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I posted to this thread yesterday, and my comment is not here today. This site is very frustrating. I’ll do it over again.

My favorite pointer is:

https://www.opticsplanet.com/z-bolt-military-pride-green-laser-briefing-pointer.html

I don’t know if you can get it as a non-military pride version or not.

What I like about it is that it has a…[Read more]

I think any of the <$20 options on Amazon are decent options. I’ve been ordering more of the rechargeable types. So far they seem to work OK.

For e…[Read more]

Thanks for the info all.

We haven’t seen a charge on our credit card, so thinking I’ll be okay.

Any suggestions for an alternate green laser pointer?

Colin

Hi Colin,

You are correct. Orion’s website went dark July 31 and they along with Meade (who is another major astronomy equipment vendor being acquired by Orion) is gone too. Very unexpected and surprising since Orion has been perhaps the major supplier for amateur astronomers for decades.

If you have money sent for your purchase, I would c…[Read more]

Upon further review, looks like they are toast.  If they took your money, you may be out of luck.

Wow, hard for me to believe, but they might be going out of business.

https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-news/meade-and-orion-cease-operations-maybe/

You can do a google search and find other references.

Of course this still requires two logos, one for dark on light and one for light on dark.

Great info. I always thought it was an 11 year cycle but that must be short of what’s happening now.

Josef, thanks for the spell check. I’ve been saying it wrong for years. 😮

And thanks for turning out the light.

Check this out. I got a Cricut for my daughter and I decided to print out a tribute to Dean for my scope. Just added this…[Read more]

Beautiful images of the northwest horizon with crepuscular rays! I added one of them with the crescent Moon to the article about Root River Park.

Terrific Milky Way shot Duane! Nice corpuscular rays. Glad you two had fun at Root River.
I’ve been following solar cycle 25 closely on unmanned spaceflight. I don’t think the cycle has peaked as yet, at least based on sunspot numbers. Check out this link: https://spaceweather.com/images2024/02aug24/sunspotnumber2.jpg

Also, Joseph spotted this… Corpuscular rays shooting upward!

Ooooo….   What scope and mount did you get? Do tell!

I’m thinking the same thing… I want the rig I want and it’s taking forever to get it; but eventually I’ll get there. I keep seeing cheaper compromising equipment for less and I keep ignoring it, but it’s so tempting.

Equipment I need to get to finish my setup: Astro-Camera (preferably the…[Read more]

Here’s the Milky Way shot I took last night:

I was lazy and stayed at my home observatory last nite.  Good skies for sure, so I hope Josef and Duane enjoyed observing at Root River.  I have a new mount and scope and was educating myself on how to operate them.  The mount is the HEQ5 Pro and the scope is the Quattro 150P, all Sky Watcher hardware.  Spent $2000+ of my savings, but hey I’m not…[Read more]

That is one big sun spot! I think we’re now past the active part of the sun’s cycle and it’s supposed to be gradually calming down. That seems to be taking a while.

I just went outside, put on my eclipse sunglasses and looked with the naked eye at the big sunspot. Here is SDO image https://sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov/assets/img/browse/2024/08/07/20240807_170000_512_HMIIC.jpg:

Weather forecast for tonight Tue 8/6 looks promising. I plan to go to the Root River park to make sure the light is switched off.

Thanks for posting. Looking up it was pretty good. I could see all the stars in the Little Dipper and a lot more within that I normally can’t see. But that was looking most upward. Looking at the northern horizon was hazy (see pic).

Looking east and west, all but the brightest stars disappeared.

Great sky while looking upward, but the lower you…[Read more]