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Thanks all! Pretty happy how things turned out, even if the mount did require like a second mortgage heh. No more new toys for a while  Rolabi Wizenard posted:That mount is so awesome, the load bearing surfaces of your RA and Dec axes are almost a large as your OTA's primary mirror! Haha yeah, the 8" is definitely a baby compared to the mount. The 8" OTA is basically the only thing I didn't sell from before (because selling/shipping a big scope without the original box didn't seem like much fun). I'll probably put something more appropriate on the mount eventually, but need to let my bank account recover some first. The AP1100 is rated for 75lbs of gear, and I think I'm only using about 30-35lb at the moment. Enos Cabell posted:That looks amazing! Is winter weather a concern? Yep! We're at a pretty high latitude. The pier is sunk about 6 feet deep to avoid frost heave, and it's not uncommon to have 1-4ft of snow at a time during the winter. The roof is sloped to help shed snow, and I'm anticipating having to periodically brush snow off with a shovel/broom. My main concern at the moment is snow melt re-freezing and making the hinges uncooperative (or gluing the roof down)... not sure, might be a bit of an adventure this winter 
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Sep 4, 2019 20:08
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 I'm sure a lot of you enjoy agood discussions about our universe what what is actually out there. A few months ago I found a curious youtuber 'Isaac Arthur'. I've since listened to/watched a few episodes a day in his back catalogue. Has some really great theories and knowledge. Get past his speech impediment (or hit the subtitles as he says for those having troubles) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JkeLIAd2Nd0
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Sep 13, 2019 14:23
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Looks like we have another extrasolar visitor! https://www.skyandtelescope.com/astronomy-news/possible-interstellar-comet-headed-our-way/ quote:Now we might be in store for another interstellar flyby, this time by the recently discovered comet known for now by the provisional designation C/2019 Q4 (Borisov) — formerly gb00234. Gennady Borisov captured the object on August 30, 2019, at the MARGO Observatory near Nauchnij, Crimea when it was about 3 astronomical units (a.u.) from the Sun. Unlike 'Oumuamua, which wasn't spotted until well after perihelion, the new comet is approaching the plane of the solar system and will reach perihelion on December 10, 2019 at a distance of 1.94 a.u.  And in other news... I realized my coma corrector doesn't actually work for my f/3.9 newtonian  I have the Baader MPCC which the manufacturer claims goes down to f/3.5, but I'm still seeing pretty bad coma. Looked around and it's apparently pretty well known that it's only good to about f/5 and makes coma worse any faster than that. Welp. Here's a quick integration/stretch on the Wizard. Maybe 6hrs of Ha? I stopped until I can get this coma issue sorted though. Think I need to do another round of collimation too. 
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Sep 14, 2019 01:28
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polyfractal posted:And in other news... I realized my coma corrector doesn't actually work for my f/3.9 newtonian Sky Watcher makes a whole line of f/4 imaging newts and this is their coma corrector for f/4 https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/prod...2UaAsw0EALw_wcB I have no experience with it, but it might be an option. B&H has a pretty good return policy if you can get out and test it soon after you get it.
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Sep 14, 2019 22:48
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Rolabi Wizenard posted:Sky Watcher makes a whole line of f/4 imaging newts and this is their coma corrector for f/4 Will check it out, thanks!
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Sep 15, 2019 13:12
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 Tried my hand at capturing a moving object. This is 2000 QW7, a medium sized asteroid about 1000-2,100 feet across (300 to 650 meters). Discovered in 2000, it is a little bit bigger than the Empire State Building basically. It's been in the news recently because it came relatively close this past Sunday and would make quite a mess if it hit the Earth. Next closest approach will be in 2038. I wanted to grab a few frames of the asteroid before it zipped back out into the solar system. At closest approach it's about magnitude 14. But it's very low on the horizon where I live (just about 8 degrees altitude at highest point during the night), and there are a lot of trees and power lines in that direction. Not to mention a lot of air mass on top of my usual crappy seeing and the full moon only a few arc minutes away. I played around with a few different exposure times, but didn't realize at the time that it would also affect the animation. That (plus a few dropped frames) are why the asteroid sort speeds up and slows down. Despite all that, I'm pretty happy how it turned out Looking forward to trying again with a target in a little more friendly position.
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Sep 17, 2019 22:28
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That is freaking amazing.
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Sep 18, 2019 14:07
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That is totally awesome, nice job!
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Sep 18, 2019 14:12
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Very nice! I was looking up that newest interstellar object and it looks like it's still around mag 18. Probably too dim to pick up from here 
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Sep 19, 2019 01:39
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Got out last night, the wind was a steady 10mph so I wasn't sure how things would look but I got some shots of the Triangulum Galaxy I need a new telescope. I love my reflector but the artifacts from the mirror are just so brutal - you can still see them at center left and bottom mid, just below the galaxy. This is AFTER I calibrated the images with dark and flat frames, too. It's nice that I'm still getting shots this nice out of the first telescope I bought, but it's time to get a nice refractor, I think.
