stock/ , I'm sure there are more adapers around, probably 3D printable ones too. and if you don't already have an RDF, this is one which can be bought as a bundle with an adaptor Heather

Well, there's a hat , but there's only one in stock ! https://www.firstlightoptics.com/sgl_shop/stargazers-lounge-beanie-hat.html

The AZ5 is a solid lump of stuff, and I enjoy using it with my mak , if slo mo is what you want, it's probably that or the skytee. I was exceptionally lucky with that Castor popping up when it did 🙂 , thanks for the topic, without being here typing my reply I'd have gone out and certainly missed it ! I'd suggest you keep your eyes open for a good second hand AZ5, there seems to be a lot of kit popping up for sale here, it wouldn't hurt to upgrade your mount/tripod before your 'scope , your current OTA could be used on the AZ5 until you have the funds for the Altair ... Heather

Well, now the adrenaline has died down, and I've secured the Castor 🙂 ... I wondered about if I'd want slo mo for the 'frac , but decided to try without , my reasoning being : I was (and am) quite happy to nudge my dob , which is 750mm focal length. However I tried using my 1500mm focal length mak with no slo mo and it was hopeless, I had to have slo mo for that much mag, that little field of view . My ST80 is okay on a decent photo tripod head, no gearing or anything , the 400mm focal length and the short light tube make it very forgiving. So, the Bresser 102, at 600mm focal length I reckoned I'd not feel the need for slo mo ,and to test this I initially used it with a Baader 3/8" to vixen clamp on the tripod photo head . It was OK, but the photo head was too imprecise for the job, and didn't pan smoothly, so a no slo mo alt az was what I wanted. I'm still sometimes engrossed with looking through the eyepiece of the mak and feeling for the bresser's focuser (wrong place !), or waving my hand around for the slo mo while looking through the 'frac (there isn't one !) , a bit like swapping between company cars and wiping the windscreen when you wanted to indicate a turn ... Heather

Well, flippin' heck ! Moments, mere moments after I posted my reply above, what pops up in the sell/swap ? a well priced Berlebach Castor ! Woo hoo ! Just in case this is some sort of magic, wish fulfilment thread , I'd just like to say, bargain second hand Nirvana 7mm eyepiece, and Altair Ascent 102 please, and if the usual magical 3 wishes limit doesn't apply here, maybe a breeser 200mm dob ? Thanks 🙂

I'd rather like an Altair 102 myself, it looks like a really nice instrument , and I've established that I get plenty of use from a grab & go 100mm ish 'frac by buying and enjoying the Bresser 102 , but the CA on that I find annoying for anything apart from wide field. The mount part is a conundrum though, there's such a leap in price/quality from the mass market sort of setup to the more niche, serious bit of engineering altaz heads (eg. offerings from scopetech, berlebach, giro, rowan ) , and the only easily available intermediates seem to be the AZ5 and skytee . I've no need of the double mount capabilities of the skytee, and I know I'd not be bothered swapping my mak with another OTA on my az5, too much faff, I want an all-in-one , pick it up and cart it outside at a moment's notice type setup for the refractor. There seems to be a wider range available in the EU https://www.teleskop-express.de/shop/index.php/cat/c21_Mounts-Azimutal-without-GoTo.html trouble is, buy anything which when converted to GBP exceeds £135 (last time I checked the relevant HM customs webpages) and you get hit with 20% VAT, plus (If I recall correctly), another 5% import duty, plus carrier's handling fee which when I investigated was around £15 or so ... Short answer to my 102 'frac mount conundrum : hope for a decent second hand Berlebach Castor or similar to come up for sale at some point ! Meanwhile a telescop-express TS6 just about acceptably does the job . Heather

2027* for first settlement, according to Kim Stanley Robinson's 'Red Mars' novel . Well worth reading , along with the follow up volumes 'Green Mars' and 'Blue Mars' . KSR in these books examines the political , social, economic and ecological ramifications in what I found a most enjoyable set of novels https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_trilogy Heather *altho' that date may have been pushed back a tad by a pandemic ...

