What did you see tonight?

[John]

2 hours ago, Stu said:

.....You seem to have a love-hate (too strong an expression but can’t think of anything else) relationship with smaller refractors. Often saying that you don’t think it worth going below 100mm, but then enjoying them when you do dabble....

 

That is true enough @Stu 🙂

I think the very mixed and variable weather this summer has affected my attitude to small scopes - often it's been the rig I can plonk outside with one hand that has got me some observing when I would not otherwise have put a larger scope out 🤔

Having the scope on Jersey back in May and spotting the supernova in M101 with it earned it quite a few brownie points as well 😉

 

 

 

[Stu]

4 minutes ago, John said:

That is true enough @Stu 🙂

I think the very mixed and variable weather this summer has affected my attitude to small scopes - often it's been the rig I can plonk outside with one hand that has got me some observing when I would not otherwise have put a larger scope out 🤔

Having the scope on Jersey back in May and spotting the supernova in M101 with it earned it quite a few brownie points as well 😉

 

Thanks for not interpreting my clumsy words as any kind of slight! I re-read my post and did worry how they came across…. Not my intention at all of course.

I recall sometime back you picked up a Televue Ranger I think and it helped you through a low patch in your observing just through sheer convenience. A lot of my observing is hardly anything to write home about, quick looks here and there through smallish scopes despite having up to 16” available to me. I’ve managed to keep my observing going through divorce, house moves and three children when a lot of people would have given up; the small scopes have definitely helped/help with that.

[Mr Spock]

I keep saying I'm going to use the 60mm for a doubles session. But then attaching it to the mount (I only have one) instead of the 4" makes me wonder if it's worth it.

[Franklin]

12 minutes ago, Stu said:

the small scopes have definitely helped/help with that.

Not only that but there is a remarkable number of targets up there that are accessible to small refractors and they're so easy to get out observing with. My SD81 on the manual APZ and lightweight TL-130 tripod are by far my most used pieces of kit and the views are amazing. Sure the bigger scope does perform better especially on extended objects like the planets but the 3" is no slouch, not by any means.

[IB20]

Right now my circumstances mean I can only have really opportune short sessions, plus throw in this summer’s weather and small grab and go scopes have been invaluable. I’d have done next to no observing without my 40mm PST and 76mm frac.

I love planetary observing through the 76mm, I get a great deal of satisfaction and joy from using it. I still hope to have a shoot-out with the 4” at some point when I get the chance but it might roll over to next year with the demands of two young terrors.

[wesdon1]

17 minutes ago, IB20 said:

Right now my circumstances mean I can only have really opportune short sessions, plus throw in this summer’s weather and small grab and go scopes have been invaluable. I’d have done next to no observing without my 40mm PST and 76mm frac.

I love planetary observing through the 76mm, I get a great deal of satisfaction and joy from using it. I still hope to have a shoot-out with the 4” at some point when I get the chance but it might roll over to next year with the demands of two young terrors.

@IB20 Reading your comments makes me want to start allowing myself some time for visual astro again. I have been obsessed with imaging for almost 1 year now, and have totally neglected the part of the hobby that got me hooked on amateur astro in the first place...just looking up through a telescope and enjoying the beauty, as is, to the naked eye. Thank You for reminding me this my friend...

Wes

Edited August 27, 2023 by wesdon1
missed out "through a telescope"

[Stu]

1 hour ago, Mr Spock said:

I keep saying I'm going to use the 60mm for a doubles session. But then attaching it to the mount (I only have one) instead of the 4" makes me wonder if it's worth it.

Whilst the resolution is much lower, there is definitely a beauty to the star images through a good quality small scope. I think it’s the large airy disks which are much easier to see even if the seeing is a bit iffy, so the stars really do look like gems on velvet. Something like Izar for instance looks fabulous with the secondary a lovely blue grey gem on the first diffraction ring.

Do give it a go 👍

[John]

1 hour ago, Stu said:

...I recall sometime back you picked up a Televue Ranger I think and it helped you through a low patch in your observing just through sheer convenience.....

Yes I did. I ended up selling it to Roger Vine who reviewed it on his website:

TeleVue Ranger Review (scopeviews.co.uk)

The main downside with the Ranger for me was that it was strictly 1.25 inch only. The Altair 70 that I now have is at least as good optically (better in terms of CA control) and has a proper 2 inch dual-speed focuser fitted to it. It also packs shorter. The penalty is that it weighs about 700 grams more than the Ranger. The Ranger had charm though plus Al Nagler's signature on it's instruction manual 😁

 

 

 

[The60mmKid]

5 minutes ago, Stu said:

Whilst the resolution is much lower, there is definitely a beauty to the star images through a good quality small scope. I think it’s the large airy disks which are much easier to see even if the seeing is a bit iffy, so the stars really do look like gems on velvet. Something like Izar for instance looks fabulous with the secondary a lovely blue grey gem on the first diffraction ring.