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Sep 21, 2019 17:45
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Two nights in a row, nice weather! I got back out Saturday and shot the Crescent Nebula. This one was a real bitch to process - I still haven't figured out my coma corrector for the newtonian (Same Baader MPCC as mentioned by polyfractal, I think) and the artifacts and coma are just annoying to handle in processing. I cropped this down pretty far and you can still see a mirror artifact on the left side. Also, I might go back and re-process it since I over saturated the colors a bit and didn't realize until I was nearly done. It still turned out pretty neat, though. I've got a ton to learn but I feel like I've come a long ways over the last year I think I'm going to move up my plans to get a new scope specifically for DSO astrophotography... I was going to wait until spring, but there's going to be lots of large nebulae visible over the course of this winter that I won't be able to properly capture with my current scope. Any thoughts/advice on something in the ~$1500USD range? I'm currently shooting with a full-color ASI294MC-Pro but will eventually be getting a mono camera for narrowband stuff (though that won't be for a while). I'm tempted by this SkyWatcher: https://www.highpointscientific.com/telescopes/refracting-telescopes/skywatcher-esprit-80mm-apo-refractor-telescope-s11400 But I'd love some input.
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Sep 23, 2019 14:05
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I'm too inexperienced to offer advice, but I just wanted to say those are great images. I would love to get into DSO astrophotography, but am paralyzed a bit by the range of options available and the possibility of doing something "wrong" with my first setup. Seeing you produce these images with your first scope and a year of experience is quite inspiring!
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Sep 23, 2019 16:23
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I totally get that. There's just so much drat stuff and if you don't have someone to teach you this stuff or a local astronomy club, figuring out what you need is totally based on a messy combination of research and trial-and-error. Thankfully I have a lot of fun with it, even when things don't go well, and I like solving problems. For the last ~18 months, it's been a consistent process of: 1. Set up, pick a target for the night 2. Have problem that keeps me from getting the result I want 3. Research the next day to see what I can do to fix this problem 4. I found it! Spend money on something to fix the problem. 5. Go to step 1 But that's happening less and less nowadays, which makes me think that I'm either figuring out the problems or am running out of money. Either way, I try not to think about it too much.
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Sep 23, 2019 19:54
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AstroBackyard has been helpful to watch for me. They're generally easy, short videos and they help put things in context.
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Sep 23, 2019 20:23
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AstroBackyard is great. He's got a way of bringing very complex ideas down to a level that a dummy like me can understand. I only wish I had found his page/channel before 6 months ago, I might have figured a lot of this stuff out a lot faster. I went ahead and pulled the trigger on that 80mm SkyWatcher refractor... a new scope is so overdue for my setup. Wish me luck!
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Sep 24, 2019 00:19
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Heard great things about that scope. Good luck!
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Sep 24, 2019 00:25
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Golden-i posted:80mm SkyWatcher refractor... Esprit 80mm or Pro ED (Evostar) 80mm?
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Sep 24, 2019 00:25
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The espirit 80mm APO, it looked better for photography if I remember correctly. (And now I have to go check that I ordered the right one) e - yes I did order the right one, phwew
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Sep 24, 2019 00:28
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Golden-i posted:The espirit 80mm APO, it looked better for photography if I remember correctly. I am a jealous mother fucker. Lifetime scope, there.
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Sep 24, 2019 00:33
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I'm very excited. It should be here Friday so hopefully I can try it out this weekend if the weather holds out (in the light pollution, of course, but oh well)
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Sep 25, 2019 16:01
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I upgraded my phone the other day to the iPhone 11 Pro (stupid name) and on a lark decided to put it on my PST's tripod, take it out on my deck, point it at the sky, turn the stock camera app's night mode to maximum and see what happened. After a bit of processing with the editing tools in the stock photos app... https://imgur.com/gallery/VNkUCo0 Yes, that's the North America nebula in the center of the frame. This phone is BUGFUCK INSANE
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Sep 27, 2019 16:50
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Golden-i posted:Two nights in a row, nice weather! I got back out Saturday and shot the Crescent Nebula. These kinds of photos remind me of the Quasar commercials from when I was a kid.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rH9gBp3fojQ
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Sep 27, 2019 19:05
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AstroZamboni posted:I upgraded my phone the other day to the iPhone 11 Pro (stupid name) and on a lark decided to put it on my PST's tripod, take it out on my deck, point it at the sky, turn the stock camera app's night mode to maximum and see what happened. I'm getting one soon too and am pretty excited to try out night mode. I've used Darkcap on my iPhone 7 a bit to try some long-exposure stuff (in pretty good skies, Milky Way visible with the naked eye) and didn't really get much more than stars.
