scotty38

1 hour ago, Gerry Doyle said:

A factor to bear in mind is I believe that the primary mirror in the C9.25 is figured at f/2.5, as opposed to f/2 for all the other Celestron SCTs (8, 11, 14).  Don't know why they did that, but it makes the mirror figure just that little bit more forgiving/easier to make and consequently yielding better images.  That assumes that you don't ever truly reach 'diffraction limited' seeing conditions.  In that case, aperture wins - not just for light gathering power but in this case because the resolving power of the bigger aperture at Dawes limit is better.

I suspect the decision has been made by now though 🤣

1 minute ago, CraigT82 said:

Almost a mile of silk... What on earth is she making?! 

A road? 🤣

1 hour ago, Astro Noodles said:

I like this one because it is a bottomless pit - I won't run out of things to learn about, and then get bored of it.

 

I only started this year  and before this had never even looked through a telescope and I’m 58..... One of the things I’ve repeated to my wife that I find so interesting is the sheer vastness of what’s involved let alone the actual subject. Take acquisition and just electronic focusing and that’s a subject in itself yet is one minor part of taking a picture. Then there’s the processing, take Pixinsight and then take WBPP, Adam Block has created 12 videos just on version 2 of this one process.

As I said my mind just boggles and can’t put into words the massive amount of information that’s there to be taken in if required, utterly fascinating.....

“What is the point?” Could probably be applied to most hobbies by those not interested in it. Train spotting is maybe a good alternative example when you could quite easily browse for pictures too.

I get the sneaking impression it was never meant to be a long term thing but who knows.

🙂 He's not been back since he posted......

I have no evidence one way or the other so bear that in mind but as was mentioned above the potential probably outweighs any (possible) downside. Sounds great to me so if it's financially viable I'd give it a shot. Do you get any land that you could observe from or is it literally the roof of the building and that's it?

Thanks, I keep thinking about getting up early for these 🙂

Or is it staying up late, I'm not quite sure.....

Yes agreed and I keep telling myself, it's too low, it's cloudy, it's too bright, the seeing is poor but I know my low light vision is not what it could be. I keep at it though in the vain hope of one evening saying to myself "Wow, it wasn't my eyes after all" 🤣

i think that that is why, when I started all this in January-ish, I favoured imaging even though I've subsequently acquired kit for visual too.....

Blimey some of that kit's impressive but must take a week to set up...

5 hours ago, Sunshine said:

Touchè

Sorry, I wasn't trying to be argumentative, it was a genuine question as I really couldn't see how much difference it would make.

6 hours ago, John said:

Well done for seeing both !

Mercury in particular is only easily visible during quite short windows of time and is never high in the sky.

I managed to have a look with my 100mm scope a couple of nights back and could just about make out the phase of the planet but it's disk is small - just 8 arc seconds in apparent diameter.

Thanks and I may set the scope up in readiness tonight depending on the weather. I still think it's my eyes that are the limiting factor for me as the views in my binoculars were better than my scopes. In fairness I spent maybe an hour or so with the bins before I got the scope out so maybe I'd left them to get too low. There was no way I was getting anything like you saw but will persevere....

Possibly so but as he said how is it (much) worse than being set up on your patio/driveway or whatever anyway?

Blimey I saw those trails just before I saw ISS too but had no idea what it was so thanks...

As the sun was getting low this evening I thought I'd have a look for Venus through the gaps in the clouds and eventually there it was but disappeared pretty quickly. I persevered  scanning around until it appeared again and after a while managed to spot Mercury following up behind.... I eventually got the scope out but Venus was below the horizon now and couldn't see much of Mercury either as it was pretty low too but was my first time so all good... Just packing up and ISS shoots across the sky....

45 minutes ago, Rodd said:

Thanks--Its hard because its so bright.  Short exposures help allot.

Agreed, and I accept I have a totally different setup to you (GT81, 0.8x and OSC - ZWO294) but my last attempt was 240x30s exposures and it's still blown out. I keep meaning to go and have another try with the data though....

