Bob in Baltimore

Those are diffraction spikes, and optical effect caused by the structure holding the secondary mirror of your telescope. Twinkling refers to rapid fluctuations in the brightness of the star due to ...

Don’t trivialize your accomplishment. No astronomer in the Southern Hemisphere could do that, no matter how good their equipment & how skilled they are.

A truly fine image! Nice work.

So which was it? Your 1st paragraph (above) seems to say it was without the TC, but the next paragraph says it was with the TC. (Am I reading that correctly?) The posted image looks to me to be ...

Dear Bitcoin, Some of my colleagues seem to have forgotten the meaning of the first "c" in "c & c". That happens. Please don't that let that discourage you. They are good folks and their advice is ...

This may not be all bad. I see that the NIKKOR 70-300mm f/4-5.6G is gone. Good riddance I say. (It was my 1st telephoto zoom, and I still have it. It makes a nice paperweight.)  They still have ...

Never have done that in all these years. Beats taking lens and camera to the shop! I'll wait a day or two to see if somebody screams, "NO! DON"T DO IT!" But it seems like a pretty good idea. Thanx! ...

No! I had a D600 and loved it. But the oil problem others have mentioned  developed over time & it was a disaster. Ultimately, Nikon replaced it with a D610, which worked fine. (I have since moved ...

I was shooting some pictures at an indoor meeting when my D850 started to behave erratically. I was using my Nikon 24-70 mm lens. I was shooting at ISO 1600, aperture priority at f/4. Typical ...

I don't really understand what you are wanting, but I suspect that you have a classic "ill posed" question. Which continent you are viewing from is not particularly relevant to how the sky ...

I just realized that I took your description of the neutral density filter as you described it. But I don't think you meant 3-stops, which would be a factor of 8 in equivalent exposure time. ND ...

Yes. Cut him some slack people! Bryon has actually pursued a nice logical approach to answering his own question. Let's help him get there. Bryon, you posted a reasonable question and got a good pa ...

AKA Do. you know where the Sun's barycenter is? ;=) We have a nice view of Jupiter, Venus, Mars and Saturn strung out along the Eastern sky in the pre-dawn hour. No big thing for this crowd, but it ...

I have seen Venus before Sunset on occasion. Just requires knowing where to look. And the use of diverted vision ... there is a blind spot near the center of the eyes field of view that you must ...

If it is practice for the May eclipse, I recommend that you stay on sight until midnight or so to see what the sky look like from your location under the conditions that will prevail during the ...

Shooting the rising Moon around sunset is a tricky business. In the critical period from the Moon peeping above the horizon to the end of Civil twilight on the 17th the Moon will probably increase ...

Thanx so much. This is very helpful information. The process and performance is better than feared it might be, but worse than I had hoped. Initial setup sounds delightfully straightforward. Very ...

Can you say a bit more about the Go To capability? If I understand you, it only does specific stars and Messier objects. Can you drive the mount to point at a specific object using classical ...

Over a year ago, pogo65 started a thread on the Benro Polaris 3-axis tracking head: https://www.dpreview.com/forums/post/64818417 It looked intriguing and we had a lively discussion going on for a ...

Sounds right to me. Easy enough to take a range of exposures to see what it takes to not clip the highlights at all.