Orange Smartie

Just the moon for me last night. The weather looked promising, but clouded over pretty quickly and then with a few spots of rain, I thought it best to pack up. I had a good look at the Montes Alpes, Montes Caucass, Cassini, Mons Piton and the trio of Aristillus, Autolycus and Archimede. Oh, and managed to guess my way to Iota Cancri, which for those who don't know, is a very pretty double star, easily split, and appearing as a nice colour-contrasting pair.

For my birthday, from my sister. Written, I believe by @Ags. It looks amazing and I can't wait to start using it.

I don't have to be up particularly early, but I don't like late nights any more. I tend to do short sessions of around 1 to 1.5 hours in the evening. Obviously this gets trickier as the days get longer, but it's fine at the moment, and I can be packed up well before midnight. Generally speaking, I try to make the most of my observing sessions by planning ahead of time what I'd like to look at; for example, I may focus in on one constellation and cover all the points of interest in that, or if there's no moon, I might prioritise galaxy-hunting. As a purely visual astronomer, I don't find I need huge chunks of time to get a fun experience out of it.

If you don't have it already, I'd recommend a copy of Turn Left at Orion as a good starter guide (with realistic examples of what you can see) to finding your way around the night sky. There are a good deal of suitable objects out there outside of the obvious ones such as moon and planets.

Hi. It's 7 pro, I believe.

Thanks all once again for the support and encouragement. Mrs Smartie remarked again what an amazing community this is. Quick update - old Samsung Galaxy has been revivified after 18 months on the bookshelf and synscan pro and Sky Safari Pro installed. Connected to Sky Safari on the first attempt, so initial indications are that it will work. I can't find a menu option to turn off auto updates, but it does appear that the Galaxy expects me to manually select to download them so hopefully I should be ok with this now.

Yes, good idea. Turns out, I have an old Samsung galaxy that I can try. Shame to have to do this, though. The concept is brilliant and when it works, it's very impressive.

Mostly. I have noticed that synscan has frozen a couple of times.

I've tried all combinations of 192.168.4.1 and 192.168.4.2 with 11881 and 11882. Previously, the mount worked with 192.168.4.2/11882 but now it doesn't.

Fixed IP is listed as 192.168.4.1 Communication protocol listed as 11882 Note that the settings which worked before now don't.

I can't connect with either the one you mention above or 192.168.4.2

My az gti is now refusing to connect to sky safari again. Man, this thing is frustrating.

It was first light for my Mak 127 + AZ GTi last night. I spent a while playing with the alignment and just getting used to the whole thing, so not so much an observing session as a mucking about session. However, I enjoyed some very sharp views of the moon, with rupes recta clearly visible. Photographed with my phone - even then it didn't look too bad. I didn't have my 10" dob out for comparison, but I would have said that the image was sharper - could all be in my imagination though. Then I did a brief tour of some double/multiple stars - 32 eri was a first for me (found by the goto), hj3945 - a favourite double, beta mon, sigma ori, Castor, the trapezium in M42. Other things I took a look at: M42 - pretty good, but not a patch on a dobsonian view. Eskimo nebula was surprisingly good - a very clear disk. Jupiter - very crisp clear views. Even Mrs Smartie enjoyed this one. All in all not a bad little session.

Weirdly the port number on some of my presets (in Sky Safari) has changed. If I set back to 11882, it works ok on 192.168.4.2. For the time being...

I'm using a Celestron power tank, 12v as far as I know.