Using Night Vision monoculars with a full moon

[alanjgreen]

7 minutes ago, GavStar said:

Thinking of getting a NV monocular then Alan? ?

Not according to my wife! 

But seriously, I am not in the market for this kit at the moment. I am 100% Ethos (100 degree) Dob only for the foreseeable future. I have lovely dark skies and the dob delivers good results (best ever views for me).

I have a plan to do New Zealand at some point (with my Borg89) and this kit would be good value then.

As I get older, I may move away from the countryside and this kit may mean that this hobby is still doable from within a town... keeping my options open.

[GavStar]

Poor skies this evening so I decided to try different magnifications on m42 as follows 55mm to give 20x, 31mm to give 36x and 18mm to give 62x. This would progressively change the f ratio from 3.5 to  6 to 10. Dodgy pics below. But I was quite pleased at the detail and image scale shown at 62x.

 

[Highburymark]

Great stuff Gavin! Higher mag M42 looks extremely sharp considering. Also good to see that NV is effective on galaxies. Will always need orthodox eyepieces for planets, open clusters and double stars - and I doubt NV will ever replace a large aperture scope under dark skies, but not many of us have access to that. Thanks for posting your latest images.

[GavStar]

Got some decent viewing this evening with the new moon and the bigger 160mm refractor but still in south west London. Really looking forward to getting to a dark sky with NV. Rosette and horsehead. Photos are a little better than eyepiece view but not much.

[Stu]

Great stuff Gavin  

Rosette looks excellent

[Highburymark]

Superb Gavin!

[Stu]

Looking at it again more closely, you can clearly see the snout on the Horsey can't you? Was that visible visually? I guess new moon and good transparency are grounds va when we looked last time? Very nice!

[GavStar]

11 minutes ago, Stu said:

Looking at it again more closely, you can clearly see the snout on the Horsey can't you? Was that visible visually? I guess new moon and good transparency are grounds va when we looked last time? Very nice!

I couldn’t really get the snout visually. I was using a 6nm filter vs the 12nm filter (which we used previously- I think the 6 gives more contrast) but the skies when we viewed in December were definitely darker.

Rosette was nice visually.

[Stu]

Ah, ok. Must be the narrower band that is making the difference. Get that under a dark sky and it should be amazing (even more!)

[GavStar]

 

20 minutes ago, Stu said:

Ah, ok. Must be the narrower band that is making the difference. Get that under a dark sky and it should be amazing (even more!)

Kit was all working really well tonight. I’ve now got a cross hair eyepiece which made the goto setup even more accurate. The TTS was hitting the targets spot on. The skyfi and SkySafari link was stable all night. The NV, filters and fonemate all doing good jobs. At the end I put a normal eyepiece for the double cluster - the tec certainly was producing nice views ?

[Stu]

Great!  

[PeterW]

Go for the cone Neb next good night.. see if you can annoy the big dob crowd! We need to start working out what else to go after using your point and click system.

 

peter

[GavStar]

2 hours ago, PeterW said:

Go for the cone Neb next good night.. see if you can annoy the big dob crowd! We need to start working out what else to go after using your point and click system.

 

peter

Yes Peter, the cone is on the list! ? We really need to get it to our dark site and see what happens...