Plenty of information available on this, here are the first few results of a quick search : :https://www.astronomics.com/info-library/how-to-pick-an-eyepiece/highest-useful-magnification/ https://learnastronomyhq.com/articles/how-much-magnification-can-i-get-with-my-telescope.html https://telescopeschool.com/telescope-magnification-guide-where-does-it-get-blurry/ https://www.optics-trade.eu/blog/lowest-and-highest-useful-magnification/

The usual rule of thumb is to consider the maximum magnification a telescope can cope with is double the aperture. The 'scope you mention has an aperture of 130 mm , so your limit is 260x. I've no idea where you live, but in the UK it isn't very often that the atmosphere is steady enough to go above 200x. I think the focal Length of your telescope is 650 mm , to find the magnification an eyepiece will give you in it, divide 650 by the mm of the eyepiece. So a 3.2mm eyepiece would, in theory, give you 200x. Adding a 3x barlow would give you 600x, which would be way beyond what your telescope could deal with. This article may help https://www.skyatnightmagazine.com/advice/understanding-limits-telescope/

A trawl through bookmarks I made when investigating eyepieces found the sources of my doubt : https://www.firstlightoptics.com/blog/vixen-lvw-vs-baader-hyperion-review.html and

I've wondered before if , say , a cheap 'space blanket', the (?) mylar silver flimsy things (for emergency use, sometimes available from £ shops) pasted on to a proplex sheet from a builder's merchant might make a lovely, lighweight, easily mounted 2mx1m mirror surface for this purpose ...

No, no internal reflections that I've noticed , and that includes using the 15mm BST a fair bit for solar observing which I'd imagine would be very likely to provoke any such reflections. The baader hyperions are , if I recall correctly , not very good at the edges in fast 'scopes , so would be good in the 127 mak, but possibly not so great in your dob . Heather

My heaviest eyepiece comes in at 373g , and the heritage 150 has no problems with it whatsoever. When I first bought it, I had a play around attaching my DSLR , which weighs 495g for the body only, add some more for the T ring and nosepiece , so over 500g, again, no problem. The mag. of the scope has never been a limiting factor for me, as the seeing here has never been good enough to make it worthwhile to exceed 250x, and attempting 200x the speed with which planets zipped across and out of the FOV , requiring a careful nudge, was the problem ! Heather

Stu, is that predictive text for stable , or will Mrs smartcookie need to be worried ? 🙂 Heather

One word (or is it really three ?) duckduckgo

Given that I didn't start in Minehead, and I doubt it was there anyway back in the 1980s , it's not surprising I failed to understand.

I'll agree that if you need a Moon filter, you should go for a straightforward ND one , which will not introduce any colour tinge to the view : I bought a skywatcher moon filter and it introduces a greenish tinge which I don't like. It might be (possibly, I'm guessing here !) something which is supposed to sharpen the view, but to my eyes it just made for a sickly appearance 😞 The ND should be (as the name suggests, and you probably know if into photography) neutral in colour. I bought the pair of polarisers which rotate to vary the brightness to use instead, and find them an annoying faff in the dob ... screw them on the bottom of the eyepiece, put it in the focuser, take it out, rotate the turning filter a bit , put it back in the focuser really carefully so as not to accidentally turn the filter in the process, observe the effect, decide it could be better, take it out .... The 2 polariser works nicely with my refractor or mak , where one part can be screwed to the diagonal, the other to the eyepiece, and I simply rotate the eyepiece (the filter in the diagonal stays still , but I couldn't see a way to make it easier in the dob focuser. Heather

I have no idea what you are talking about.

I've been giving this 'how to improve my views' a lot of thought recently, and it seems to me that the most cost effective major upgrade I can possibly do next is not a bigger 'scope, or better eyepieces, but trips to darker skies to make the best use of what I already have. Heather