Ags

Without the light from the security lights, I'd have to use my camera flash to photograph the stars! 🤣

PM'd you @badhex!

Still thinking about this and googling lead me back to my own long-forgotten thread! I am stuck in an infinite loop of confusion... I am curious about how a prism diagonal can influence spherical and chromatic aberrations, not necessarily for the worse! So I have picked one up to try. I could have got a Tak, but they use lower dispersion glass which isn't what I want in this case - I want the non-neglible impact on aberrations. I do have a nice dielectric too, so curious how this will stack up.

Snap! I have the same keyboard!

I tried splitting the Double Double with my Zenithstar 66, again. It was a nice wide white double at 29x, while both pairs started showing elongation at 79x. I tried barlowing to 158x, but the barlow is decentered and is going in the bin. However my 4.9 mm accepts a tuning ring giving a 1.6 boost to magnification, so I added that for 127x. Finally got a clear split of the wider pair, but not the closer one. I noticed the stars were yellowing at this magnification, so clearly chromatic aberration was starting to be a factor at that mag. I haven't noticed CA with this scope before...

I also have a Report 112 Astro, and it certainly is super-stable. I do find the wooden eyepiece tray annoying and hardly ever attach it. I use a 25 cm extension tube on the 112 to get a bit more height when required. A scopeech Mount Zero is going on top, one of these days...

@badhex yes, for a book project. The list is to help overcome my northern hemisphere cultural bias, it's probably not the final word on the "best" constellations 😀

1. Cover eyepiece or other optical item in peanut butter. 2. Present to pet dog to lick clean.

When I pick up a light scope on a carbon fibre tripod, I feel happy. It makes me feel enthusiastic for the coming session, completely out of proportion to the aperture!

Well, every constellation is going to have faint bits that are a challenge to spot (UMa is indeed a good example). With Bortle 9 skies, seeing any of the stars is a win! When I moved to Amsterdam from semi-rural Wales in 2010 I was shocked by the light pollution, it is simply never truly dark here. But... it's even worse now. I could make out the complete "virus" shape of Bootes in 2011, but now I can pick out just a few of the stars. Even the Big Dipper is a strain to see clearly. So the faint bits are not on my menu

@Gfamily I agree with you to a point, but for me if a constellation does not have a bright star it is just a blank area of light-polluted sky. Lyra pops out instantly for me, but Delphinus is only recognizable in my binoculars.

@JeremyS here is the top "20" for the northern hemisphere, we only get to 19 constellations with mag. 2.5 stars: 1 : Ori : 6210 2 : UMa : 5195 3 : Gem : 2676 4 : Leo : 2629 5 : Cyg : 2582 6 : And : 2577 7 : Cas : 2528 8 : Peg : 2503 9 : Tau : 1799 10 : Aur : 1793 11 : Boo : 1762 12 : Per : 1744 13 : UMi : 1734 14 : Lyr : 915 15 : CMi : 912 16 : Aql : 908 17 : Ari : 871 18 : CrB : 854 19 : Dra : 851 Here is the southern division (also only 19 long): 1 : Sco : 6036 2 : Cen : 5234 3 : CMa : 4408 4 : Car : 3547 5 : Vel : 3452 6 : Cru : 2702 7 : Sgr : 1749 8 : Gru : 1747 9 : Oph : 1698 10 : Eri : 911 11 : Vir : 904 12 : PsA : 902 13 : TrA : 878 14 : Pav : 876 15 : Hya : 873 16 : Cet : 869 17 : Pup : 849 18 : Lup : 845 19 : Phe : 839 @Franklin I can't score the aesthetics, but I agree Taurus looks Bull-like. This algorithm favors larger constellations that simply have more stars that can score. Lyra would score highly in my personal estimation, but it is to small to compete. Same with Canes Venatici, very easy to recognize, but its just two stars.

