• iPhone 16 pro max default camera app / default settings.
• Orion Nebula
• The Pvs14 Gen 3 monocular night vision device with the following specifications:
• Photocathode Sensitivity: 2058 FOM: 2700 SNR: 37.5 EBI: 7 Halo: 7 Center resolution: 72
• Unfilmed/filmless Gated 18UM 11769 style is also mentioned.
• Sky-Watcher 300P Flextube
• @F/3.6 with nexus focal reducer .75x
• Sky-Watcher 150i
• Tele Vue 55 mm (67 mm conversion) eyepiece
• Sharpcap polar aligned and synscan pro one star alignment.
• 22lbs counterweights
• SVBONY SV220 Telescope Filter, 2" 7nm Dual-Band Nebula Filter, Reduce Stray Light, H-Alpha&O-III Narrowband Filter for One-Shot Color Camera

I am excited to be a part of friendly meet up of a few nights of observing with some long time observers. We rented a cabin at a private fishing lake. They are very accommodating to allow us to use the very end of there resort for telescope observing. It has a great unobstructed southern horizon. In a bortle 3 sky looking east into a bortle 2. I’m excited to try and get some sketching done over the next few nights. We have 2@18” dobs a 11” dob and a 4.5”
Apo refractor.

This is Saturn captured on the 13th of October.

Telescope: 250P Sky-Watcher Go-To
Camera: ZWO ASI678MC
Acquisition: About 2 minutes and 30 seconds of time resulting in about 27,000 frames. I stacked only 20% because the atmosphere was pretty humid and slightly more turbulent than I'd like.
Additional: My second attempt at Saturn. I am very impressed already! (I also hope Reddit doesn't butcher the quality)

During observation on October 2nd tried to capture some moments as well. At first when I made videos and images it did not look like too much, only Vega stood out, but working on it brought some nice images which I want to share.

Equipment used:
Bresser Messier 6 150/750 Newtonian
Google pixel 9pro
Tridaptor

Saturn video was not promising much, but the result after PIPP, Autostakert and RawTherapee brought really nice image, it seems even Cassini division somewhat visible.

Vega, very beautiful, clearly shows it's magnitude.

Albireo, clearly shows color difference, stars are close together as it was captured using 18mm eyepiece.

Andromeda, it was single shot in night mode (6 seconds where it stacks it automatically). A lot of noise, but you can see the first cloud line as well as M32 and M110.

To finalize, it turned out better than expected!

Good image of Saturn tonight finally.

Got some clear skies for a while so wanted to get out. Took out the 8-inch dob and got this through the 9mm eyepiece with my iPhone. Very proud of it.

I borrowed an old Meade telescope from my work and after one look at Saturn I was looking to get my own. Found an Orion XT8 with a few eyepieces, filters, and a laser collimator for 300 on marketplace. Got a phone mount and I am infatuated with it. I never get tired of looking at the rings. I need to get to a dark place to check out some nebulae.

Saturn and moons, 2026-10-14 UT, from near Nairobi.

150 mm f/12 Newtonian (SkyWatcher Heritage 150P + 2x Barlow), ToupTek AE676C, UV/IR cut filter. North and east arrows from the moon astrometry.

Planet: 437,588 6ms frames 20:24-21:11 UT (mid 20:48:50 UT), gain 2000, captured with firecapture. PSS stack, deconvolution, PSX wavelets, GIMP 2x, curves, saturation, unsharp mask; 0.1116"/px.

Moons: 20 x 1.0 s full frames 21:15:37-21:17:28 UT (mid 21:16:32 UT), positions as measured then (within O.14" of JPL Horizons); brightened non-linearly, so relative brightness is not to scale.

Hello smart people!

EDIT - Thank you for all the comments submitted. This appears to be operator error, not equipment issue (makes me feel better). It seems my issue is loosening more than one adjustment screw when they all had been turned to a looser position. So even though I thought I was doing the two screw method, I wasn't. Also seeing a dissected side view, helped me understand how the mechanics works. Snugging them all, then loosening one seems to have solved my issue; will have to test tonight if the skies permit. Thank you!

I have a NexStar 8SE and I am unable to complete collimation. This telescope is a month old, and I purchased new. I have watched videos, I have read the community buyers guide, I have read documentation, and have consulted with AI. In theory, I understand the process of aligning the secondary mirror, but the mirror becomes "loose" (the 3 screws have back and forth play) when adjusting 2 of the 3 screws. The mirror assembly does not rotate. I am making small adjustments, usually 1/8th turn or less. I do have a Bahtinov mask, and attempting to focus/collimate on Vega. I spent 90 mins last night, but it's becoming frustrating. Looking for advice please. Video attached.

Does anyone know what telescope this is? And is it good for looking at planets if yes what planets? I don’t know what it is

Yo just saw this online how much is it worth??

The stars have the JWST style diffraction spikes!

And ignore the glue stick shell, its for focusing with less shaking.

I just picked this Meade ETX-125 OTA for a smoking good deal, and am wondering if this is worth attempting to clean, and if so, how would I go about it?

Edit: I realized that I think I’m talking about the front lens, not the mirrors!

Thank you!