Love it, I've been messing with M13 when I'm given the chance and have not got anywhere near resolving the core yet!

48 minutes ago, Neil27 said:

Having had a Home Observatory fitted some 4 years ago, I can attest to their quality.

Lovely people to deal with, both during ordering and delivery / installation. They get a thumbs up from me 👍, I would recommend.

I really like that and it sits well there too. I ran the old "shed" question past my wife again yesterday and she's having none of it. To be fair she gave me permission for whatever I want on the other side of our barns but that only gives me a Northern half view so of limited use but that seems to be of little  concern to her 🙂 I think I'll show her this picture....

13 minutes ago, malc-c said:

So what has a reference to a song about a prostitute have to do with an order for an observatory ????

Jeepers, just the don't do credit cards nothing more than that...

3 minutes ago, malc-c said:

 

The fact they don't take credit cards would alarm me....

 

Sorry but I couldn't help getting this in my head...

She don't do major credit cards
I doubt she does receipts
It's all not quite legitimate.......

Top marks to those that get the reference 🙂

Is your kit really connected with routers or switches? Apart from the router for your internet connection coming in to the house you shouldn't need another one for a normal domestic network. If they are typical switches "daisychained" together you shouldn't need to do much at all to have each bit of kit see each other.

15 minutes ago, JeremyS said:

Yes, @mikeDnight’s Tak FC 100 DZ

 

😊

 

Ok I'll run with this then.... All other things being equal then Mike's 6" FC100 🙂 would give me a nice sharply resolved M13 versus the fuzzy ball ( I see right now) in a real 6" achromat, correct?

ok got it, thanks!

Have you seen this below? That sounds to me like you are connected to the asiair's wireless network which is fine for controlling it, say if you're in the middle of a field. To have it connect to your own wireless network you need to configure it to do so:

https://astronomy-imaging-camera.com/asiair/asiair-guide-four-ways-to-connect-the-asiair-pro-to-network-updated.html

5 minutes ago, ollypenrice said:

It's very difficult to do that on stellar objects because the eye and the camera respond quite differently to stars. You can process an image of a nebula so that it gives a fairly accurate impression of the eyepiece view but clusters are notoriously difficult to image well. A classic case would be the Trapezium in M42. It is very easy to see four well separated stars at the eyepiece of even a very modest telescope but, as anyone who has imaged M42 will confirm, this is not so easy with a camera. Likewise the eyepiece sparkle of the Double Cluster is very hard to render in an image. The camera cannot easily control stellar size in the way the eye can, so closely placed stars run together. The great thing about a good apochromatic refractor is that it produces very pinpoint stars, the opposite of the way cameras behaves, which was my original point.

I'd rather describe my experience of M13 in instruments I've used:

20 inch F4 Dobsonian. Instantly spectacular with very bright stars resolved to the core and a magnification allowing the cluster to fill a widefield, high power eyepiece. The mirror I had was not diffraction limited so the stars were not truly pinpoint but they were still well resolved. Darkish bakground.

14 inch LX200 SCT: Slightly less spectacular due to mildly reduced stellar brightness but tighter stars still resolved to the core. Background perhaps a tad lighter than in the Dob. I never had both at the same time so that's from memory. (Note: I also had a 10 inch SCT at one time. The 14 inch is much better on stars.)

5.5 inch TEC140 apo refractor: Slightly less spectacular again because of further reduced stellar brightness and an image optimized at lower magnification in order to preserve brightness. However the stars are the tightest, the background the darkest and the impression of sharpness to the core comparable with the others. Outlying stars look sharpest in this instrument to my eye.

Trapezium not easy in the camera. This had a lot of fancy processing: https://www.astrobin.com/full/380941/0/

Olly

 

 

 

Thanks Olly, appreciated and will read through shortly as just need to nip out. Just to be clear though I'm only referring to visual with this scope. I have the Altair and a Stellamira ED 80 for visual but my imaging is done with a WO GT81.