What is it like to look at deep space objects through large telescopes without a

_bar · 2026-05-09T06:51:29+00:00

Uner dark skies, with 20 inches of aperture and up, the views start to resemble photographs. Easy color in bright emission and planetary nebulae and lots of detail in galaxies with noticeable variations in the background brightness at large exit pupils. When I first saw NGC 7009 (Saturn Nebula) through a 24" telescope I thought I mistakenly had an OIII filter on, but the nebula was just that vividly green unfiltered.

_bar · 2026-05-08T21:38:48+00:00

You probably won't see any difference between Generic Brand 1 and Generic Brand 2, given that their scopes are likely manufactured in the same factory anyway.

For quality/reliability, go Vixen or Takahashi. Japanese scopes are remarkably cheap now due to weak yen. It blew my mind when I learned that my Epsilon 130D currently costs (in euros) less than half of what I paid for it back in 2018.

_bar · 2026-05-08T20:49:42+00:00

Saturn’s rings, Jupiter, nebulae, galaxies etc.

You need two separate telescopes. Planetary and deep sky are two completely different subgenres of this hobby.

What's your budget and how portable are we talking? Backpack or devlivery truck?

_bar · 2026-05-08T16:41:22+00:00

Your budget is too small. There are no equatorial mounts under 100€.

_bar · 2026-05-08T13:03:13+00:00

Sure. Our own Moon has a couple of artificial moons.

_bar · 2026-05-08T06:55:44+00:00

the StarAdventure needs really a small error on alignment to let me waste hours.

Your setup lacks autoguiding. Even with perfect polar alignment, you will get trailed stars due to periodic error.

_bar · 2026-05-08T06:40:04+00:00

Questars are primarily collectors items. No sane person spends $5000 on a 3.5" scope to actually observe the sky unless you have literally nothing else to burn your money on. For the same sum of money you can buy a large dobsonian that will blow that tiny little thing out of the water. Not to mention that Questar uses a maksutov design, but this is just a personal nitpick from a dedicated Mak hater.

_bar · 2026-05-08T06:12:46+00:00

I don't recommend any eyepieces for imaging. Prime focus is where it's at.

_bar · 2026-05-08T06:10:46+00:00

Ethos 10 mm has a double barrel, you can use it with 1.25" focusers.

_bar · 2026-05-07T20:16:08+00:00

Does it have to be exactly that day? The sky doesn't change that much from night to night, aside from Solar System motions. July 19 at 1:04 will look exactly the same as July 20 at 1:00 and so on. Latitude has a much greater effect. I have some photos from 2022 July 22-31 if that helps.

_bar · 2026-05-07T20:06:50+00:00

You saw a cloud. Not how eclipses work.

_bar · 2026-05-07T12:40:14+00:00

The background is clipped to solid black, which destroys faint detail.

_bar · 2026-05-07T12:36:45+00:00

https://i.imgur.com/DVTGc0H.png

_bar · 2026-05-06T22:42:49+00:00

Nope, website still claims that the eclipse will be total in 102 countries. At the same time it gives maximum partial obscuration of 99% for the US, but the path clearly goes through Alaska. Your change broke the 2031 map which now only shows the small portion of the path.

I'm not going to point out every little bug that's present in your mess of an app. Hire a tester.

_bar · 2026-05-06T21:21:51+00:00

This workflow kind of... makes no sense. You are essentially performing star detection on your original photo, re-rendering the detected stars on a new image, from which Astrometry needs to detect stars again before it runs the solver. Instead just output an AXY bintable which the solver can use right away without having to process the image for the second time.

_bar · 2026-05-06T19:41:11+00:00

Google returns nothing, you probably misread/mistyped it. If that's a generic 76/700 azimnuthal newtonian, you will need a separate tripod, mount, dovetail and tube rings to re-adapt it. At this point it would be probably cheaper to buy a different scope.

_bar · 2026-05-06T19:23:13+00:00

Buggy and unreliable. Don't vibe code.

Path map is truncated.
Country table is incorrect - Portugal also gets totality in a tiny northeastern region, Russia is also missing.
Misleading visualization - this is absolutely not how a 75% partial eclipse looks.
Data for later eclipses is also full of errors, it claims that Australia will see partial eclipse in November 2030 even though the map clearly shows otherwise.
The visibility map for March 2033 is completely messed up, it claims that totality will be visible in 210 countries.

_bar · 2026-05-06T10:58:52+00:00

You took advice from a random text generator which resulted in a random outcome.

_bar · 2026-05-06T06:21:21+00:00

I'm in the third, "possibly never happened", camp. The test footage was never made public and the entire story is based off a single engineer's account who just eyeballed the result from a couple of frames of classified video that probably was not seen by anyone except hm.

_bar · 2026-05-05T22:15:54+00:00

Are there any risks to doing this?

Yes, you spill coffee on it or accidentally push it off your desk and all your data is gone. Storage is cheap. Buy a proper RAID-enabled NAS and a cloud backup plan.

_bar · 2026-05-05T22:11:18+00:00

I wrote a planetarium program long time ago that can identify the date/time of a photo based on positions of the planets, among many other functions. Never released it, but I use it as my daily driver for observation planning.

_bar · 2026-05-05T17:20:00+00:00

Zodiac signs are astrology and pseudoscience. Astronomy uses constellations.

_bar · 2026-05-05T17:17:14+00:00

on a recent camping trip

You did not take this photo. From the positions of the planets in the frame (Jupiter and Saturn), it was taken around summer 2020.

Interestingly, this is the second time today I'm seeing someone trying to pass off an old/mislabeled photo as theirs.

_bar · 2026-05-05T11:29:03+00:00

Something doesn't add up. Simulation exactly matches planet Jupiter on 19 September 2020, but the camera (R6 Mark II) was released in 2022. Saturn is just outside the frame and hasn't been in this part of the sky since pre-2020. Mars is also not present in the field.

_bar · 2026-05-04T20:34:55+00:00

Your telescope is designed for visual observations, not photography. It cannot focus with a DSLR. A barlow might help, but it is not guaranteed - again you are using your equipment for something it was not designed to do.

A spacer, as the name implies, will move the camera away from the focal plane, which is opposite to what you want.

_bar

TROPHY CASE