PeterStudz

The obvious thing to do is give it a go with what I have. Even if it doesn’t work it’s all experience! I’ll have a think and a play.

The steel tripod is popular and good. I have one which I purchased from a member on this forum. They do come up secondhand every now and then so it might be worth waiting and looking around.

That’s brilliant! It’s things like this that want to make me buy a camera. And a PC…

What with the weather and being busy it’s been weeks since I’ve had the telescope outside. But there was a brief window yesterday evening before the clouds rolled in. Seeing was surprisingly good and I also got good views of the moon and even the now tiny Mars. This was from a short 9sec video taken at around 8pm - 4K at 60fps with stock camera app, iPhone 14 Pro on a basic smartphone adapter. Skywatcher 200p Dob on a DIY EQ platform. BST StarGuider 3.2mm plus variable polarising filter. Stacked on the phone with the VideoStack app. Cropped, rotated and processed on the phone using WaveletCam and Lightroom.

From my limited experience of going to a Bortle 1-2 site (this was end of Aug 2022) is that you don't need much. I had some 8x42 binoculars and they were enough. Personally I find anything more that 10x difficult to hold steady. And my daughter was there too and I wanted something easy. Although we did push the boat out and also took a small 4.5” reflector. I’d also suggest trying to have a plan on what to look for. There’s so many stars that we had trouble with orientation. The Milky Way casting a slight shadow. As it’s bright we were draw to the Milky Way core. A few examples - I could make out the Swan Nebula naked eye. The Lagoon Nebula looked more obvious than I’d ever seen Orion. In the binoculars we could easily see the Lagoon and Triffid together in the same field of view. Even in the reflector at 20x we could see both together. However, the Lagoon Nebula in the reflector at 40x was stunning. I’ve never seen anything like it. I did have a UHC filter for the reflector. It helped but the view without was so good anyway. There didn’t seem much point in going over 40x and majority of the time 20x which with the reflector was the lowest power. 8x binoculars would keep us happy all night. And another suggestion. If possible take a small tripod for your phone. We had a small telescopic selfie tripod from Amazon for about £15. This is a picture (didn’t take many) using my old iPhone 12 and will give something to remember your trip. Just point and shoot with an exposure of 30 sec. A more modern phone or camera would do much better.

Without seeing the dents it’s hard to give relevant advice. Although @Second Time Around suggestion of asking a body shop if they can help sounds like a good idea. In my youth I use to own a 2CV (well, several). The body of this car is made out of very thin metal and could easily acquire body dents - probably my driving. With a bit of practice I got quite good at removing these using a basic panel beating kit. I still have mine down the shed. Something like this… AllRight 7Pcs Craft Panel Beating Kit Panel Beating Hammer and Dolly Set with Storage Case Hammers Set for Car Auto Body Panel Repair https://amzn.eu/d/0y07I2s

Have you missed out. As others have suggested not at all. I started out just after 2 yrs ago and at that time had “missed out” on the planets. But it comes around quicker than you think. Especially if you are prepared to get up early in the morning. Then my first views of Saturn and Jupiter were at around 2am. Back then that was in the summer. And early in the morning I find that I generally get better views. Probably, as I’m in an urban environment, the air and atmosphere has settled down. Moreover, this year Jupiter and Saturn are giving to be even higher in the sky - potentially giving better views. And as mentioned there are loads of DSO. Here, in the spring and summer, I’ve got great views of the galaxies M81 & M82, various globular clusters, a host of star clusters, the Dumbbell Nebular and a big favourite of mine, the Ring Nebular. And don’t forget the sun in white light. The solar cycle is on the up so now is a good time to invest or even make a white light solar filter. Personally I really enjoy looking at the sun. And of course you can observe in the daytime with the advantages that gives.

Looks Good! Although for me and cider keeping it in anything plastic is out. You can get away with the initial strong fermentation in a plastic vessel (which is what I do/use) but I mature mine for about a year before drinking. After a few months air can get diffuse through plastic and the cider will start turning acetic. Glass and stainless steel are great but a stainless steel vessel is expensive. So I transfer mine into demijohns in order to mature a bit longer and to drop clear. Even then air will slowly diffuse through the rubber bung and airlock and if not careful you’ll get a film yeast. Glass bottles with crown caps are great and will keep the air out, but I’ve got a few weeks before I start the bottling process. It’s personal but I prefer my cider still (no bubbles) and bone dry - as God intended And the advantage of lots of smaller batches in demijohns plus using bottles is that no one bottle tastes the same. I also prefer it cellar temperature. Well, for me it’s shed temperature. And if one demijohn turns bad I haven’t lost the whole lot! Having said all of that I might invest in an all in one stainless steel fermenter. Although I’d still end up bottling.

