Ags

Only a short session as Cor Caroli is near the zenith and it did my back in. Hopefully a night's rest will cure all! Polaris - easy split. The companion seems brighter at 60x using my ES 24/68 than at 150x using my Speer Waler 10/82. It's not the first time I have noticed this and I don't understand it - with my small maks more magnification darkens the sky background and teases out faint stars, whereas with the C6 magnification seems to darken stars! 36 Boo - Izar - I had to use 150x magnification to resolve this one. The companion appears as a hot dot in the diffraction rings of the primary. 8 Boo - Muphrid - Either this one is very wide or I didn't split it (Google tells me I did split it but the companion is merely a line-of-sight coincidence). This star is 37 light years away, and is Arcturus' closest neighbor. A planet in the Muphrid system would see Arcturus as a magnitude -5.4 star - far brighter than Venus! Muphrid is a G class star about nine times as bright as the sun and very rich in non Hydrogen/Helium elements. Double Double - this was quite low and over houses so the view was unsteady. In the moments of clear seeing the pairs were clearly split with dark sky between them, but most of the time each double was blurred together. I am reminded of the adage that larger aperture is more sensitive to seeing effects. M3 - much brighter than in my 102mm Mak, but I still need averted vision to resolve the stars. Cor Caroli - I do enjoy this brilliant white pair, so easy to find too. On the equipment side I really enjoyed my Berleback Castor mount tonight - it seems smoother and more precise with a bigger load - I think the added weight of a C6 vs a Skymax 102 stabilizes it and the larger scope gives more leverage and makes precise motions easier. Clearly I need to upgrade the ST80 to something a little longer... And the side by side mounting was reasonably aligned without the need for tweaking. The C6 can do doubles - it's not the ideal scope for the job (stars are not as sharp as a refractor and the diffraction rings are bright) but it is serviceable.

I've seen it many times, but forgot to put it on the list tonight!

Looking towards a proper night of visual with my wonderful C6 and its little helper my ST80. Any suggestions for bright targets suitable for Bortle 8 skies? M3 and M57 work, but what else? Can anyone suggest some easy bright colorful doubles? Triples are also acceptable 😃

My frac is cast in a strictly supporting role tonight...

The M51 image displayed for my thread isn't mine and isn't taken with a C6 or AZ GTi. Later pictures in the thread are by me.

I have been using an AZ GTi with a C6. Nothing impressive yet but I am hopeful of improvements in the future.

That's only a 9 on the Redonkulous scale. Here's an "11". https://astrobites.org/2016/05/25/kelt-the-extremely-little-telescope/ From Wikipedia: Each KELT telescope consists of a wide field (26 degrees by 26 degrees) medium format telephoto lens with a 4.2 cm aperture, mounted in front of a 4k x 4k Apogee CCD. Each can also be equipped with an alternative narrower field (10.8 degrees by 10.8 degrees) lens with a 7.1 cm aperture for a narrow angle campaign mode. KELT-North uses an Apogee AP16E camera, while KELT South uses an Apogee U16M. The optical assemblies and cameras are mounted on Paramount ME mounts manufactured by Software Bisque.

As a hack, add a colored border to the image to fool the printing service into thinking the image isn't as dark as it really is!

...and I don't mean the good heart-stopping moments, like when you look through a new telescope and it's awesome. I mean the bad heart-stopping moments. I had two tonight. The first one occurred as I was loosening the AZ clutch on my mount and suddenly realized I was actually undoing the dovetail. The sad thing is it's the third time I've done that. My problem with the dovetail started when I was doing outreach and someone thought the dovetail knob was the focus knob. That alarming moment sank into my subconscious and I seem doomed to relive the awful moment every full moon now. Anyway I did not destroy my fragile SCT so I shot several sequences of the Moon until I ran out of hard disk space. I went in and deleted last night's data to make room for the processing. Ten seconds later I realised last night's data was actually shot past midnight, so I had pressed Shift-Delete on all the sequences from tonight's run too!

I also captured Gassendi and Mare Humorum. Gassendi is criss-crossed by a network of rilles known as Rimae Gassendi. Apollo 16 took this picture of Gassendi: There is a long fracture or rill running north-south to the west of Gassendi, but I haven't found any information on it yet.

