Month: June 2026

Viewing Report 8th June 2026

11pm – 2:30am

I collected the new ZWO Seestar S30 Pro (S30P) today. I thought Luke and I could give it a little run, even though astronomical darkness is no longer with us until August.

I setup the S30P here on the observatory patio. Luke setup the S50 at his house. We then took a variety of test images on both to compare the different scopes.

Whilst I waited for darkens to fall I took a quick phot of Venus and Jupiter close together on my iPhone.

Venus & Jupiter – iPhone 15 Pro Max

Then we setup the S30P so that it could be used remotely. You can share the scope but only 1 person can be logged in at any one time.

Screenshot of sharing scopes

First we tested out just getting focus on Arcturus and seeing what FoV we would get with the much larger chip of the S30P.

Next we slewed to M13. Given the light nights it’s better not going for a galaxy or nebula.

M 13
M 13

Then I went fore M27 on the S50 only but I had problems with red banding on the photo. It must have been some interference, however I was not quite sure I knew from where.

M 27

Then I did M10 on the S50. At the same time I did M92 on the S30P as M10 was poorly positioned.

M 10
M 92

I then tried a Milky Way shot but this was too faint due to the night sky being so very bright.

Milky Way

Lastly I set the S30P performing a short Star Trails image on Polaris.

Polaris & Star trails

Viewing Report 29th May 2026

23:00 – 00:56

Tonight I thought I would continue my testing of the ZWO ASI2600MC Duo camera for performing photometry on T Coronae Borealis, HR 5958, as Wednesday night I realised the Antlia filter was in the imaging train and because even with the filter in, at 1s the maximum the star was, was .1 in green so far from saturated which gives a chance of being able to compare to a mag 2.2 star, Epsilon CrB in the same field of view.

I took 100 x 50ms of TcB, stacked them and this increased the signal to noise which helped. I then downloaded AstroImageJ for the Mac which I will use to perform photometry. Now I just need to learn the software.

Viewing Report 27th May 2026

22:15 – 01:00

Started work on my first photometry project tonight which I will do with my friend GingerGeek. T Coronae Borealis, which is also known as HR 5958 in that constellation is the target. I have been working on the information provided by the BAA

https://britastro.org/section_news_item/get-set-for-the-next-eruption-of-the-recurrent-nova-t-coronae-borealis

and also from the AVSO

https://www.aavso.org/blog/what-do-during-eruption-t-crb

Both the above have proved useful in understanding both the situation and the comparison star/s to observe too. In my case I will attempt to image T CrB along with Epsilon CrB as this is a non variable mag 2.2 star.

T Coronae Borealis

Tonight I managed to take a few different subs at varying exposures, both to characterise the behaviour of the camera on this Field of View, but also to create an annotated overlay to help pinpoint T CrB on other frames.

After taking exposures ranging from 1s to 300s, the latter being for the annotation, I slewed to the Moon to take my first image through this new Sky-Watcher Esprit 150EDX.

Moon 0.2s single frame