Ags

Lovely scope. It deserves an impulse purchase.

If escape velocity at the surface of the hypothetical body is the speed of light, then the object will become a singularity pretty quick. Unless of course it is made of pure adamantium 😀

That one is new to me, looks like a great 2" eyepiece for a Mak or SCT (1.9 degrees in my C6...). If I am ever in the market for 2" eyepieces I will keep an eye out for one of these 😃

Lovely widefieldish views tonight of some colored doubles with my new to me 13.4 mm ultrawide eyepiece. Wonderful to see some bright wide doubles almost lost in a field of pinpoint stars. Still can't quite split both double double pairs. Had a look at saturn too at 80 magnification, lovely view. Spotted the moons Titan and Dione. Packed up too soon, I should have had a go at M31 (already? The year is flying by) and some of the doubles in Cassiopeia.

Had first light with the 4.9 and 13.4 with my Zs66. Happy with both, the tight eye relief I saw during the day disappears at night. Very comfortable to use and easy to hold the view. Based on my experiences of a solar session earlier in the day, and from trying to split some tight doubles, the 1.6 extension ring does not maintain the quality of the view.

Don't tell me that! 😀 My astro budget is eaten up for months... I do try to get eyepieces second hand though, the only new eyepieces in my case are a couple of plossls.

Not very widely - and at nearly twice the price! Also, series 4 lacks the eccentricity of the earlier models 😀

I will find out tonight hopefully!

I find the "imaginative" naming of objects in Stellarium almost toxic. I love the program, hate the ridiculous names.

My ZS66SD in double star mode.

Just had a brief solar session with my Herschel Wedge, using 60x to 120x. Seeing wasn't good enough to really judge, especially as there was only a very small sunspot on show. But I did find the focusser very good (compared to an ST80 anyway). However 120x is pushing the limits of the AZT6 mount. Next thing to buy...

The mirror clack on my 1100D drove me mad, especially as there was no way to switch it off. A peace offering and apology is the best advice, I think.

One day I will find the 17mm!

Speers WALER Series 2 4.9 mm with 1.6x extension tube fitted. These are big eyepieces but not as heavy as they look, as the design involves a huge air space between the lenses in the nosepiece and the lenses at the eye end. They are out of production now but have always been highly regarded as so-called "Nagler killers". I have had a Series 1 10 mm for over a decade, picked up cheap because the eyepiece had developed an incurable lens rattle - a common problem with Speers WALERS. But I have never noticed any effect on the deep sky views which are always superb, certainly at least as good as the Explore Scientific widefields I have owned. For planetary viewing the eyepiece is very effective but does fall a little short, with faint ghosting around bright objects. I have now acquired two Series 2 units (4.9 and 13.4 mm) and will update the thread with first light hopefully tomorrow. I only checked that I could reach focus so far. Although they are supposedly long eye relief eyepieces (WALER = Wide Angle Long Eye Relief), I can confirm eye relief on all of them is positively eyelash tickling!

What is this rule? Googling has drawn a blank...

@John I believe there was a W70 line that were just rebadged generic 66 degree models. The WALER line ran up to 17 mm, but only covered 78 degrees at that length.

My case is slowly filling up with Speers WALERs and Vixen NPLs and SLVs.

I also got the 1.6x extension tube, so the 4.9 mm can operate as a 3 mm. Looking forward to trying it on some doubles 😀 @John I have heard that the SW 82 are a cut above the SW 70's. No way of knowing if that is true... looking for the SW 17/78 and 7.2/82 eventually!

I have had the orange lettering 10 mm Speer WALER for over a decade. Today it is joined by 4.9 and 13.4 mm siblings (sadly not orange lettering first editions).

Well, a moment of quiet celebration here - all 194 doubles in the book are documented.

More toys for my ZS 66 arrived - a TS 99% dielectric diagonal. after years of using SkyWatcher freebie diagonals I finally have a proper one. I wonder if it will make any difference? Initial thoughts on fitting the diagonal and inserting an eyepiece - nosepiece catches in compression ring! Good thing I avoid changing eyepieces.

Define "definitive"... 😃 I have a number of ideas to improve the charts mostly revolving around my central use case of "non-expert with tons of light pollution and small scope seeks target type X", which wouldn't result in a definitive work, but practically I am getting to the point where I can scale up book generation significantly, and could support definitive-scale works shortly. One limiting factor is written content, this just takes time, not only to write but also to proof. So I need to reduce the reliance on written material and only add it where it is truly valuable. It is taking a lot of time providing relatively general finding instructions for doubles, but for future versions I suspect the better approach is to use my knowledge of path finding algorithms from game development. Looking at "Star Clusters and How to Observe Them", the google preview basically showed a lot of boilerplate content about Herzsprung-Russell diagrams and topics like "What is a globular cluster"? We've all seen this material before and not sure adding that class of content to a book is making it more unique or valuable, while it will increase print costs and weight. Some of it's nice to have but not needed for version 0.1 of a book.

Let history record that I was documenting Struve 2313 when England went down. Still 6 more doubles to go, but will definitely move to first edit next week. After that I will put the beta PDF for download to get some feedback 😀

@mdstuart globs and planetaries - good stuff for light polluted observing locations... Good thing the game has gone to extra time, I still have seven doubles to go...

Superb!