A new Dwarf 3 telescope to play with

With all the recent issues I have had with setting up a telescope I decided it was time to move with the times and purchase a smartscope. For various reasons I opted to buy a Dwarf 3 scope and this cost me £459 from First Light Optics. It comes with two lenses - one telephoto and one for wide angle. The telephoto lens has an aperture of 35mm and a focal length of 150mm, whilst the wide angle has an aperture of 3.4mm and a focal length of 6.7mm. The respective equivalent focal lengths (which I assume are compared to a standard 35mm camera) are 737mm and 45mm. It has a Sony IMX678 sensor. What I liked about the Dwarf is that it has a standard 1/4 inch tripod screw fitting and so I could set it up in the garden on my sturdy Manfrotto.

I didn't get to use it right away because of the poor weather but then on Friday (the 19th December) we had a good clear night with no moon (it was one day to new moon). I have leveling bubbles on the head of my Manfrotto and this worked very well with no issues in the initial set up. Everything is run from an app on your phone and, as with anything new, it took a bit of time to get the connection sorted and to figure out how to start a session of observing. The beauty of it is that once the phone is wirelessly connected I can run everything sitting inside in the warm. There was no problem there. 

For my first target I decided to do something obvious until I was more familiar with the controls and so I picked M31 (the Andromeda galaxy). The app has an atlas and you can search for the object you require. I set the Dwarf running with auto parameters and was slightly perturbed when it was scheduled to take 999 images of 15s each, so over 4 hours of observation. I was under the impression that the number of images it would take would be appropriate to the object being targeted, so I wasn't keen to do much else but let it run. However, after about three hours of integration, I thought there must be a way to stop the process and there was (a long press on the shoot button). I was also confused as to whether the scope stacked the data as it captured new images and it does, so I did do further stacking in Mega Stack which wasn't necessary. Once the final stacked image has been acquired the picture can be processed in Stellar Studio to give you a nice noise-free image.

Here is the result of 536x15s (2 hours 4 minutes) of integration:-

 

The images that are captured are usually 3840x2160 pixels in size in telephoto mode but due to image rotation during the exposure, the post processing has cropped this to 2068x1720 so some of the outer edges of the spiral arms are lost. The two satellites of M31, namely M110 (top) and M32 (bottom) show up nicely as do the dark dust lanes of the spiral arms and regions of blue star formation at the outer edges of the galaxy.

It is interesting to compare this processed image with the raw stacked image produced at the end of the observation. Here is a 500x500 pixel area from each for comparison:-

 

The one above is taken from the image before processing in Stellar Studio and the one below after:-

There is quite a considerable difference between the two! The stars have been sharpened significantly, the noise has been removed and the colour rendition improved. I definitely could not do this sort of thing in Photoshop myself! Having said that, I don't think there is anything there that wasn't in the original image even though the noise reduction is supposedly AI powered.

Having had a go at M31 and it not being too late in the evening, I decided to make the most of it and try to image something I have never tried before and that is IC1805 which is known as the Heart Nebula. This large emission nebula can be found in the constellation of Cassiopeia east of the 'W' arrangement of stars. After 346x15s (1 hour 26.5 minutes) I obtained this image:-

 

Again this image has been cropped in post processing so the full shape of the 'heart' can't be seen. In the centre of the image is a cluster of bright blue stars called Melotte 15 and these stars are so powerful that their light is causing the surrounding gas to ionise and then to recombine and emit red light (the H-alpha line). I was very pleased with this image and even though this telescope has a very modest aperture it clearly can do what I would struggle to do with a larger telescope. I am looking forward to photographing other areas of the sky and other suitable targets. It was well-worth the investment.

All text and images © Duncan Hale-Sutton 2025 

 

Saturn on the 3rd December 2025

I have been struggling recently to set up my Orion OMC-140 telescope on my HEQ-5 mount. I find that trying to use the polar scope correctly and then carrying out a 3 star setup isn't that easy and it is very time consuming. I had a session the other day where it looked like it was going to be clear and so I began the process in the afternoon of setting up the mount and the telescope. By the time it was dark I had finally carried out a successful 3 star setup but before I could really do anything the whole telescope (and in particular the front corrector of this Maksutov-Cassegrain) had frozen up! It was very disappointing.

