Society for Popular Astronomy

I did enjoy it, but like what Stella says there were some errors and one very glaring mistake regarding the personal life of Einstein.

Hi Cliff Even at 3.3 degrees I think that in-experienced eyes will struggle with the rings with the supplied scopes. I think that most people viewing Saturn for the first time will be very disappointed with the view on show during 2009. I know from experience with my public viewing events, that peop...

What is the size of the aperture stop on the 200mm scope?

I think that the rings of Saturn wil be edge on in 2009.

Hi Paul I would think that the Earths atmosphere would encounter these smaller sized objects on quite a regular basis, then we also have incoming man-made space junk. The thing is that most of these burn up in the atmosphere. I was thinking more of the ones that make it through and can cause damage ...

I seem to remember reading that we can expect to get hit several times each century. Over the course of a century we can expect one event on the scale of Tunguska, with around five smaller hits. Doing some digging, I see that the Earth was hit by a 10 Hiroshima bomb size event in 1863. In 1908 we ha...

I like to think I am fairly stringent\conservative assessing magnitudes (whilst I understand that magnitudes fainter than about mag +11 given in SkyMap Pro and probably most other planetarium programmes are a bit suspect anyway). Hi Cliff Yes, that is correct. According to Brian Skiff, the Hubble G...

A print out of the Double Cluster pic seems to show stars down to about mag +11 to 11.5, but viewing my processed image on the PC monitor I reckon to see down to about mag+12.5. Hi Cliff Last night while using a 80mm f/7 APO and Canon DSLR, I recorded stars down to magnitude 13.0/13.1 in the Double...

As your scope is f/13.88, I would think that any half-decent Plossl eyepiece will give very good views. BTW, I have those two eyepieces, and I really like the 25mm model. If it were me, I would not waste money on any really expensive eyepieces for use with a Mak scope.

So I tried to find Vesta last evening late. I let an LV 4 eyepiece in the tube, giving 300x magnification. Yes, it still was difficult to focus, absolutely not visible as a disk. But Vesta appeared as a very solid orange star, drifting smoothly in the eyepiece, no struggling focus, same constant or...

Yes, indeed, the SPA is hoping to provide telescopes to 1000 schools in the UK. We are just waiting for the final stages of the funding to be sorted out and then we will be making a full announcement. Guy Fennimore (SPA Secretary) Hi Guy This seems like a good way for the SPA to get plenty of publi...

Hi Dave and welcome.

What are you wanting to do with the scope? Being an f/5 Achromat,I would think that it would show a fair bit of Chromatic aberration in the image.

I use an f/8 Achromat and find the C.A. for visual use is quite well controlled but still visible in images.

Hi Dave

Image sent.

Regards.
Lady I.

Hi Davej

An extremely nice cover for a LX200 is in the latest edition of the BAA journal. It's a dummy dovecote, looks very nice and hides the scopes.
I can email some pictures if you think it will be of interest.

Hi

The changing brightness was due to various ices in the upper atmosphere of the planet. If I remember correctly, the biggest change was half a magnitude, making the planet easier to see with the naked eye.