ONIKKINEN

This one is the best one yet from your NGC 7331 saga. All of them were good, just this one is the best.

I recently bought a Long Perng 90mm F/5.5 refractor. It is sold under the "apochromat" section in TS but i would classify its more as like a half achromat. It is obviously not colour free, and the extension of the aberrations are not completely filterable away. That said, i have been satisfied with mine, and with the Baader fringe killer that lives in the diagonal 24/7 i have found it to be an acceptable fast focal ratio scope. Jumping back and forth between my completely aberration free 200mm newtonian and this one leaves me with fairly obvious (in comparison, maybe not in solitude) spherical aberration and some colour aberrations inside and outside of focus. But perhaps more importantly there is a point in focus where planets can be observed with reasonable satisfaction. Its not perfect but for the money, maybe worth considering?

Imagine spending close to 900 bucks for what is essentially an astromaster. Damn do we have it good today!

According to an inflation calculator online it would be 870 dollars today 💀.

Oh my god i only noticed once you mentioned it. Its actually a miracle that the mount can go to this angle anyway

Its a new item, not many of them out there. Astrobin search only comes up with a handful of images taken with the thing, but they look good to me. https://www.astrobin.com/search/?d=i&sort=-likes&q="Sky-Watcher Quattro 150P" The price seems very competitive with the corrector included. Not sure if its a good or a bad thing, but if everything works its very well priced.

I had the Maxfield 0.95x with an F/4.4 scope and was not satisfied with it. Does not correct coma up to APS-C and has noticeable field curvature/star shape issues in the corners along with just producing generally soft stars all across the field (including center). Could be better with an F/5 primary, but if given the choice i would not buy this corrector again. The Skywatcher aplanatic or the various GPU correctors would probably be better value for money judging from released spot diagrams found online.

Maybe its an Australian ad?

Delays are always going to be a thing in spaceflight. No way around them, or should maybe say no way around them without increasing risks of a launch failure like with the shuttle a few times so delays every now and then is a good thing in my book, it shows the business is being run with engineering facts first and pleasing the impatient public second. Why i think many (me included) are disappointed with with every little trivial setback SLS gets is that there is no good product in the end. The design itself is flawed (in cost and practicality, not necessarily overall capability) and no amount of testing and delaying will fix that. It will still be a technically functional launch vehicle one day, and guaranteed to be so sooner than Starship will be so in that way it is doing more than Starship will be doing for a while. I am not the one paying the bills for NASA so i will be happy to see whatever launch vehicle manages to take humans to the Moon again!

I am seeing about the same things with a 90mm refractor under bortle 3-4 skies than i do with a 200mm scope under bortle 8+ skies. So i would say definitely worth it to haul a smaller scope further out of the city than try to just power through the lights with more aperture. Dobs are bulky, and i think an eq or alt az mount + tripod will be easier to transport since it can be taken apart so maybe consider something other than the dobs? Will be more expensive though, so maybe not an option.

Yeah that might be a problem for so short a guide exposure, but im just guessing as have not used narrowband filters. You could rearrange the imaging train and put the filter in a filter drawer/filter wheel or use a clip-in filter if you have a DSLR.

Have you ever managed to capture just background? Seems like you point your scope at nothing at all and a pretty picture comes out. Really inspiring stuff as always!

Amazing capture considering the distance and a manual dob!

During capture, no, and its not possible to affect this anyway since there are 2 green pixels for every red and blue one, and they have different sensitivities. Raw colour capture will need calibrating later on anyway, in short dont worry about it, just make sure that none of the colours are saturated. After the capture, i recommend the RGB auto balance tool in Registax6, a free app where you can also do wavelet sharpening.

Thank you Bryan!

Cant see why not? Less focal length so even more guidestars to pick from.

Im no expert but have done many (mediocre) 10-15 minute animations of Jupiter and Jupiter moves shockinly much in just that short a time so probably a bit shorter than 3min is better. This example here spans around 15 minutes: These are with 60s recordings. Any longer than that and derotation of the video itself would probably be necessary and that seems like a lot of work.