I’m sure normal ply would be fine. Although I thick it’s a good idea to hand select the best sheets. As for the cider and going off topic. I have a DIY press. The apples are collected from local hedgerows from the beginning of September until late October. I then press in late October, sometimes the start of November. I start fermentation in a large buckets and then transfer to demijohns. I should get away from demijohns but I have a load secondhand and it’s nice to be able to see the cider. Eventually the cider is bottled and drunk from about a year onwards. Mostly the demijohns are stored down my shed, but I’ll bring some up to the house if I need to fiddle with any. Like in the recent picture - thats not all of this years.

It has provided, amongst other things, some stunning views of Jupiter, Saturn and Mars. And my daughter is especially fond of the planets. Picture from back in 2021, at around 4am at the end of a 2 hour session on Jupiter and Saturn. The first time Alice had seen these. Base obviously not finished. @Ratlet, the crescent moon has a function. I use it as a handle to carry the base on its own. I also put in a round cabinet light. Useful when setting and packing up. @Bentley, I haven’t heard of that product, although it might come under a different name here in the UK. One of the issues that I’ve had when trying to order this kind of thing is that often the suppliers here assume that you are some kind of builder working on a house/building and consequently have minimum orders of silly amounts. And if you can order a small quantity equally silly minimum shipping charges.

Thanks! The stool was a £10 from Gumtree. It’s an old Ikea screw stool. Sadly no longer made. The telescope has your old primary mirror. Well I’m sure that I bought it from you! The OTA was given to me free (without a base) as the primary was damaged. I never have enough cider As you know I make my own but cider varies and it’s difficult to get anything decent near me.

I made a base for my 8” Dob about 2 years ago. I would have loved to have used birch plywood but even then (wood has really increased in price) I just could not justify it. One of the main points of building a Dob base is that you can make something decent at a reasonable price. If you need to buy everything from screws and bolts up (I didn’t) it’s surprising how the costs can mount up. I ended up making mine from cheap 18mm plywood from my local Wickes. At the time it was £18 per sheet & I needed two. I even had some left over to make most of my EQ platform. It was more than adequate for the job. I made mine “organically” without a plan and it’s a little over “engineered” and maybe a tad heavy but it’s as solid as a rock and extremely steady. One important thing - whatever material you decide to use make sure that you inspect it carefully and make sure it’s dead STRAIGHT. Most of the cheaper wood, even some of the expensive stuff will be warped, even if ever so slightly. I went through all the 18mm sheets at Wickes (yes, I was that guy) and hand picked sheets that were dead straight. Even a slight warp in your ground board will cause it to have annoying “sticky” points. I painted mine but you could easily make one with a decent plain varnished finished with the plywood that I used . You just need to take time and extra care cutting and finishing off. Which you’d need to do with more expensive wood anyway. The edges on cheap plywood will have occasionally gaps which will need filling. I started off filling mine with filler but quickly got bored with the necessary sanding. In the end I used the old model aircraft technique of sealing the edges with tissue paper and dope/sanding sealer. A surprisingly easy, cheap and efficient method. If you want something fancy for a varnished finish you could seal the edges with iron on veneer furniture edging. Although I’d glue it on - far quicker, easier and secure. In fact you could veneer the whole base (not difficult) which would give you something different, interesting and hopefully nice. A bit like my dew shield. '

And have a look at the beginners section at FLO. You don’t have to buy from them but it’ll give you an idea: https://www.firstlightoptics.com/beginner-telescopes/page/2/ A bit over your budget but if you don’t want to spend much more than £100 then this is what I’d suggest: https://www.firstlightoptics.com/beginner-telescopes/ursa-major-102mm-tabletop-dobsonian-telescope.html