So on the 3rd I thought to hell with it, I wouldn't bother with an elaborate setup. I have three slabs set in the ground where I can place the feet of the tripod mount and on these I had marked where I think they should be placed (this at least was a good outcome from the freezing night). So I just set the feet correctly, moved the telescope until it was pointing at Saturn and switched on the equatorial drive (you can do this in one of the hand-controller options). Bingo! It worked very well and I was able to hold Saturn in the eyepiece for over an hour without having to adjust anything.

I decided to draw what I saw through the scope:-

Saturn's rings, at the moment, are virtually edge on. There is a very good application in TheSkyLive which shows where Saturn's moons are and how the rings are displayed to us. I used this information to label the moons that I was able to see. Two other potentially visible moons Mimas and Enceladus were located close to the rings but I was unable to pick them out. I was very pleased to see four of the moons. There was also a hint of a colour change in Saturn which I have indicated by thin line. North is up and east is to the left. The equatorial diameter of Saturn on this day was about 18.9 arc seconds and its magnitude was about 0.75. Our moon was one day from full.

All text and images © Duncan Hale-Sutton 2025 

Variable Star observations on the 28th November 2025

Just over a week ago the weather tried to play ball and give us some clear conditions but it wasn't that brilliant. The moon was at first quarter and there was light thin high-level cloud that made for poor variable transparency. I had been planning to have a good session of variable star observing with my 10x50 binoculars but in the end I only managed three stars:-

TX Dra, 18.45 UT, chart 106.04, K(5)V(2)N, mag. 7.5

AH Dra, 18.55 UT, chart 106.04, 2(3)V(2)6, mag 7.6

CH Cyg, 19.12 UT, chart 089.04, =H, mag 9.2

 

CH Cygni was very difficult and right at the limit of what I could observe in these conditions. I could only see it in averted vision. Because of the moon and the poor visibility I was worried that these estimates might not be very good, but on comparison with values from other BAA members it seems that they aren't too bad.

 

All text and images © Duncan Hale-Sutton 2025 

 

Red Aurora on the 3rd December 2025

Last night I unexpectedly had an aurora warning beginning around 18:00 UT with a strength of 380.8 nT on the Aurora Watch magnetometer. Initially, I thought that the moon would be too bright to see anything (it was one day until full) but a friend alerted me to the fact that the aurora was active. The alerts kept coming - the magnetometer at Sumburgh Head recorded 560.2 nT at 19:00 and before falling back to 218.6 nT at 20:00. At around 19:00 UT I was outside with my telescope trained on Saturn when my friend put something up on WhatsApp about what he could see. I turned round and was surprised that I could see a red glow in the north. I went inside to grab my camera and tripod and my first picture was at 19:11 UT:-

You can see red vertical rays through Ursa Major and a little bit of green glow below this. This was taken on a Sony RX100 with an exposure of 4s at f/1.8, ISO1600. The display continued on until 19:21 UT but seemed to be weakening:-

This image was taken at 19:16 UT and I had reduced the shutter speed to 2.5s. The red vertical rays can still be seen but are now at a lower altitude. I took a picture looking more to the north west but there was little evidence of activity in this direction apart from a vague red glow. 

After this I went inside for a bit (it was pretty cold by then and frost was starting to form on the grass). I came out again 30 minutes later at 19:46 to find that the activity had ramped up considerably:-

This was again a 2.5s exposure at f/1.8, ISO1600. There is now a a much more intense general red glow with slanting vertical rays overlaying this. The green glow is at the base of this is still visible. The top of the rays are still lower in altitude than the ones taken at 19:11UT. Looking in the north west the activity had also increased there:-

This was a 2.5s exposure taken at 19:48 UT. The constellation of Lyra is at the extreme left of this image and strong red rays are just seen over the roof top. To the far right a much stronger underlying green glow is evident. At 19:49 I took an image to the north east:-

Not much activity can be made out in this direction and the moon just creeps into the top of the picture. There is some general pink glow to the far left. The display in the north was getting to be very pretty by 19:50 UT:-

 Again a 2.5s exposure. It constantly changed and towards 19:55 UT began to die down again.

 This picture was taken at 19:53 UT.

All text and images © Duncan Hale-Sutton 2025