GrumpiusMaximus

Jupiter has been great this year. I've observed it through: Several pairs of 10x50 binoculars on a parallelogram. A pair of 20x80 binoculars on a parallelogram. A Sky-Watcher Heritage 100P set up in the tabletop Dobsonian config and on a tracking alt-az mount with 20mm and 9mm eyepieces. With and without 2x Barlow. A Celestron C5 SCT on a tracking alt-az mount with 20mm and 9mm eyepieces with and without 2x Barlow. An Altair Starwave 70ED refractor with 20mm and 9mm eyepieces on a tracking alt-az mount with and without a 2x Barlow. Conditions have varied but generally were moderate, with some atmospheric turbulence. Each time I have observed through a telescope, the banding has been quite clear after spending time getting the focus right. The only time it was not quite so clear was with the Heritage 100P with the 20mm eyepiece - but it was still there and that was largely as a function of observing at low power rather than the clarity of the image itself. The C5 SCT gave good results in all configurations, the 70ED gave me excellent results, especially at 90X fantastic contrast. The binoculars gave me clear views of the moons but little or nothing by means of banding. The 80x20s do give some hint of it. I would suggest that you're not fully lining up Jupiter in your scope, your collimation is out or you're not fully focussing the image in your telescope. With 1000mm focal length on a 5-inch reflector, even in marginal seeing you should be seeing some form of banding.

I got a new telescope in the post today. We had a good inch of snow last night and heavy fog most of the afternoon so I didn't have my hopes up. However it's turned into a fairly clear night, with moderate seeing so I thought I'd give it a go. I own a Celestron C5 and a Sky-Watcher Heritage 100P (that was 30 Quid, so an impulse purchase) but I'm a beginner and have never owned a refractor. I purchased an Altair Starwave 70ED from these very forums a couple of days ago - ostensibly for astrophotography - but I also like a quick setup with my AZ-GTI. I've never even really looked down a refractor apart from when I was 14 at school and the Head Boy bought in a old 4" Russian Achromat and showed us all Saturn one night. I think it's fair to say, that was a life-changing event. Well, I had a quick half hour on Betelguese, Jupiter, M42, the Moon and the Pleiades and I'm an instant convert. I get it now. The rich contrast of a good refractor, and the low power (420mm (70mm, F6)) is astonishing and makes observing so easy. Looking down a 20mm Wililam Optics Swan gave me breathtaking views of the starfields and whacking on a barlow and the omnipresent Celestron 9mm Omni to give me 90x views was crisp on the Moon, with relief of craters on the terminator jumping out. The banding around Jupiter was clear and sharp. My C5 is good on Jupiter but this was every bit as pleasant, with a better contrast. M42 was also beautiful and the trapezium was clear and shone brightly from the centre. Averted viewing gave abundant, wispy nebulosity and high contrast against the black. It only took 30 minutes and I'm a complete refractor convert. @heliumstar Thank you for being a fantastic seller and thank you for the 70ED. It's exceeded my expectations.

It's the second time through for me on the COVID train too. Not as bad as the first time, not exactly 'fun'. Ironic considering that I work 100% remotely and don't leave the house much! My partner is a teacher and brought it home. That's incredibly helpful, thank you. The complete opposite of what I had thought but that also makes sense and makes the whole process potentially a lot easier than I first considered! The mount ends up the 'opposite' way around to a conventional Equatorial then. I was overthinking it!

Unfortunately managed to get COVID so haven't been able to play too much with my new setup but am feeling better now! I've been through considerable portions of this thread and either I'm missing something or I have a fundamental misunderstanding on how to Polar Align all of this. I understand how to Polar Align with a polar scope, so the concept isn't new - it's just the implementation for this particular setup. From what I've read, I need to have the scope in a 'Home' position (pointing upwards?) and have the mount itself pointing towards Polaris. So when I do this, the scope is going to be pointing southwards? I have PHD2 on the Astroberry but I don't have a guide camera. Am I right in thinking I can use drift alignment through my primary (and only) camera to set this up, even if the telescope is pointing 'over the shoulder' with respect to Polaris? If I'm being dense, please tell me!

I got the Altair Hypercam 183C Pro in the post today (thanks, Dad!) and have been fiddling around with everything. I did get the correct cable from FLO (ordered it on Monday evening, arrived on Tuesday morning) and set up the Astroberry with the equipment profile for the AZ-GTI using the EQMOD options. Managed to get GOTO working over WiFi with EKOS. I've also managed to get the Altair camera working in Astroberry in EKOS and taking previews, so that looks good. Now when I next get a decent sky I'm going to try for the PHD2 for the polar alignment. I must admit, so far it's going OK and it's not quite as technically challenging as I was dreading. A few things in my favour though, i) I work in IT (specifically for an MSP) so fiddling around with stuff like this is a large part of my day job and it's fairly natural to me and ii) I've been playing around with Linux ond and off since 2006, so some of the foibles of the various utility software on Astroberry is largely familiar. No doubt my confidence will come crashing down when it all first meets contact with the enemy but this is all quite good fun so far!

