Society for Popular Astronomy

My interpretaion of this thread is that A) The new S & T magazine Popular Astronomy has the same name as the SPA Magazine.-and is therefore a popular name. B) There was another much older American magazine with the same name (this was vaguely linked with S & T in the distant past, apparently...

Hi davej, I apologise for any offence but I was just responding to Cliff's comments of how imaging could be cheap and easy without considering the alternative - not to do it because the observer did not want to. There must be an almost infinite number of ways to do astronomy - none is the only right...

Still do not have a lot of desire to take images, I am very happy just to view.

It is quite interesting to sketch the prominences. An artist colleague produced some great results using a friend's PST.

Keep It Simple, I say.
M A Feist

Hi Cliff However, I do feel need to take umbridge at your suggestion that imaging is inevitably expensive etc I would rather look at the question of "any chance of images on here" from a different viewpoint altogether. Why the obsession with taking images ? This certainly seems to be the i...

Not the first or second use of this title as there was once an even older Popular Astronomy Magazine in the US. See the following:- The Goodsell Observatory, Northfield, Minnesota was completed in 1887 as a Romanesque Revival style building. The observatory contains an 8-1/4-inch refracting telescop...

I bought a copy of this. It does not clearly state what it is all about...whether it is an onging alternative to the main S & T or just a 'special'. Very basic observing, rather like the bi-mothly magazine (I cannot remember its name) that was recently discontinued.
M A F

Re imaging with PST...My colleague has experimented but it does not seem to be just a matter of putting a digital camera at the eyepiece.
M A F

I do not think that I have ever been struck by the cosmos in that way although I appreciate the spectacle of the universe that we can see in our skies, but when considering the biological world here on Earth it sometimes strikes me as so complicated and interwoven as not to be really even to be a po...

Mirrors are for shaving.

I remember reading a story of an American astronomer, stopping overnight at a motel. When he went to shave in the morning he found that the mirror in the bathroom was a telescope mirror! I think he bought ot off the owner.

MAF

Also...I remember reading once that Galileo used x900 magnification. Sounded impossible until you realised that he was refereing to x900 area magnification which equally x30 normal magnification!
MAF

Surely huge magnifications meant tiny fields of view. Turning Herschel's big scopes was, I believe, very clumsy with labourers pulling on rope and pulleys. I wonder just how you could locate anything let alone follow it as it scooted out the fov. I do not think that he had a clock drive and I wonder...

I once bought some secondhand binoculars that had a spot of something inside one of the eyepieces. I carefully managed to disassemble the appropriate bit, removed the dirt and carefully re-assembled them. great! Except that I obviously blew on the inside of the eyepiece and managed to replace the di...

I thought perhaps I had to re-register because my e-mail address had changed as this is asked for when you register plus I also kept forgetting the code as well.! So new code, new name etc etc
MAF

Just in case you should wonder Mike Feist is the same person as Mike A Feist. Have a new computer and e-mail address so re-registered here under a slightly different name. I have not gone all American, I really do have a middle name starting with A!
MF or even MAF!