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The first picture is at 36x zoom, the second one at 150x zoom. The more zoomed in one is fainter because the same light is spread across more area, but you can see the four trapezium stars as four separate streaks!
This was a very frustrating night for photography because finding things in a big sky is hard. Light pollution made it hard to see M31, I couldn’t find M33, and then finally clouds rolled in and it became a race against time to photograph the Orion nebula M42.
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Today in observing I:
Tried to get a photo of the ring nebula through the 6mm lens. Realized my finderscope was misaligned, couldn’t get it aligned in time before it sank below a tree. Tried to get a photo of Jupiter, succeeded! Tried out a new phone app named skeyecam that lets you take many many photos with the same settings, for some reason it made Jupiter green. Then I tried taking a photo of m42 through the 6mm lens, but I couldn’t get anything on camera.
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I got a mirror that’s 2.3 inches wide. However, several weeks ago, I printed a mirror holder that was designed to fit a mirror 2.46 inches wide. Sure, I could just use the bigger holder, but the bigger the secondary holder the more light it blocks from reaching your mirror. Is it worth a smaller secondary mirror holder that will block half a square inch less light? Yes, I decided. So I opened up the model and slightly scaled it down.
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Visiting family in another city, and turns out there’s an astronomy store named La Maison De L’Astronomie (The Astronomy House)! I called them up to see if they had some secondary mirrors in stock… And they did! They had so many big telescopes, way more small refractors than I was expecting, a huge cabinet of binoculars, and some absolutely massive tripod mounts.
The bbastro calculator says the most optimal uniform illumination secondary mirror size is 62.
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I found this with the help of an amateur with a huge telescope and laser pointer so bright it looked like a line pointing into the sky. Looked like a dim circular smudge to the eye. Picture taken with the 25mm eyepiece, so I bet I could get an even better picture through the more zoomed in 6mm
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Reminder to North and South Americans, there’s an eclipse today! https://www.timeanddate.com/eclipse/in/usa?iso=20231014 DON’T LOOK AT THE SUN WITHOUT SPECIAL ECLIPSE GLASSES, EVEN DURING A PARTIAL ECLIPSE! If you don’t have one, take a piece of paper, punch a hole in it, and look at the shadow. Trees or colanders with many holes will make very cool shadows!
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I was cleaning out my boxes when I discovered @Beasmeeply not only sent me a primary mirror, but also a 46mm secondary mirror! Wow! Thank you!
Secondary mirror sizes are weird; apparently having a secondary mirror too small means the outer part of your view is slightly dimmer. I did lots of research into what kind of secondary mirror to use. This calculator says a 62.5mm will give me the most even illumination across the field, but that’s for super huge eyepieces so a slightly smaller one should be fine.
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