1/19/2025 SVBONY SV510 Solar Telescope – More than you expect

SVBONY asked me to review this 60mm white light telescope. Given its low price of about $75, I wasn’t expecting much. I’m glad to say that I was pleasantly surprised.

In the unboxing, I found a lightly padded backpack, a tripod, the 60mm refractor, 1.25” diagonal, 20mm eyepiece of unknown design, and instruction manual.

The tripod is light duty, but the telescope is lightweight. Given that my testing was in a 10 MPH wind, the tripod performed better than I expected. Still, a better tripod is recommended and the scope comes with a short Vixen dovetail to enable mounting on a telescope mount.

The telescope has a standard pinhole solar finder already mounted. With a focal length of 400mm, the 20mm eyepiece provides 20x magnification. That makes the Sun easier to find. Until you find it, all you will see is black of course. Once found, you might want to swap to a higher magnification. A 14mm eyepiece would probably be just right. That said, the image I saw was crisp and clear. I could easily see five sunspot groups with the provided eyepiece.

The picture of the Sun here was taken with the same cellphone as the other pictures and I have never been good at cellphone-eyepiece photography. Still, it turned out to be acceptable.

This telescope is intended for people new to solar observing and I think this telescope does a good job at that without breaking the bank.

1/17/2025 Reprocessing of old Orion Nebula image

It’s been cold and dreary and I don’t have any new images to process so I decided to reprocess this one from four years ago with PixInsight. The image is a combination of short and longer images to bring out the dimmer parts without blowing out the core. Hard to say which version is better. What I need and plan to do is reshoot the area with my newer gear when the weather allows.

Click here for the original image.

1/3/2025 A Seahorse and Seven Sisters

I think I’ve reached the end of usable data from Friday night. The first image acquired (and last to be processed) is the Seahorse Nebula, one of my favorites since childhood. I also took another crack at a Pleiades widefield. I recently published a shot of the Pleiades taken with my ASI533MC Pro, this one was taken with my 2600MC Pro which has a significantly larger format.

One thing I love about astrophotography is you don’t have to take anyone’s word about stuff like this. You can take a telescope and camera, or sometimes just a camera, and take a picture of your own.

The Seahorse Nebula aka Barnard 150 aka LDN 1082 is a dark molecular cloud in the constellation of Cepheus. We see it mainly by the light it blocks. This was taken with my 11″ SCT with Hyperstar @ f/1.9 and ASI533MC Pro camera with an Antlia Triband RGB Ultra light pollution filter.

The Pleiades or Seven Sisters or Messier 45 is an open star cluster in the constellation of Taurus. Fun Fact: The two closest star clusters to Earth are both in Taurus. The other is known as the Hyades which make the face of Taurus the Bull. The nebulosity seen here is not related to the Pleiades but lies between us and the star cluster. That nebulosity was my main target as it is dim and not always easy to capture. This was taken with my Samyang 135mm lens and ASI2600MC Pro camera using the same Antlia Triband RGB Ultra light pollution filter.

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