This is the primary reason that I'm setting up my first astrophotography setup with Astroberry and a Pi 4. I'm being loaned an Altair camera that my Dad isn't using because he's gone all-in on an ASiair and ZWO cameras. The ASiair is a great bit of kit (even better if you're using an ARM-based Mac) and ZWO locking users into their ecosystem was a shrewd move. For those of us that don't mind a bit of tinkering and experimentation, Astroberry looks (from my initial explorations) to be a great solution, albeit it trickier to set up but that's not for everybody!

Stunning. Absolutely stunning. I have to admit that it all made me rather emotional yesterday and this is the icing on the cake.

A couple of 3-second quick shots from my iPhone. I'm down near Dover! It's not visual here but I suspect if the clouds weren't in the North would have been about 45 minutes ago when I took these.

Took the AZ-GTi out tonight for the first time for about an hour. Kept it simple. AA batteries, Alt-Az, visual with the C5 and a 20mm WO 'Swan' eyepiece connected to my iPhone via WiFi. As seeing wasn't great and it was threatening to cloud over, I just tried out the single-star alignment to get a rough idea - especially since my red dot mount decided to fall apart just as I was getting the telescope out (fortunately I had a spare) and had to quickly align that too and wasted ten minutes! The mount thought it was oriented differently to begin with but soon corrected itself when it built its map after a couple of attempts. The single-star alignment isn't exactly brililant (I aligned it with Jupiter to start with) but it got me close enough for a good look at M31 - it was just in the FOV without much fuss. M81 proved a different story, so I re-aligned it with Polaris and it was better but despite the marginal seeing I got M81 pretty quickly after I'd re-aligned. Tried the 3-star alignment but chose Merak as my third star. Which is just slightly obscured by my office roof. I could see it standing up, officer! Gave up with that, aligned with Jupiter again and stared at it for about 15 minutes. There are a fair few things to do. I've upgraded my Raspberry Pi to a Raspberry Pi 4 B+ with 8GB of RAM and have Astroberry running perfectly on there. Next, I need to get the right cable to connect it directly to the mount (a bit of advice would be appreciated here, happy to get a genuine EQMOD cable if it's the right thing?) and my Dad is posting his spare Altair Hypercam 183C Pro. I also need to get proper power to the mount. I have an old-style Celestron Powertank with a 12v cigarette lighter adapter but I'll need to double-check the polarity before I inevitably fry the mainboard of the AZ-GTi. So: - Get the AZ-GTi talking to the Raspberry Pi. - Get the Hypercam 183C Pro talking to the Raspberry Pi. - Figure out how to do the polar alignment with the camera. - Get this all working in the dark, outside, probably in marginal conditions. - Remember where I left my Bhatinov Mask. - Spend hours faffing around with little success. - ??? - Profit.

I've no idea what the manufacturing tolerances are but I can't see a reason not to re-align the plate to its initial position. I recently took the corrector plate off my C5 to clean it and tighten up the secondary mirror housing (a story for another day) and was sure to put it back in the same place. No harm done at all, just took a while to collimate it because I'm a ham-fisted twit.

In the UK, we generally have fairly limited conditions to observe and particularly so if we live in a typical suburban or city neighbourhood. I live in a new build development in the South-East and my garden is overlooked and the sky isn't as dark as it was when we moved here. There are clouds a significant portion of the year and finding the energy to go out in the evening after work is difficult. I have a Celestron C5 SE that was handed down to me after my Dad bought himself a C8. A really lovely gift for which I am very grateful, however the fact that I couldn't use the SE mount without finding power and setting it up meant that I had to commit to some time outside to use the scope 'properly' and there are other demands on my time. When I got the 100P I put the mount on a heavy-duty photographic tripod I have used that for both the 100P and for the C5 for an exceptionally quick setup. Just grab the tripod from my (outdoor) office and plonk it down in the garden. This last week I've got an AZ-GTI which can be used manually as well as do GOTO, but in a package of similar portability and weight. When the clouds eventually clear in five years or so, I'll be able to set that up and go for some short observing sessions. There's a lot to be said for a setup that can be grabbed quickly and set up with the minimum of fuss as it maximises the number of opportunities we have to observe, even if those sessions are for ten minutes. That's how you truly get into the hobby, you observe as often as you can. Unless you live in Colorado or somewhere with better weather and a more sparse population than the UK, getting anything that requires significant setup is a real commitment of time and many of us just don't have that time to commit. Getting yourself a 16" Obsession is great if you're going to use it but for the vast majority of people that just want to get out there and observe, 250GBP will buy them something that they can achieve that objective with. A Flextube 130P is less than 200GBP and is all the telescope that you need to see a lot of interesting deep sky objects. Look for a good deal on an eyepiece and you can get something reasonable with the remaining 50GBP. Stretch the budget to 400GBP and you're looking at an 8" Dobsonian from FLO - which for visual work is more telescope than many of us will ever need! It's about maximising your opportunities to observe, with the minimum of fuss and not creating the excuses. 'I'm too tired', 'it takes too long to set up', 'I've only got 15 minutes before it clouds over'. Get into the mindset with a simple setup and then you're hooked!