Hello Jennifer and welcome! This isn’t an easy question with no simple answer. I started off relatively recently when I bought my then 9 yr old daughter a telescope for Christmas about 2.5 yrs ago. A budget of £100 is pushing it. It’s not a cheap hobby. Although I got something for Alice that cost ~£150 it was rather inappropriate. But managed to get by and make it a success with persistence and effort. I/we find astronomy is something best done together. It also rewards patience, something that children can lack! Eg one night we slept out in the garden under the stars (no tent). Spent a lot of time looking for shooting starts with some success - a lot of fun in itself - then scanned the sky with binoculars, looking at stars & star clusters… learning about the constellations. We looked in the “big telescope” just once (at something called the ring nebula). Spent the rest of the time drinking hot chocolate & toasting marshmallows. What I’m suggesting here is that to do something like this you don’t even need a telescope. And we actually used the binoculars far more. Binoculars are worth considering (Alice also uses them for wildlife), although I know that kids often want something that looks like a telescope. And on top of buying our first telescope (we now have two) I quickly spent at least another £150 on “accessories” - better eyepieces, upgrading the mount, smartphone adapter… There are pictures under this thread that illustrate some of our journey: And a few other important points… AVOID eBay at all costs. Nothing wrong with secondhand but eBay is not great for purchasing astronomy kit until you really know what you are doing. And even then it’s not great. What city are you in, where about are you located? I’m in Southampton which suffers from light pollution. This limits what we can see from our back garden. The moon and plants are fine. But planets can be tricky as they require good conditions (not just clear sky) plus a telescope that can take a high magnification - which means more money. If there’s a club not far away it might be worth giving them a visit. They will be more than happy to help. Even an individual astronomer. People who own telescopes are usually more than happy to “show off” what they have and equally happy to help. The size of your garden doesn’t matter. But is it obstructed by anything? Which way does it face? Eg my best views are to the E to SW. The north is poor. And at this stage forget about trying to attached a DSLR. You’ll need to spend a lot of money to do that successfully. However, you’ll be able to take smartphone snaps of bright objects easily and cheaply which we find a lot of fun. And don’t forget viewing the sun. With a simple white light filter plus precautions and care we’ve found this enormous fun. And no need to hang about in the dark and cold! Hope this helps! Peter

This is an interesting one and has been bubbling away for a while now. I don’t have a Samsung phone so I can’t comment from practical experience. But it seems to be something to do with a feature called “Scene Optimizer” which, apparently, can be turned off. I’ve also hear other completely unsupported comments about “adding stars” that aren’t there and the possibility of “enhancing” other familiar astrophotography targets like the Orion Nebula.

These are excellent! And the montage would make a nice poster/wall chart. I’d certainly have it on my wall. Of course there’s more detail here but I’m a visual observer and can recognise these from viewing Mars over the recent months having started back at the end of June when, of course, it was rather tiny.

And Jupiter with Ganymede. From the same video as above taken on 17th September 2021. As it’s a rainy day I had another go. Will it ever be clear again. It seems like ages since I’ve been at the eyepiece 🙁

That’s great! Just getting the phase of Venus (visually there’s not much else anyway) is tricky given that at the moment it’s so close to the horizon. And it’s rather small too. I did find that looking at it during daylight gave me a steadier view and capture. Probably because at that time it was higher in the sky. And with obvious care taken really fun too.

Hi @Stu, as you say it can be a bit difficult to get a good short video with good content and that doesn’t crash VideoStack. I find that I can’t get over 10 seconds and it helps if the planet is a decent size. Fixed by zooming in a bit. Maybe there’s a way to use something longer? But what iPhone were you using? And what were you recording at? I’ve set mine to 4K at 60fps as it did seem to import things somewhat. There are some other options to play with which I haven’t tried. And I always us the stock camera app (no 3rd party app) to shoot the video. I do need to play around with some of the video settings but there aren’t many! My iPhone 14 Pro does take better videos than my old iPhone 12 (non Pro). I also found that by zooming in while shooting the video using the 2x on the iPhone 14 Pro and something around 1.8x on the iPhone 12 gives better results. I haven’t a clue why. This is from one of my first Jupiter videos taken back on 17th September 2021 using an iPhone 12. Shot using 4K at 60fps, zoomed to 1.8x. Edited using the stock camera app, stacked with VideoStack, WaveletCam and Lightroom on the phone. Difficult to keep the moons when trying to bring out detail on Jupiter. The iPhone 14 Pro does a better job but then the sensor is much bigger.

@Wageslave, yes, that’s my daughter in my profile pic. Taken just over 2 yrs ago on our first night with our first telescope. It’s enormous fun doing something like this with your kids. Although there are frustrations and compromises. Eg sitting out in the cold getting their eyes use to the dark. We go around some of this by looking at the moon and planets - they are bright so no need to get dark adapted. Or camping out in the garden without a tent (my daughter likes camping anyway) which included looking up at the stars with/without binoculars, looking for shooting stars, making hot chocolate and toasting marshmallows PLUS looking through our telescope.

If you go down the tripod route it might turn out easier, certainly more stable and comfortable to use, if you purchased something like a steel EQ5 tripod. I got one second hand for £70 (they aren’t cheap) for our smaller telescope. It was done as an upgrade to the wobbly tripod it came with which had a EQ type mount which yours has. However, it certainly won’t fit the tripod as is. I got around this with a block of wood and some bolts. Although before you make that investment you’d want to ensure that the telescope is in some sort of working order and actually worth the effort. When we restored ours and before I got a working base, I’d literally prop it up with some wood and get it focused on something like the moon or random stars.

