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Unable to find image IMG_20230919_223643192_1.jpg A while ago I was musing about ways to get better space pics, and @BeasMeeply incredibly generously offered to donate an 8" blank sitting in his closet for 10 years if I paid for shipping! Thank you so much! I’ve got it now and it looks incredibly clear. He also sent a metal 1.25" focuser, which was an extra addition I wasn’t expecting.
It’s like I was standing on the edge of an abyss deciding whether not to jump in, and then someone threw a mirror at my back.
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I took out a relative’s 8x42 binoculars today. Saw M7 as a faint sparkling of stars, but Andromeda was a much dimmer smudge compared to my telescope that if I hadn’t seen it before I wouldn’t have been able to spot. It I was able to follow a satellite though! And I got to show off Mizar and Alcor to others!
Sadly the moon was out and it was so bright it was casting shadows, stopping me from seeing any nebulae like I was hoping.
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I got to see it with my own eyes for the first time!! It looked like a gray oval-ish but slightly pointy smudge. But it’s a cool smudge in the sky!!
This is a phone pic with a 2s exposure and ISO cranked up to it’s max, 3200. The rainbow snow is random noise from my sensor magnified by turning the sensitivity up very high. You can even see M32 as a slightly fuzzy star almost directly above Andromeda’s core!
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I’ve been thinking about https://www.space.com/liquid-telescope-construction-in-space-ax-1 . I wonder if you could take a circular baking tray, spin it on a pottery wheel, and then pour SLA 3D printing resin into it so the resin would form a liquid mirror, then shine UV light on it to cure it and make a telescope mirror
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The code’s open source, so I looked through it. Turns out every time it tries to draw a map of the sky, it loops through every single star in the sky down to magnitude 7.5. Every frame. Sigh
At least it’s open source, so I can probably add some caching and massively speed it up.
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The sky is too big. I went out telescoping looking for M13 and there were too many stars and it’s too big and I don’t know where I’m aimed. When you’re so zoomed in, there’s so many stars you don’t know where you are or where to look.
Enter the pifinder! I’m going to make one.
I went to my local makerspace, known for having too many donated bits and bobs they actively try to get rid of (what a wonderful problem to have).
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My telescope is pretty good, but now that I have one I’ve been thinking about how to get even better. Here’s what I’ve been thinking about:
#1: Bigger telescope.
Bigger telescopes with bigger mirrors both capture more light and allow you to resolve tinier details. I saw someone made a “Leavitt” telescope, also 3D printed, designed to fit an 8" mirror! My telescope has a 4.5" mirror right now. It cost $30.
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For the record, past me was wrong. That’s not the ring nebula. There aren’t two bright stars aligned like that near the ring nebula. But that’s the prettiest Jupiter I’ve ever taken!
(Why is there a double saturn? I know why now!)