PeterStudz

Nice report @LondonNeil. I think that the is the right place to post it too. I observe mostly from my back garden, which logistically is a lot easier! I always use and replace dust caps as I go along. After a while it becomes second nature and you don’t notice doing it. Although it helps if all the eyepieces use the same type/size dust cap. Often they don’t. And for me dropping one is terminal - the dog loves eating them! - although it’s been a few years since I actually dropped a dust cap. I usually keep eyepieces in a big long pocket on my hoodie. Helps keep them at the right temperature. It’s not so much dew, but if too cold then just the heat from your eye/face can cause them to mist-up - really annoying. I do have a small eyepiece tray, but only use it for temporary storage, The thing is to get a system that works for you. Of course this takes practice and trial/error.

Skywatcher 200p Dob on DIY EQ platform. Southampton urban garden, Bortle 7, 17th April 2024. Seeing decent. BST StarGuider 15mm. iPhone 14 Pro held to the eyepiece using a no-brand smartphone adapter. Images from Live Photo and 4K at 60fps Video. All editing & processing on the phone. For lunar/solar, when using a modern iPhone with the stock camera app, you have several choices when making a capture through the eyepiece. Eg on my iPhone 14 Pro… * “Standard” resolution, HEIF (just pressing the shutter icon) still photo. On my iPhone this produces images in a format known as HEIF. * Higher resolution still photo in RAW format. *Something called Live Photo, also in HEIF. *Taking a video and then manually selecting a single frame or stacking using the iPhone VideoStack app. Here I’m just sticking to capture, editing & processing iPhone only. RAW can work well but I find it harder to edit using standard tools/apps on the phone and for me is only of benefit if/when seeing is very good. Live Photo is an interesting one. The way it works is to take a short burst (about 1.5 seconds I think). This can be viewed in various ways including a short animation. When doing a lunar or solar snap and after I’ve taken a Live Photo, I select an option called “Duplicate as Still Photo”. Exactly what this does I’m not sure, but it seems to produce something of better quality than just a “standard” still photo. It seems to combine the Live Photo frames in some way. Stacking? I don’t know. But it can produce nice results, sometimes better than RAW, especially if seeing isn’t the best. These two images were done at the end of a lunar observation session on 17th April. As is typical for me I didn’t plan to take any images and was all a bit of an after thought. Here I’ve just tried two methods:- 1. is a Live Photo; 2. is the result of a short 30 Sec video, stacked on the phone with the VideoStack app. The Live Photo is sharper and does show more detail. The VideoStack example isn’t as sharp but personally I like the contrast, the highlights look more natural to me. It’s also only 30 seconds, which for stacking isn’t a lot! With the VideoStack image I didn’t need to do much editing. It also managed colour fringing better. The Live Photo took more work. I’ve kept both images with a little colour and tried to keep them at a similar scale so you can compare. It’s also worth noting that the Live Photo is much bigger:- initially 1.2MB; the VideoStack image - 389KB. VideoStack is really made for planets in which case this is fine. And it might be more suited to lunar or solar closeups and/or when the seeing is iffy, as it has the ability to “cut through” some of this. Anyway, I’ve rambled enough. You can tell it’s cloudy! Live Photo Short video, stacked on the phone with VideoStack

Nice, with a good “at the eyepiece” feel. Always good to see anyone posting here too!

@Kon ISS images are amazing. And I didn’t think it was possible, even more so with the equipment used. Whatever your level of experience there’s always so much to lean. One reason why it’s such a great hobby. After seeing these I did have a go at tracking the ISS manually, with my 8” Dob, with a view to trying a mobile phone capture. I never (or haven’t yet) got around to attempting a capture, but I could see the ISS in a low power eyepiece - I could just make-out a shape of something, but it’s bright and fast. Visually theres a lot of “wobble” too. As for something else to view in a light polluted area (I’m in one too), there’s always our nearest star. And we are approaching solar maximum too. I made a white light filter without much expense using a sheet of Baader AstroSolar Safety Film and some cardboard. In the last couple of summers we’ve had a lot of fun viewing the sun, sometimes while out having a BBQ. Which reminds me. There’s then the possibility of an ISS transit of the Sun, or even the moon (which @Kon has done). I managed one of the sun and captured it using my mobile phone. There are websites that calculate transit times for your location. Of course it’s not an everyday occurrence and you need a fist full of luck! Some info in the link below, which explains things a bit. I’ve attached a little animated GIF so you can see how fast the ISS moves!

Hale-Bopp is the only comet that I’ve seen naked eye. I wasn’t into astronomy back then, but even in a light polluted areas it was clear, with a tail, like drawings and paintings of comets I’d seen. You couldn’t miss it.

I agree. When I got my old Newtonian I could just about focus on a distant chimney pot, but I wasn’t convinced that was far enough. In the end, the only way I could be sure, was to take it out at night, prop it up with some garden furniture (there wasn’t a mount) and try to focus on some random stars.

@AstralFields Good to know that it all works. For a hand controller as long as you have some bits of wire you don’t even need to spend any money. Some people have separated the motor from the box (with circuit board & switches), joining the two with long wires. You can see the two separated in the Teleskop version - the motor at one end and the box with the electronics and switches at the other. I thought of having a hand controller, but personally I haven’t found it to be a problem. I have a little volt meter across the motor terminals on my version. All I do is make sure it’s set to the correct number (for me 2.35 - 2.37 volts) at the beginning when I have to bend down anyway and keep it there. I rarely need to fiddle with it and often don’t touch the potentiometer for several sessions in a row. Although the good thing about making your own is that you can personalise things to your taste/requirements!

