Did you catch this

Great I thought – except all the star trails ones! Ooh trails wooooo…

that andromeda one reminds me of this:

Apple has once again altered the Universe according to their whim. They moved/removed many stars, and got rid of a whole galaxy. This is M110, which is one of M31’s [Andromeda’s] satellites. The other big satellite, M32, is still there.

Apple deleted a galaxy

I took this image of Messier 42 by renting a 14.5″ telescope remotely in New Mexico, then processing the resultant images. A fairly worthwhile experiment, although in hindsight I should have paid a bit more for a longer rental, giving me more images to stack to improve the quality.

how much does that lightbuckets thing cost? and how do you process the images?

That used $30USD of time. I used CCDstack for the processing.

Of course I didn’t.

It’s been bleeding cloudy ever since I bought my small, cheap telescope in June. I’m not joking, in 9 weeks I’ve been out to view about 6 times and 3 of those were cloudy.

An incredibly frustrating hobby, a little akin to surfing, I think.

(Although cloudiness allows me to read lots, plan future purchases – hopefully a 200mm Dobsonian next month – and scan the internet in the event that the clouds part. Seriously, it’s nice to have found an interesting hobby that taxes my brain a bit!)

The cloudiness is infuriating. Nice pic of M42.

I’m surprised no one’s thought of kitting out an MTB chalet with a huge old telescope. It would be awesome especially in say southern Spain. If there was a riding retreat in the Alpujarras with a big old 10″ dobsonian or something I would be there every year for a month and would forget about the Alps. They’re only a few hundred quid on Astrobuysell.

Peanuts compared to the ubiquitous jacuzzis which no one ever uses anyway

*possible thickie content.
as a bit of an aside, can anybody suggest a telescope that I might get cheapish (200ish -ebay etc) that could be easily packed/car carried and maybe walked a bit that would be viable as a normal telescope and a skywatcher – if that’s possible
(Ie used my dads old 1950s naval telescope and never cease to be amazed at what you can see)

Thanks

A Dobsonian. The tube assembly is massive, it’s true, but the mount is simple and the whole point of them is they’re very simple to take apart and throw in the back of the car. You could get a 6″ one very cheaply on Astrobuysell UK (google), or a bigger 10″ one for not much more (the difference between what you can see will be huge – really try to get as big an aperture as you can).

Be careful not to buy just the tube assembly as often that’s how they’re sold on Astrobuysell. And make sure it has a good finder scope, 50mm ideally.

*ah – not viable as a normal telescope though. That’s much trickier. I don’t think the two overlap particularly.