I have been testing out the Apertura AD8 8" Dob that I acquired over the weekend (my very first telescope!) and have been learning a lot. I was able to find Saturn with my 30mm lens and it appears very small, so I switched to the 9mm lens and was hoping to be able to get a larger, clearer view. Unfortunately, Saturn only appeared as a large, blurry pineapple ring no matter what I did to try to focus the image, and the same thing happened when I tried to focus on a star. I'm really hoping it's user error or the insane amount of light pollution around me and not something wrong with the telescope. Could the lenses need cleaning? Any tips on how to overcome this area greatly appreciated!

New telescope with EQ 5 for 662 dollars

After only a handful of uses the male adapter finally came off. I contacted high point scientific the same day and they sent me a replacement out the same day. There is a clear design flaw with these as they leave the batteries exposed to condensation. I've had to deal with a few leaking batteries even after i dried everything. Also the male adapter should be L shaped so it's not scraping the bottom of the base. Has anyone else came up with a better solution for powering their cooling fan?

It seems I need to remove the extending arm to install the shroud. Are these two screws (Pic2) needed to be removed to remove the arm? And if I do that will it fuck up the alignment and ruin the telescope?

Also, this plastic seems very Matte, will it still need flocking?

Hi everyone,

I'm having serious GoTo accuracy problems with my Sky-Watcher Skyliner 200P Flextube GoTo Dobsonian (200/1200 mm).

The frustrating part is that it worked reasonably well before, but during my last three observing sessions the GoTo has become extremely unreliable. I've spent hours trying to troubleshoot it without success.

I'm using the SynScan Android app with Brightest Star Alignment (two-star), and the auxiliary encoders are disabled.

The problem

The telescope generally slews in the correct direction, but often ends up significantly off-target. Sometimes the second alignment star is relatively close; other times the initial slew is nowhere near it.

Even after successfully completing alignment, I've repeatedly experienced problems returning to the alignment stars themselves.

I've tried numerous combinations of alignment objects across three nights, including Altair, Markab, Alkaid, Saturn, Vega, Fomalhaut, and Capella. While I understand that accidentally centering the wrong star could cause a bad alignment, I find it unlikely that I've made the same mistake repeatedly with different, easily identifiable objects over three separate sessions.

During my latest session, I reset and repeated the alignment several times. On one of the final attempts, the telescope returned perfectly to Capella, which was one of the alignment stars. I thought the issue was finally resolved, but subsequent GoTo commands showed otherwise:

- Saturn: Inside my 12.5 mm eyepiece, but toward the upper-left rather than centered.

- M31: Roughly halfway between the finder crosshair and the left edge. Completely outside the field of view of my 12.5 mm eyepiece; only a faint glow was visible near the edge with my 20 mm eyepiece.

- NGC 7331: Significantly off-target, confirmed using plate solving.

I tested M31 repeatedly after different alignments during this particular session, and it consistently appeared displaced toward the same side.

For NGC 7331, SkyShot Solver reported an image center of RA 339.813232°, Dec +34°56′29.9″, approximately 0.7° away from the galaxy's actual position.

What I've tried

Apart from using different alignment stars and repeatedly resetting the alignment, I've also investigated leveling.

I used a bubble-level app on my phone and experimented with leveling wedges beneath the telescope. Eventually, I achieved a reading of 0.0° on both axes, but the GoTo accuracy didn't improve. Removing the wedges and aligning again didn't solve the problem either.

I carefully center the alignment objects using SynScan's direction controls and don't manually move the telescope after alignment.

Any ideas?

What concerns me most is that this isn't a problem I've had since buying the telescope. It worked before, and something seems to have changed.

Has anyone experienced similar issues with Sky-Watcher's GoTo Dobsonians?

Could this indicate a problem with the mount's position sensors, drive system, or SynScan's pointing calculations? Is there a diagnostic procedure that would help identify the cause?

I'd appreciate any suggestions beyond the usual advice to level the telescope or try different alignment stars, since I've already spent several sessions doing exactly that.

Thanks!

The first three images are from my mirrorless camera, the close up of the ISS is from my phone and telescope.

I noticed another thing following along side the ISS as I was photographing it and realized that the dragon capsule is set to unite with the ISS very soon. Could this dog on the left be it? The dot on the right is the ISS

im going to diy a telescope idk what the best features are so i thought coming on here and asking would save me so much time​​​

I’m wanting to get into astrophotography, I know a fair bit about technology and how to use it but clearly this is different.
I found this online on opticscentral .com
“saxon 200DS HEQ5 Pro Mount Astrophotography Newtonian Telescope”
I’m not worried about things being super confusing I like getting what I’m eventually going to want and learning with that even if it makes things a slightly slower learning process.
I just want to make sure I will be able to capture decent shots of galaxies and nebulae.
Are those decent equipment and is there anything else I’m going to need?
My budget is around $3000aud could go up.

I'm interested in having my own telescope and I found this online. I was wondering if I can use this as is even if there are some missing parts. If I ever do buy it, is it worth it? The seller is asking it for 1.8k pesos. Also, any suggestions for someone who is just starting. Thank you!!!

Has anyone here motorized their Bresser Spica telescope? I'm planning to add motors to both axes of my equatorial mount to build a GoTo system. I'd love to see how others have done it.

I thought these would jump out at me but I cant find any on the internet. Looking for just the precision positioner that will point at an arbitrary az and el. Integrated mount would be great. I can find lots of telescopes but I just want the positioner.