I think DSO were assumed because that’s where EAA and similar excels - eg it can enable you to view something that you can barely see, or not even see at all, visually through a telescope. And close to real time too, with just a short delay. EAA, especially simply attaching a camera to the eyepiece, is poor for live planetary views. Stacking, processing and editing is a very different matter. You’ll get better live views through an eyepiece. The moon is an exceptional example. Even in my little cheap and basic travel/grab-and-go Newtonian the moon looks far better than any image I’ve seen. And always gets a “wow… ohhh… arghhh” type comment. I have used a mobile attached to an eyepiece in order to point-out lunar features to a group, but then it’s back to the eyepiece. Of course with the planets and the moon there’s no need to get eyes dark adapted. In fact it’s a disadvantage. With two telescopes it could be useful and fun to have one for visual and one with a camera attached, but it’s a lot more work.

I’ve done a few “outreach” type events for young kids and to be honest DSO are tricky even with EAA. I also don’t think that many kids would find it that interesting and attention could go rapidly. Might work but involves much more effort to make it good - I think. For me the ones that have worked are the planets/lunar and solar. Eg I did a lunar, Jupiter and Saturn session with kids at my daughter’s school. They were 10-12 yr olds. Seeing the moon with its craters, Jupiter, its moons plus the GRS, Saturn, its ring and the Cassini division, Saturns moons… they were so excited I had trouble getting them away from the eyepiece. This was all done in twilight and to begin with you couldn’t even see Jupiter/Saturn naked eye which added to the magic. It was also easy to do and managed - ie it didn’t require much skill on my part. Even just lunar, on a good night, can be brilliant. But it helps to know your stuff. Eg names of craters/features, where the Apollo space craft landed etc. The other has been white light solar, with obvious safety precautions. Although most of the kids loved the safety briefing which I made a big issue, danger and all of that. Because it’s obviously all done in daytime, the kids can clearly see the telescope, eyepieces, focuser, how stuff works etc… which makes it all the more interesting. As a finale I showed them Venus in daylight. Again, you could not see it visually by eye - look up and there was nothing… look in the eyepiece and there was a bright planet Venus showing a phase.

PS - I/we (my daughter is much the same) could not just look at a screen. We like to see and observe targets through an eyepiece. I can see the attraction of going all out EAA, but it’s not for us. The smartphone images are an addition, sometimes just an afterthought, usually at the end of a session. Obviously the use of a screen will ruin dark adaptation!

I use an app on my iPhone - AstroShader - that live stacks and auto-aligns. No tracking necessary and you’ll see the image immediately on the phone screen without processing. Recent image of M13. And I’m in Bortle 7.

The ZWO Seestar S50 is new and interesting and worth considering if your son is OK with, and will enjoy, looking at things on a screen. There’s a general assumption that the younger generation all love tech. My 12 yr old daughter is well into mobiles, tablets and social media etc, but she’s not interested in something like the Seestar. She wants to observe through an eyepiece. Not sure on your transport. The Dobs that you listed are all surprisingly big. We have an Skywatcher 200p and with the back seats down it just fits into our car. Of course that means that only two of us can travel with the telescope. If you are in a light polluted area you might find that anything larger than a 200mm doesn’t give you much of an advantage for DSO - beyond that point it can just magnify the light pollution. The planets and the moon are a different matter as they are bright, so light pollution isn’t such an issue.

It depends on how far you want to go. I flocked and blackened everything when I did mine, including the back and sides of the secondary. For silver screw threads I slipped on a small section of black heat shrink tubing (for electrical insulation) which I had at home already. Just slipped over the tops of the threads where they stick out. Only worry about paint directly to metal is that it can flake off and you don’t want that ending up on your mirrors. Haven’t a clue if it makes a difference but it only took a few minutes and cost me nothing.

This is true. Might be worth pointing out but I think that there are other errors that are more significant than this. Although for practical visual purposes they probably don’t matter. Eg the EQ1/2 motor drive. I love its simplicity but its speed isn’t always constant - you can see this for yourself by placing a voltmeter over the motor terminals. I have one as a permanent fixture that I can switch on/off. For practical purposes it doesn’t matter but it will create drift. And some of these little cheap drives are better than others. Bit of pot luck there. Balance... Recently I took my magnetic balance weight off the end of my Dob and placed it onto the ground board for convenience. This just happened to be directly opposite the drive segment. Although weighing just 600g this was enough to cause my platform to slip to such an extent that it was no longer working properly. It took me ages to work out what was going on!

@AstralFields, interesting… thanks for this. Although after using my EQ platform extensively for almost about 19 months it’s more than accurate enough for me. Eg I can view targets like Mars at high magnification (x375 which is about as far as seeing & my 8” Dob will go), then pop inside for a short break, make a coffee, come back and Mars is still well within the FOV. I’ve even used it for simple imagining. As you say, it’s easy to make new segments, but I don’t think it’s worth fiddling with… if it works don’t touch it!