I was wondering which constellations are the brightest and most recognizable. Ursa Major, Orion, Cassiopeia, Crux, Scorpius are obvious picks but I made a little algorithm this afternoon to make the list more science-y. I score all constellations by their stars that are mag 2.5 or brighter, weighting the list linearly with the brightest star scoring 5 times more than the faintest (mag 2.5) star. I think the list is about right. Lots of Southern Hemisphere constellations hogging the top of the list 🥲 Rank: Const. : Score 1 : Ori : 2990 2 : Sco : 2816 3 : Cen : 2474 4 : UMa : 2435 5 : CMa : 2108 6 : Car : 1707 7 : Vel : 1612 8 : Cru : 1322 9 : Gem : 1296 10 : Leo : 1249 11 : Cyg : 1202 12 : And : 1197 13 : Cas : 1148 14 : Peg : 1123 15 : Tau : 879 16 : Aur : 873 17 : Boo : 842 18 : Sgr : 829 19 : Gru : 827 20 : Per : 824

Really enjoyed this one.

I normally appear on this thread to hate on my AZ-GTi, but I had a nice photo session last week. It just worked and tracked properly. The Moon was full and it was hazy, so really not promising so I shot a few targets like NGC 7000, M57, M27, and Albireo. I only did 10 minutes on each, so a kind of delayed EEA for when I processed the data later. I just levelled the tripod, slewed to the targets manually and hit point-and-track, to avoid the heartbreak of goto alignment. I am quite pleased with this M27 - it is only 11 minutes of 4-seconds subs, shot with my ASI485MC and Zenithstar 66 @ f4.3. I would have shot more subs on this target as it looked promising on the laptop screen, but ran out of disk space. That's what you get with a relatively big unbinned sensor and 4 second subs 🤣

Have you had any more adventures with the evolux?

Is it Goto?

I think there is a right way and a wrong way to do a mid-life crisis, and you are definitely doing it the right way.

I hope to be clever with diagrams and layout and add more information without cluttering. The finder charts cover 10 degrees, so I can point out the other good doubles on each chart; the supplementary doubles wouldn't have the detailed coverage of the central double but if each chart has a few other doubles within a finder-hop from the central double, then an observer's sessions would be much more productive. My own experience with the book (and my orange skies) is that getting in the general area is much more time-consuming than the final hop, so I want to enrich that final phase and reduce the dependence on wide area searching. For example, the DSO book covers 615 targets, although there are only 386 which get the full treatment with descriptions etc. Also, i have an idea to put more information in the finder charts, so you can get all key details about a double at a glance, without looking down to the text. Also 1,000 is the goal for the whole sky, so not quite so many in one of the hemisphere books.

I have put the books on Amazon too now, including hardback and paperback, and a black-and-white version that cuts printing costs in half. https://discovering-astronomy.eu/discovering_dsos.html Next up is the Discovering Double Stars book; I want to update it to cover 1,000 doubles (without increasing page count).

I have airlined with an ST80, Skymax 102 and ZenithStar 66. The only reason I travelled south with the Skymax was for a Mars opposition - the planet was at its largest for 20 years, but was only at 10 degrees elevation at home. Mars was a lovely big sight in the eyepiece, but my visit coincided with a planet-wide Martian dust storm - there was no detail to see, nothing at all! The refractors performed beautifully for DSOs in dark sky surroundings however. The experience was better with the ZS66 not because the optics are sharper, but because I had also packed my 50mm finderscope, and I was ten years more experienced in finding stuff! Also I was backpacking in Nepal with the ST80 and a bulky AZ3 tripod, which I regretted every step of the way 😀, while the ZS66 had a carbon fibre tripod and light mount head. I am looking at getting a Long Perng 90/500 semi-apo for future trips, and grab and go duties generally.

What I can't understand is why he wasn't standing on a mountaintop? 🤣

The most enjoyable S@N in many years!

This could actually work if you cover the eyepiece in peanut butter first...

Did some Lunar observing with my C6 in the evening, now it is 2am and I am shooting some short sequences of NaN, Sadr, Albireo and the Ring.