I agree with what @Carbon Brush says. After getting hold of a telescope for free from a nice member on here I was able (from knowing nothing) to completely take it apart, fix it, make it better than new and put it back together again. This was with my then 9 yr old daughter. There’s a whole thread on it here… If you take things slowly, bit by bit and have plenty of patience then it’s perfectly possible. Although I’d suggest making something called a Dobsonian base (surprisingly simple) over a tripoid. And at the time we had a small telescope plus binoculars to use which helped keep up enthusiasm while I slowly fixed our “new” telescope.

Hi Yongchong, Thanks for that and good to hear from you! Maybe I’ll see if I can email you a video(s). Got to go off and do a little work now. Peter

I’ve been meaning to update/reply for ages but been a bit busy. And after a little break I had another go at going through some of the videos. It’s all a bit of a learning curve for me. I’m a visual observer but occasionally try and use smartphone snaps to record what I’ve seen and use them along with an observation report. Now that I have a better idea what I’m doing it’s getting quicker and easier. Sometimes I think that I’ve tried too hard and got too much noise, things that aren’t actually there, in some of the shots. It’s also “interesting” trying to process and edit on a small smartphone screen - however good these things are it’s not the same as using a decent size display. The first two of Jupiter and Mars are from the same videos, just taken a slightly different path, rotated etc. And what colour is Mars? Visually it’s more yellow-orange than most of the astrophotography that I see. I also did this of Mars on the 6th February (also mentioned in another thread). By now Mars was getting rather small but seeing was very good and I was able to get the magnification up to x375. At the limit of what my 200p Dob can do. However, I could not get anything decent out of the stacking app VideoStack - that might just be me. This was produced by going through the video manually and selecting a single “lucky” frame. But I did use the WaveletCam to bring out some details plus Lightroom to finish off. Given how small Mars was I’m pleased/surprised to have got anything. This is something new (but also mentioned in another thread) and was totally unplanned. On the 13th February and after viewing the sun in white light, I decided to have a go at finding Venus. With some care it was surprisingly simple to locate and see in the finder. At the eyepiece I could could clearly make out the phase. Then thought I’d try taking a video. The time was around 13:45 so still very light. The video was then cropped, stacked with VideoStack, edited with WaveletCam plus Lightroom while I was still sitting outside at the telescope and only took around 5 minutes to get something decent. Although I could only get VideoStack to work if I made the background dark/darker. Then I played around with it in the evening. Here are a couple of results. It’s captured the phase of Venus very well - something that was previously impossible for me to do by just using a smartphone.

I’ve only been intro this hobby for just over two years. I have a small 4.5” reflector and an 8” Dob. I’m in Southampton which is Bortle 7. Generally and as far as DSO go, there’s only a small difference between the two in the number that I can see from my back garden. Although the 8” does resolve more details. And it does blow the 4.5” away as far as doubles, the planets and moon go but thats a different matter. An example are the galaxies M81 & M82. In the 4.5” I can only JUST make these out. In the 8” they are both obvious. And globular clusters are far better in the 8”. If I crank up the magnification on these, so that they fill the whole FOV, then I can resolve far more stars and many will “twinkle” - I assume due to the atmosphere. I also have an EQ platform and this allows me to view things like this at high magnification without constant nudging. Allowing me to relax at the eyepiece and just take in the view. On a good night they can be magnificent. In the 4.5” globular clusters are no more than a fuzzy blobs. A few other points. Not all nights are the same. Even though I’m in Bortle 7 there have been a few times when I could easily make out the Beehive Cluster naked eye. These are the nights that you want to get out. Generally my sky is at its darkest around 2am. Of course this does make for late nights. And the darker parts are straight up (obviously) and to the E-SE. If possible I’ll try and look at DSO at this sort of time and when they are at these places in the sky. Personally I do get pleasure out of what I can see from my back garden. But I’ve actually seen more/better DSO in the small 4.5”. And that was because I was able to pack that up in a small case, take it on holiday via an aircraft and use it at a true dark site. There, it was Bortle 1-2, the sky was amazing and I can well remember being able to see the Swan Nebula naked eye. The views in the little 4.5” were, for me, stunning. As far as star hopping goes I do use an app on my phone called PSAlign Pro that includes a PushTo feature. The phone being mounted to the OTA. Just sync to a known star or two, select your target from a list and push to it. And there it is in the eyepiece. For me it works every time.