I got my UHC filter on the weekend, but I also picked up two more things: a laser collimator, which is used to align all of the optics in the telescope (they slowly drift out of whack, or more quickly if you’re not careful with it), and a pair of binoculars. Binoculars might seem a bit redundant, but they’re actually really handy — because they’re low magnification (7X, compared to a low of 46X in the telescope at the moment), you can take in a lot of sky at once, which makes them handy for spotting objects before hunting them down in the telescope.

They’re also perfect for taking a quick look at something, without having to drag the telescope outside. You might not think you’d be able to see much, but the moon looks great, you can spot the moons of Jupiter, open clusters, and the brigher globular clusters too, even if the latter just look like fuzzy smudges.

Unfortunately, the weather has been crap, so I haven’t really had a chance to play much — I tried the UHC filter briefly and was able to spot the Triffid Nebula for the first time, and I’ve checked a few things in the binoculars, but I’m yet to have a good play with either yet. Bring on the clear skies!

As fun as looking at the planets is, I’ve started looking more at deep sky objects recently, ignoring the fact that my light polluted skies limit what I’ll be able to see and just diving in regardless. I’m starting, as most amateurs do, with the Messier objects, one of the earliest catalogues of deep sky objects, dating back to the late 1700s. Messier had no interest in these deep sky objects — the telescopes of the day could barely make them out anyway, so no-one had any idea what they were — but he had a keen interest in comets, so his catalogue was primarily meant as a list of faint, fuzzy things that were known not to be comets. The beauty of the Messier catalogue is that it’s all within reach of a decent amateur telescope, since even a telescope like mine is larger and far better made than anything Messier had access to.

I’ve spotted quite a few star clusters — open clusters like M6 and M7, and globular clusters like M4 — but the most impressive thing I’ve seen so far, is M8, the Lagoon Nebula. With my skies it doesn’t look anything like the photos of course, but the brightest areas are definitely visible.

To help with the nebulas, I’m heading to Bintel tomorrow to pick up a UHC filter. These filters block all incoming light, save for a few narrow bands around specific emission lines for things like hydrogen and oxygen, so instead of getting a faint nebula image drowned in background glow, you get a faint nebula image jumping out of an inky-black background. Can’t wait to see how it’ll go!

My webcam telescope adapter arrived last week, on Thursday night I found some time to give it a go on Jupiter:

With the webcam, the idea is to record video and then process the frames in to a single image, which averages out most of the noise, and for a first attempt I don’t think this looks too bad. The colours are off, though, and there’s not as much detail as I’d like. I think I had the shutter speed a bit too high, though, so the dynamic range in the images was too small. If I can fix that next time, I’ll hopefully get some better results.

I also finally managed to get a glimpse of the ISS in my telescope, as it passed overhead last night. It was an ideal pass, really, but the sky was covered in clouds, and I didn’t think I was going to see it at all until I finally spotted a faint white star moving through the clouds. I only got to see it for about 30 seconds before it disappeared in to thick cloud, and it was tricky to track, even at my lowest magnification, but I could still make out a central structure (the station itself) with some extra bits on either side (the solar panels).

I tried to get some pics of it during tonight’s pass, but I got set up about a minute too late. If it’s clear tomorrow night, and I’m home early enough (it’s passing over at about 5:30), I’ll have another go then.