Do give it a go 👍

Agreed. The small scopes have their own charm, to my mind. I used to love film photography. The Leica III rangefinders are antique jewels, and the photos they produce are special. A more modern or larger-format camera will produce images that are more detailed. But one misses the beauty when one slips into comparisons. That's how I feel about my FOA-60Q. The views that it offers are special, and I don't feel the need to compare it to my larger telescope.

[RobertI]

11 hours ago, John said:

One night I'll line up all my refractors, from 70mm to 130mm, pick a target and then move through the scopes comparing the views that the increments of aperture give at a similar magnification (to keep things fair). Should be fun

I’d love to see a good structured comparison between a 3”, 4” and 5” class refractors, particularly on DSOs. I often hear comments like “a 4 inch refractor is the sweet spot” and “the jump from 3 inch to 4 inch is more noticeable than the jump from 4 to 5” (and also the opposite!). But I often wonder whether this might be due to the nature of the showpiece objects which are commonly used to compare, ie: those objects just happen to seem better at the 3 to 4 jump, and less at the 4 to 5 jump. For more challenging objects, perhaps that’s less true. Or perhaps it’s bang for the buck, or bang for the weight. I’m probably rambling now, so I’ll let us get back on topic. 🙂

[JeremyS]

1 hour ago, The60mmKid said:

Agreed. The small scopes have their own charm, to my mind. I used to love film photography. The Leica III rangefinders are antique jewels, and the photos they produce are special. A more modern or larger-format camera will produce images that are more detailed. But one misses the beauty when one slips into comparisons. That's how I feel about my FOA-60Q. The views that it offers are special, and I don't feel the need to compare it to my larger telescope.

Good summary. I cannot believe how satisfying the FOA 60Q is. Brings a smile to my face just holding it.

Edited August 27, 2023 by JeremyS

[Bedlasky]

15 hours ago, Bivanus said:

Like this ? I was wondering what's going on 😊

That's exactly it! Here's picture from Stellarium for today's night:

 

 

[Epick Crom]

2 hours ago, Bedlasky said:

That's exactly it! Here's picture from Stellarium for today's night:

 

 

Yep, it's always interesting when a star of similar magnitude as the galilean moons masquerades as one 👍

[RobertI]

Super session with the 4” tonight, great views of the Veil and North America nebulas, challenging view of the Crescent, and an amazing view of the California nebula with my new Hb filter. Full report here. 

[badhex]

Still no decent opportunity for a good session at my end due to weather and other commitments, (total cloud cover for the opposition obviously) but I have a holiday coming up eventually and will take the ZS73 with me. I'm really looking forward to it as I suspect it will be the first proper observing I'll have done since last year really, for one reason or another. I had actually planned to take my ultra-light converted Skywatcher 50ED which was designed to be a holiday scope and has not had a proper workout yet, but where we are staying looks like it will be basically perfect for observing, so the ZS73 will go instead.

Bit off topic, but just following on from the earlier posts about small scopes. Although they obviously have their limitations, the portability of this class of scope (70mm-ish) means it has allowed me to observe from various locations around the world that just wouldn't have been possible with anything else. This in turn means there are objects I have only ever seen through this scope, despite—or indeed because of—the extra aperture of my other scopes. 

Edited August 28, 2023 by badhex

[SwiMatt]

I'm back to cloudy Sweden I will try to live vicariously through those of you who are getting some observing skies.

But your discussion about small apertures is making me feel like I want to commit only to small telescopes - which is a welcome medicine to those days when aperture fever hits me and I start adding 16" dobs to my FLO wish list

[Stu]

23 hours ago, RobertI said:

I’d love to see a good structured comparison between a 3”, 4” and 5” class refractors, particularly on DSOs.

I’ll see what I can do with these chaps. You can see one of the points which is the sheer size difference once you get up to a 130mm class f8 refractor…

[bosun21]

On 25/08/2023 at 10:58, Mr Spock said:

. I just like looking at stars - what does that mean?

You're obviously starstruck Michael 🤩.

[Ratlet]

Got up at 0300 but it was cloudy so went back to bed.  When I left at 0500 it had cleared up but pretty light, despite this Orion was up in the South East and Jupiter was very prominent.  I'll need to shift the binos into the car again!

Even more surprised to see Venus on my drive to work.  Just less than 10° off the horizon.

I can't help but think that Orion and Venus just left....