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Sep 28, 2019 07:10
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RIP I got punkd good by co worker cos of my forgetting what month it is.
Humphreys fucked around with this message at 10:06 on Sep 29, 2019 |
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Sep 28, 2019 15:03
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This is how things work, right? Get a new telescope, exited to try it out, and it rained for almost a solid month. Anyways, the weather's finally clear, so I got out last night and decided to try shooting the West Veil Nebula, since I love how my earlier attempt at the East Veil Nebula worked out.  West Veil Nebula 40x180sec light, 5x dark, 20x flat This was through the Bortle-8 light pollution of my driveway with an LED streetlight about 100 feet away, and I'm really surprised with how well it turned out.
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Oct 26, 2019 16:59
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Hello from the Southern hemisphere, below 40 South, I can't imagine that's too common here! I got the bug and almost before I started researching I've ended up with two telescopes from someone who was moving interstate. It was short notice (but also super cheap) so instead of asking what to buy, it's more like "how do these compare?" One is a Skywatcher Heritage 130P which, skimming the last few years of this thread, was mentioned positively. It's a collapsing 130mm Dobsonian, 650mm long when extended. It fits happily on a car seat (with the seatbelt around it, of course, safety first!). The other is a Bresser Messier AR127L. 127mm (achromatic?) refractor, 1200mm long, and if I hadn't driven two hours and was blinded by FOMO I probably wouldn't have bought it. It just fits in my car boot and is heavy and sturdy enough to bludgeon intruders. Came with an EQ(5?), and a 2X Barlow and a few eyepieces (9-25mm) that fit both scopes. Mount is manual but can be driven. I guess the main question is, is the Bresser significantly better? I don't have a backyard, and they're about the same aperture which seems to be the big factor; the small one is so much easier to transport that I'm not sure if it's worth keeping both. Obviously I'm the best-placed to know by using them but apart from lack of knowledge, I've been cloud cursed or busy since I got them and there's no local astronomy group. This is already long enough but I'll add a little trip report - the one free clear night was right after I bought them, so I took the Skywatcher and some old binocs to a coastal cliff lookout with a picnic table. Unfortunately the moon had set so that wasn't an option. I also wasn't prepared for the cold wind and couldn't see much through watering eyes - and mistook Sirius for an unfocusable planet after getting turned around, which didn't help. But just getting out to a dark sky for the first time in a while was neat, as was figuring out afterwards what I might have seen. Hopefully this weekend I'll take both out with more preparation.
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Oct 30, 2019 03:50
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The 130P is going to be a really convenient little light weight scope, its primary drawback will be the need for collimation. Roughly collimated and with a decent wide field eyepiece, it'll be a pretty fun sky sweeper. For high magnification viewing, you'll want to collimate as precisely as possible. Anything over 150x will probably benefit quite a bit from attention to collimation at f/5. You probably don't want a huge turkey leg eyepiece, the little focuser and tabletop mount might not be happy with that much weight on the front of the scope. You seem to have some eyepieces to experiment with, we don't have to go down that rabbit hole unless you're interested. The AR127L is a huge 5" achromatic refractor. The EQ5 is good enough to carry it, but barely. By that I mean that moving the scope or touching the scope to focus it will cause it to shimmy for a few seconds, you have to wait for it to settle to see if your focus attempt was successful, and then try again. If you get a clock drive, or even a go-to kit for that EQ5, you could point the AR127L at something, focus, and then not touch it. That would be ideal. It will, in all likelihood, put up GREAT images of Jupiter and globular clusters and such. (Omega Centauri and 47 Tucanae will probably make you poo poo your pants through the AR127L). It being an achromat, it will probably display a purple halo around bright objects like Jupiter, the brightest stars, and the limb of the moon against the black sky, but forgive it for that, because it will probably put up really good images and be very pleasant to look through. The downside is its size. Pointing at anything high in the sky is going to have you sitting on the ground, even with your tripod legs all the way out. Legs all the way out make your mount even more wiggly than it would be otherwise. Long refractors are tough to mount, but if you can live with their drawbacks, you'll be happy with the views.
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Nov 6, 2019 21:29
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Internet Explorer posted:Is anyone jumping on the Stellarvue SV102-Access deal? Seems like quite the buy. Normally $1,095.00, on sale for $695.00 as a close out.
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Nov 7, 2019 00:26
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Anyone doing anything cool for the Mercury transit next week? We're setting up multiple solar scopes (our club owns 4) and I'm going to record a timelapse. As long as the weather holds out, that is (current forecast here in MD is partly cloudy).
