Ags

Nah, that was a rubbish result! Tried again making sneaky use of Siril photometric color calibration this time. The galaxy is a bit orange now, but the stars are more colorful 😀 ...third time's the charm....

An aperture mask will also have the benefit of making the field seem slightly flatter as it will increase depth of focus. Not that I see any field curvature issues in this image.

The Atronomik L3 cuts a little far blue in addition to UV, so it can improve blue halos at the cost of a little richness of color.

I find an Astronomik L3 filter helps. A very nice picture by the way!

I thought this was an ok result, shot over two evenings using the Air's ability to goto a picture you took the previous evening. This is under Bortle 8 skies.

It is annoying that a functional equatorial mount would have been beautiful and, most importantly, not wrong.

We don't need to add to the reasons not to observe 😄 I'll stay away from the C6 on the more brisk evenings! Maybe I need a more aerodynamic option for the gusty nights, like a 50 mm refractor!

Welcome!

Yes, I was also expecting the wind was a problem for plate solving, but I was hoping the setup could stand up to a bit of a breeze. One possibility to improve things is upgrading the current light Berlebach Report tripod to cheap but solid skywatcher steel tripod. I didn't know I could change the exposure length for polar aligning. Thanks for the tip!

I tried the mount with my C6 tonight, a less than successful endeavour! I wanted to see if the mount would cope with a light breeze and the relatively large C6 and dew shield, and the short answer is no. Guiding was all over the place and exposures of any length had wind-induced trailing. Obviously a scope-mount combo for the most serene evenings only I was also hoping to see if plate solving would work with the ASI485MC and the C6. Even with the f6.3 reducer, the FOV is on the edge for AsiAir plate solving. I made several attempts but could not solve any view, nor could I polar align with the main scope. Also, I managed to spend an hour trying to find focus!

All asteroids are minor planets, and all minor planets are (eventually) assigned a number indicating order of discovery, like 1 Ceres or 4 Vesta. The numbers were introduced to replace unique planetary symbols that were initially assigned to the first minor planets to be discovered. https://www.minorplanetcenter.net/db_search/show_object?utf8=✓&object_id=4 Only the first few asteroids to be discovered got planet symbols, and indeed they were recognized as planets. The symbol for the planet Ceres was: These little planets were demoted to minor planets when the number of discovered asteroids became too large - exactly the same reason for demoting Pluto from planetary status 150 years later. Of course, since 2006 we also have the category of dwarf planets (namely minor planets that are round due to hydrostatic equilibrium). Ceres is the only dwarf planet in the asteroids belt, but possibly Hygiea may yet be promoted to dwarf status (there is some dispute over why it is so round).

Do you mean dwarf planets - I include Ceres and Pluto only. You want me to add the larger TNOs?

I have still got to write a lot of frontmatter, but I have lots of new astrotoys distracting me at the moment 😀

Chart editing is finished so we are now sending off for a print copy to do a final edit and also review the cosmetic aspects we've introduced with this book.

Not too impressed with the results from the Long Perng 90 (plus f6.3 reducer), so I am trying M51 with the ZS66 tonight. I had some issues polar aligning - try as I might I could not get the Air to polar align with the ZS66 (I had reset focal length to 0 so it wasn't carrying over the focal length from the LP90). Eventually I resorted to polar aligning with the guide scope, which worked fine. I am dithering but I have this set to the minimum values as I have no idea what to set it to. It seems to have helped on the very stretched image above! The background is smoother than I usually get.

Spent an hour and a half imaging the owl. My scope doesn't like bright stars. Also first time using Starnet++.

I have the same scope, I think it is pretty nice! Don't have any experience of other Ha scopes, so I basically know nothing though.

I've lost them too, revealing.... Contrails.

I am interested! Not in the market to buy one now though. I note the optics are "smoother"?

I too felt it was too bad to sell, but someone read my loud complaints about the eyepiece and offered to buy it. Other people have looked through the Nirvana 16 and compared it favorably with the Nagler 16. I can't account for such divergence of opinion.

I used the Nirvana 16 at f5, f10 and f13 and found it equally objectionable at any focal ratio. It was good on the Moon in my f13 scope though...

Pictures or it didn't happen!

I could save a bit of money and shorten the buying cycle if I can persuade myself of a more minimal 2x progression rather than 1.5x: 2.5, 6, 12, 25. The strongest argument is my Svbony 3-8 zoom, it really does make owning a lot of short eyepieces a bit superfluous. But the SLV 2.5 would be a useful lunar/doubles eyepiece, and the SLV 12 would give 1.2 degrees of FOV in my longest frac… The four eyepieces would cover the 4 basic magnifications - low, medium, high and optimistic 😀

Well, the NLVs are outwardly almost identical to NPLs.

I believe that was fixed a while ago, still something to think about when buying second hand.