Very keen to swing the dob at Orion one morning.

[John]

Un-forecast clear skies currently. Got my ED120 refractor out and some high-ish power eyepieces in use. 150x-225x seems to work well currently.

Bright moon over to the south but very nice views of Saturn plus 5 moons in that direction and even more rewarding on Jupiter was Io's shadow showing against the southern equatorial belt. Io itself will start to cross the jovian disk shortly.

4 nice cloud belts showing on the giant planet despite it's low altitude currently. 

Uranus is nearby in the sky but hiding behind a large confer just now 🙄

Sigma Arietis is doing a neat job of posing as a 5th Galilean moon tonight !

Nice appetizer for the forthcoming planetary season 🙂

Simulation below generated by Stellarium, which draws much better than I can !

 

 

[Zermelo]

Just got in from a 2.5hr session with the Mak 127.  It's been nearly three months since I was last out, due to health and other reasons, and it's scary how quickly you forget the routines that you used to do in autopilot.

The moon near full was always going to restrict the session. I tried for M13 early on, and it was so poor that I stuck to doubles. At least the moon is quite low at the moment, and stayed behind the houses until quite late.

Seeing seemed to vary from average to quite good, though anything beyond x250 was unusable, so the tighter doubles were inaccessible. Successes included Izar, HD 136160, Sarin, 100 Her, the Lyra double double, HR 7294, HR 7529, 49 Cyg, HR 8166, Gamma1 Del, Σ2725, HD 186902, Σ2789, and iota Cas. The last one was very unsteady, so I only managed two stars rather than the three I've seen in the past.

But the real success of the evening was the Clicklock adapter I bought recently, this being its first outing. I love it.
In most sessions I like to experiment with several different eyepieces on each target, and this gadget makes it so easy to switch. @badhex was right, I'm hopelessly hooked.

[Ratlet]

Learned my lesson from yesterday and went out for a quick check despite it being cloudy at 0330 when I woke up.  Small gap in the clouds so dropped the 10" on its slab and lined up as the clouds rolled in.

However like the Red Sea before Moses the clouds parted as I was setting up.  Put the 8mm zoom on and was rewarded with a sharp view of Jupiter.  View was very bright so righted up to about 5mm and the extra magnification cooled it off.  Easy the best view I've had of Jupiter.

Plenty of detail to be seen with the southern eq band lumpy towards the western limb (I think west, left of the planet through the newt).

I'll need to get setup again tomorrow as there should be a shadow transit and the GRS presenting.

Swung up to the Pleiades with the 30mm but it's just too much power and not wide enough.  Need to get some overtime and get a 102 Starfield.

[badhex]

7 hours ago, Zermelo said:

But the real success of the evening was the Clicklock adapter I bought recently, this being its first outing. I love it.

In most sessions I like to experiment with several different eyepieces on each target, and this gadget makes it so easy to switch. @badhex was right, I'm hopelessly hooked.

Glad you got on well with it, apologies for spending your as-yet unearned money for you! 

[Littleguy80]

Woke up to my alarm at 3:30 am with the sky looking a bit cloudy. By the time I got outside with the Tak FC100DF it had cleared. I went straight to my main target Comet C/2023 P1 (Nishimura). Found it quite easily. Very compact and bright. I ramped up the power with the Pentax XW 5mm, the comet responded well. Well worth the effort to get up for. 
I was shocked to see how Jupiter was, I’ve gotten used to low planets. Caught the end of Ganymede’s shadow transit. The planet and shadow nice and sharp in the Tak. Saturn was a bit low but still nice to see. Finished up with a nice widefield view of M42 as a winter preview. Now back to bed for some sleep before work!

[SwiMatt]

Last night I had a lucky impromptu session from the window of my kitchen. The cat woke me up and going to feed her I saw that Jupiter was showing, so I mounted the quick set-up (just Mak 127 and AZ5). 

With the super 25mm (60x), I was welcomed by the view of the gas giant, along with the four Galilean moons. This was at around 1-1.30am, so Io had just come out of it's occultation behind the planet. Europa and Ganimede were on the same side as Io (left wrt Jupiter) while Callisto was on the other side. I increased the magnification to 100x by putting the BST 15mm in and then to 150x with the 10mm super. At 150x the view was not improving too much, and I found the BST to provide basically the same amount of details, given the field of view and the additional viewing comfort, so I stuck to the BST.

This was the first actual observation I did through a telescope, which is quite exciting. Being behind a glass, I was very surprised with the crisp view I got! Actually I was so pleased and taken by what I was seeing that I forgot that I own a barlow 🤣 - I would have loved to try it with the BST. Next time!