This was my first clear night in a few months, but I wasn’t having much luck with DSOs. Saturn was back in the sky, so most of my session was focused on that.

Saturn is finally back in the evening sky. This is my first time looking at it since I got my first looks with my small starter scope.

We went to the city’s fireworks show and the sun peeked through a hole in the clouds right before setting. There’s currently a large cluster of sunspots that shows up as a dark spot in a cell phone image through the smoke. After the fireworks there was a bunch of heat lightning in the clouds…

It’s been smoky so I’ve had time to take apart the cheap 114mm f/8 refractor I picked up. Both mirrors are cleaned, the mirror clips were way too tight, and I center spotted the primary for easy collimation. And it looks much better with a coat of purple paint! It’s still smoky but there weren’t…

After making some moon mosaics recently from images taken specifically for that purpose, I decided to go back to some of my older images and see what I could put together. First up is one of my oldest moon shots, a video taken by my Lego webcam through a 70/700mm refractor. I recorded as the…

I picked up a used 144mm f/8 Newtonian. I fixed it up a bit but it’s still in need of a good collimation. Visually it seemed sharp at low powers, but it shows significant issues at higher magnification or with a camera.

Lots of wildfire smoke in the air meant there was no point in setting up the scope, but close to sunset I noticed just how dim and red the sun was and took a picture with my phone. Looking at it after I noticed a faint sunspot. Cranking up the contrast revealed a few more!

Another mosaic, a few days after the last. I’ve found some interesting details but haven’t researched their names yet.

Rough seeing and the moon being out meant that I didn’t get very good picture of fainter objects. I’m waiting for a night of excellent seeing to really dial in the collimation as well.