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Nov 7, 2019 01:04
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I was really tempted to pick up a solar filter for my scope to try and capture the transit, but the weather's supposed to be miserable. Should be great, please post whatever you get! I got out and did some experimenting with the light pollution and what I can do to deal with LED glare. I shot 90 mins on the North America Nebula last night and spent a while dicking around with the stack:  For reference, here's the unedited, original stack (histogram stretched):  You can clearly see the bottom of the image is the side of the telescope that the streetlight was on, at about a 90 degree angle, which I sadly can't do anything about and there's nowhere else on the property without tree cover. I think it turned out OK, all things considered, though I had a really hard time getting PI's DynamicBackgroundExtraction to tell the difference between what was nebula and what was LED glare. I definitely lost a ton of detail and had a bitch of a time with noise reduction (obviously it's still a really noisy image). This was a really challenging one, though... it's a big nebula, so there wasn't much background in the image to reference when eliminating the light gradient, so I think smaller targets will work out a little better. Hopefully I can get a clear weekend and get out of town to shoot away from the pollution.
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Nov 8, 2019 20:15
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I like the natural look of the second image. It makes me feel that that's what it would look like if I had eyes sensitive enough to just look up at twilight and squint my eyes a little bit to focus on the Ha. You just got your Esprit 100mm, we need some sexy gear pictures!
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Nov 11, 2019 19:36
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Mercury transit was cool. I got to see it through a hydrogen alpha filter.
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Nov 11, 2019 21:40
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Rolabi Wizenard posted:I like the natural look of the second image. It makes me feel that that's what it would look like if I had eyes sensitive enough to just look up at twilight and squint my eyes a little bit to focus on the Ha. I'll get some pics of my setup next time the weather's clear! Might be a couple weeks. I actually got the Esprit 80mm instead of the 100mm - I really considered the 100mm, but I liked the slightly wider f-stop of the 80mm (f/5 vs f/5.5 on the 100mm) and the shorter focal length (500mm vs 550mm) for a wider field-of-view. Seemed like the best way to go considering it was almost a thousand dollars cheaper.
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Nov 11, 2019 22:00
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Here's a shot from the Mercury transit: https://www.instagram.com/p/B4u8qXyp-Av/ I took an exposure every minute to try and make a timelapse out of, but I had to move my field of view around so we'll see how well it comes out. We actually had pretty great weather, only hazy clouds all morning. The setup: https://www.instagram.com/p/B4vLaE7J2la/ And our little group of observers: https://www.instagram.com/p/B4uavNvJCws/
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Nov 12, 2019 02:44
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I almost caused a car crash as I moved my cannonesque Dobsonian in daylight. The guy’s head was out the window and turned a hundred and thirty degrees around to look at me.
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Nov 12, 2019 03:03
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It was cloudy where I am, but the clouds were just thin enough to still see a dim (but clear!) image in my PST.
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Nov 13, 2019 04:47
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AstroZamboni posted:I upgraded my phone the other day to the iPhone 11 Pro (stupid name) and on a lark decided to put it on my PST's tripod, take it out on my deck, point it at the sky, turn the stock camera app's night mode to maximum and see what happened. That's pretty cool. I have the same phone and just got one of these to play with:  On a similar vein, I just got back from a trip to the open ocean and thoroughly enjoyed my plain old binoculars just for the extra light collection they offered, so on a little bit of a whim, I got myself some owl eyes.  They're nifty even just looking around at the distant hills here in the dark, lots of light I couldn't see before, looking forward to the clouds clearing and possibly pointing my phone through them as well. Maybe I'll decide it was a waste? Maybe not, though, I feel like I could really enjoy laying back on the grass and staring at the sky almost unchanged, but with more stars visible.
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Nov 14, 2019 06:52
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It’s kind of mindblowing that a series of lenses cannot increase surface brightness. When an astronomer points a scope at M31, the fuzzy area of the sky isn’t easier to see because it’s brighter. It’s easier to see solely because it is larger.
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Nov 14, 2019 07:33
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I'm not an optical physicist or anything but I'm pretty sure telescopes work by concentrating light gathered over the big objective lens on to a smaller focal point near the eyepiece, which does make things brighter compared to the small objective lens size of an eyeball.
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Nov 14, 2019 07:48
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Infinite Karma posted:I'm not an optical physicist or anything but I'm pretty sure telescopes work by concentrating light gathered over the big objective lens on to a smaller focal point near the eyepiece, which does make things brighter compared to the small objective lens size of an eyeball. Nope. Here’s a random link from google, there are probably better explanations: http://www.rocketmime.com/astronomy/Telescope/SurfaceBrightness.html The total amount of light collected is more than if you just stare at the object, but it’s spread out over a larger area on your retina. These effects balance perfectly at the minimum usable magnification for a telescope. For higher magnifications, you are spreading the light out even more and reduce the surface brightness compared to the naked eye. Note, we’re talking about surface brightness, not the total amount of light. Basically, the density of the light, if you will. This is what the eye detects, so it makes sense to talk in terms of surface brightness rather than total light.
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Nov 14, 2019 08:18
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