I had some excellent luck with perfect seeing on Friday, so I was eager to get out again. I only got a chance past midnight, and was immediately struck by the poor seeing. Inspecting the Moon at 96x for some targets I was struck by a strange elongated crater that I now know as Schiller. It appears to be two fused craters of the same age, possibly the impactor broke up into two parts shortly before impact? To the east of Schiller are a pair of walled plains, the larger Longomontanus to the south and Wilhelm to the north: On the subject of strangely elongated craters, to the north of Schiller is this deeply excavated peanut pod, next to the dark Lacus Timoris: Does anyone know the name of the peanut pod? EDIT: Thanks to @CraigT82 it is called Hainzel, and is actually 3 overlapping but distinct craters - the two deapest even have central peaks as can be seen in the image. Here is the whole region (downsampled as it is a screen capture from StarTools demo version - I bought a key today but it takes 48 hours to get the key). I got the crater names from here: https://pubs.usgs.gov/sim/3316/downloads/sim3316_sheet1_lo_res.pdf This was shot with a 1560x1560 ROI in a sequence of 2000 8ms frames. I processed in Autostakkert (keeping only 10% of frames due to poor seeing) and StarTools. Equipment: C6, AZ GTi, ASI 178 MM. Shot in mono, but with a Wratten 29 filter, so really an image in long red and IR.

Skymax 102 with the AZ-GTi mount is a nice combination, particularly for viewing planets.

I have a Skymax 102 which is very similar. A small Maksutov like this can give nice views of the Moon and and planets and also some of the smaller and brighter deep sky objects. But Maksutovs have a very narrow field of view, so it is hard to find things if you don't know your way round the sky. Not a problem for bright targets like the main planets or the Moon.

Celestron C6! Aperture, lightweight, and with a 0.63 reducer widefield(ish) too. Star images are OK, not great but OK (better than an F5 Newt anyway).

I will try shoot darks outside in the same sequence as lights and darks. I just need to find a good light source and a windproof way of holding my diffuser to the front of the scope.

Yes, darks, lights and flats are all shot with the same Gain and Exposure Length. I'll try and get some FITS files for you (they are currently buried in SER files). Temperature should be the same. Flats are shot indoors immediately after the session, so I don't think the camera chip warms up in 7 minutes. Flats are shot by putting a sheet of paper over the front of the scope and pointing it at a room light. The histogram peaks at 50% with no clipping according to Sharpcap. In contrast my lights are so underexposed I could use them as darks. Could the big exposure difference between lights and flats be an issue in itself?

Thanks @celestron8g8, I am glad my humble image brought back good memories! I am certainly enjoying my new C6. Can't wait to see Jupiter through it!

Yes I use flat darks - these are same same as my ordinary darks because the darks, flats and lights are all shot with the same settings.

@vlaiv any idea why Autostakkert is over-correcting for my flats? I shoot the flats with the same settings as the lights, but the flats are 50 times brighter (based on histogram peak).

Had another go at M82. 15 3-minute sequences of 500 ms frames, 75% selected and stacked in Autostakkert. I did a bit of stretching and sharpening in Gimp.

I'm curious. Can you share a link to this product?

Venus and the Moon (I tried to do something artistic with the neighbor's roof...)

Mount: AZ-GTi Telescope: C6 Camera: ASI 178 MM Exposures: 21 sequences of 600 x 200ms frames at gain 360 and 2x2 binning Darks: 6 minutes * 200ms Flats: 6 minutes * 200ms My "workflow" was convoluted and quite possibly thoroughly misguided! Each sequence was stacked in Autostakkert, and the resulting TIFs were cropped and linear streatched in GIMP and then stacked in Deep Sky Stacker. I tried to finish it off in GIMP but wasn't getting anywhere so ran it through the trial version of StarTools. Next time I will try the Autostakkert derotation feature so that I can shoot a single sequence. I'd really appreciate any tips on how to get the stars away from center sharper - Autostakkert's routines seems to struggle with isolated stars in very noisy data.

I think this one is better, just a 2 minute sequence of 200ms frames, keeping 75%. I still have to stack it with the other 20 I captured. I tried to shoot color tonight to add to this but couldn't get enough signal - Autostakkert doesn't seem to be able to sharpen stuff if it is too faint. I tried 4x4 binning and 800ms frames, but it wasn't enough for the blue which came out as a mush.

This one may or may not be F1.8: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32776332053.html?spm=a2g0z.12010612.8148356.28.732e47f4i0cO1Z