Thank you, much appreciated! The dark skies are to thank for the clean background. Easy to work with data that has no or very little gradient in it.

First DSO light with a new corrector, tuned mount and an OAG instead of a guidescope. 165x60s from SQM 21.0 skies with an 8'' newtonian, paracorr type 2 and a Rising Cam IMX571 OSC camera. I did a bayer split after calibration resulting in 1.5'' per pixel subs, but downsampled a bit later in processing to around 2'' per pixel. The new OAG and tuned mount setup did not improve performance nearly as much as i hoped it would so its a bit softer than i planned for, but still a small upgrade from last year. The corners are also not great which is why i have cropped the image a bit, i am lacking proper adapters and shims to get the backfocus dialed in. Also some tilt/collimation in play, but ill get to that after the backspacing looks better. Most of the processing in Siril, but later on fiddling with Photoshop too. No starless processing or star reduction, since i think its pointless for this target when most of the interesting things to see are the stars in the galaxy itself. Thanks for looking, comments and critique welcome of course!

Aurora! Quite obvious too. Saw this naked eye even with the lights right there. Has there been a flare or something? This is not commom even at 60N. Edit: Shows over already. Lasted just a few minutes. Very odd😲.

Finally time for a true first light with the 90mm Long Perng on an AZ5 under dark skies. Have looked at M31, M33 which was surprisingly easy to spot (no detail of course), Cruising around Cygnus with a 24mm and a 3+ degree FOV in search of the veil but no cigar on that one, Dumbell, Ring nebula, Double cluster, Pleiades and some open clusters in Auriga and of course Jupiter which was pretty good just now. Very low effort setup to use while the astrophotography does its own thing. Not having go-to takes some getting used to but its not too difficult to find things with the wide FOV so overall a pleasant experience.

Is the adapter also USB3 on both sides? If some part of the connection is not USB3, then devices will be forced to use USB2.

Thought i would write a closing statement in case someone stumbles upon the thread wondering about the same question. Last night was able to test the Askar OAG+120MM setup in a 1020mm FL/200mm aperture scope and tried my best to slew around the sky in search of a spot where i could not get a guide star, and pleased to report that could not find one. There was always at least one suitable guide star with 3s exposures, so nothing to worry about in the tiny sensor of the 120MM!

Looks like this will be perfectly placed for northern observers, unlike Leonard last winter which was licking the horizon all the way. Lets hope this one keeps up the pace and shows up in January 👍.

Not familiar with a "PS1000" from Celestron, but from what i can gather around the internet the Celestron PS1000 could refer to the Celestron powerseeker 127, which has a 1000mm focal length and is a commonly sold model. There could be some kind of clever naming scheme trickery going on from the seller as the name "powerseeker" is kind of tainted and not many who are in the hobby would recommend one. So i have bad news, this is not a good telescope, even for the money and im afraid you will not be getting much of the clear views you had in mind. Here is a review of the scope from Ed Ting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXfR7YTF5a4 If you can, you would be better off returning that scope and getting something else for the money. For this kind of budget you're looking at a compromise of something, so really only the budget tabletop dobsonians will give you nice views. Skywatcher Heritage 130P: https://www.firstlightoptics.com/beginner-telescopes/skywatcher-heritage-130p-flextube.html That one is a bit more expensive than you had in mind, but not that much. This one has a proper parabolic mirror and you will get decent views of many objects in the night sky with it. In your shoes i would save up a bit more and get the 130P. Skywatcher Heritage 100P: https://www.firstlightoptics.com/beginner-telescopes/skywatcher-heritage-100p-tabletop-dobsonian.html This one fits your budget too, and will be better than the Powerseeker 127 for sure. But this one is F/4 instead of F/5 so it will be harsher on budget eyepieces and will be trickier to keep in good collimation. And actually, the primary mirror is not collimatable at all, so if its out of alignment it will stay that way.