I had a great deal of luck recently and managed to snag a Heritage 100P mini-Dobsonian for 30 GBP a few months ago. That, plus a reasonably-decent eyepiece and a book would still come in at far under 100 GBP. I'd argue that would be an ideal present for a child that's expressed an interest.

Good shout, that. I do need to check that.

I've been reading through this thread gradually (not there yet!) but it's convinced me to get an AZ Gti. Found a good deal on eBay (I know, I know) with some extra accessories and the seller has been absolutely fabulous and very helpful with some advice, etc. I've got a Celestron C5 and a Heritage 100P. I'm being long-loaned an Altair Hypercam 183C Pro soon (belongs to my Dad) and I'm going to see what I can get going with Astroberry (wish me luck!) and I'm really excited to learn and grow with this setup. I have a Star Adventurer and going to use its wedge for this but the lack of Goto makes things really difficult for me because I don't get much of a chance to get out and observe or photograph, so actually finding the objects I want to look at is difficult. I'm hugely excited to give this a go. I'll start with some basic planetary most likely (Jupiter is in a great place from my garden) just to get used to it and then see what I can do. Having a Heritage 100P and a C5 theoretically gives me a decent range of optics to get a decent range of targets - but I know it's not as simple as that and I have a lot to learn.

As a teenager about 20 years ago I went to see a lecture by Richard Dawkins on human genetic history with my Dad - specifically to do with the X and Y chromosone mutations in evolutionary history. One of the most startling things that he said is that you can roughly estimate the 'natural' population of a species based upon its size. The smaller the organism, the more prolific and the inverse is also true. According to the data modelling, the extant human population should be around two million. We have a population now of around 8 billion. When I was born in 1988, it was around 5 billion. Astonishing.

Had a bit of a mare yesterday night looking for it through my 20x80 bins. Eventually I got clear skies after a day of heavy cloud. I have no idea why but I had trouble finding it, which feels utterly ridiculous to say but it was at what felt a much higher inclination than the charts suggested. The charts were right, of course and it was my complete lack of recent practice that was the issue! In a 'typical me' situation I ended up getting there by first finding M81/82 - but I'm strange like that. When I actually found it, it was great and I was somewhat embarrassed that it had taken as long as it had given how obvious it is.

Not in the Weald (East Kent) but welcome!

As does mine. It's almost as if that's what they have.

Ashford? My condolences. When I used to live in Charing Heath it was still good out there and there are plenty of spots up around the A20 where you could set up...

I've just found this too for some reading: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2515-5172/acaf7e

I know that clay soil very well. Grew up in North Kent (and only moved to East Kent) and it's a bloody nightmare. Really looking forward to seeing the results. Love these builds.

For photography you're best off with something like an 80ED or 72ED to start with - which is also a nice visual scope but there is a step up in price and that price will just be for the OTA so expect to pay around twice as much again for a mount - a minimum of an EQ-35M really. The Dobsonian already has a mount built-in and they are the go-to as a visual scope for many, particularly those on a budget. Planetary imaging with a Dobsonian is possible and I've seen some manage it manually but it's not really a photography platform. Great for visual work though, especially with a lower-power eyepiece. They are bulky but very easy to set up (it takes seconds).

All the best for a speedy recovery to your wife.

I bought one of these a couple of years ago for about £65. It works well with my 20x80s and is very stable. Being aluminium it's not as heavy as it looks either. If I'm going for a longer session, I'll get out my parallelogram but for a quick setup, it's a great tripod. I also use it for my Star Adventurer. EDIT: I've just realised mine is a Manfrotto 075. Doesn't change anything, much the same advice as above!

I would be absolutely delighted to see a video of this in action, it's absolutely fantastic.