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 

A Personal tribute to Heather Couper

I wish to pay a personal tribute to the astronomer, broadcaster and writer Dr Heather Couper (2/6/1949 - 19/02/2020) who died five years ago at the relatively young age of 70. She was a great ambassador for astronomy and somebody who took an interest in young people and encouraged them to be astronomers. This was true of myself and, by way of thanks, I want to write down how she influenced me into trying to become a professional astronomer.

When I was at Haileybury College between 1975 and 1980 I gained an interest in astronomy by accident rather than by design. At the school we had a number of different societies to which we could belong and one time, when I was obviously at a bit of a loss as to which one I should join, someone suggested the Astronomical Society. I knew very little about astronomy at that time. I was very science orientated (particularly in physics) but I knew very little about the stars. We were very lucky in those days because the school had an observatory which was equipped with a 4.5 inch refractor (probably a Cooke telescope). This was a splendid old brass instrument, mounted on a pier and contained within a brick building. Here is a picture of me standing outside it when I returned to visit the school in 2000:-

By then it had begun to look as though it had been abandoned. Looking on Google Maps today, the observatory is still there and the dome is in intact but it sits forlornly at the corner of a machinery yard. It makes me wonder if the telescope is still inside.

I was assisted in my learning about astronomy by one of the society members - a Scottish lad who was a five years my senior and who knew how to work the telescope. This was Barry Gardiner who later went on to be an MP and a junior minister in Tony Blair's government. I can still recall him saying to me that I needed to understand about Right Ascension and Declination and showing me a copy of Norton's Star Atlas. This book was probably the prime atlas for amateur astronomers at that time and in 1980, when I won the Powell-Davis Art Prize at school, I asked to be given a copy as a reward (rather than an art book)! So armed with this book and a knowledge of how to use the school telescope I began to explore the skies and after a while I was hooked (I can still remember my first views of objects like Orion Nebula and the impact it had on me).

So, as I progressed through school I remained in the Astronomical Society and as I entered my A-level years I became its secretary. This meant organising meetings of the society and in the summer of 1980 I arranged for an excursion to the Royal Greenwich Observatory in London. Of course I had a lot of help in this from my physics teacher and mentor Ian R Williams (or Doc Williams as he was known). Ian was a superb teacher and very inspiring as he had himself done a PhD in low-temperature physics. You have to understand at this time I was on course to study architecture at Manchester University. I had taken A levels in Physics, Chemistry and Art (yes, I know, an odd combination) and had an offer of a place at Manchester. This had been my direction for a number of years, mainly because I come a family of architects and it seemed like a good profession to go into.

So the day came for a group of us from school and Doc Williams to head into London to the Royal Observatory at Greenwich. We travelled by train, tube and then by boat up river from the center, which was very exciting. In the morning we were to go to the Planetarium and to be treated to a show by one of the lecturers. This is when I met Heather Couper for the first time (she had been appointed senior lecturer there in 1977) and it was Heather who gave us the an excellent planetarium show that entertained us from start to finish. There was always something sparkly about Heather's talks and she always liked to introduce something slightly risqué and in this case it was alluding to how the constellation of Virgo was seen lying low above the horizon at that time of the season. 

At the end of the talk Heather mentioned that she was organising an event for young budding astronomers later in the year and said that if we were interested we could put our names down for it. At the time I didn't think much more about it. We headed off to look round the observatory buildings and then down to the National Maritime Museum (the girls in our group disappeared off shopping in Greenwich!). However, later on when I was back at school I began to feel that I was more interested in astronomy and physics than I was in architecture and one day in dining hall I had this epiphany moment! I was going to do it, I was going to become an astronomer! For the first time in my life I realised what I really wanted to do with my life.

It was quite a turn around and there were a few obstacles to overcome, not least that I needed an A-level in mathematics. I didn't really know how to go about this. My maths skills had been somewhat mediocre up till that point but I had done very well in physics and I knew that I must have it in me somewhere. I went to the careers advisor who turned out to be Mr Bentley who had, by coincidence, been my maths teacher right up until O-level (I famously got 5 out of 95 for one of his maths tests). To his credit, he didn't try to dissuade me and I am grateful to him for not doing this. He laid out a plan for me and said that I would need to go to a college in London (a "crammer" as they were called then) and see if I could get an A-level in mathematics in a year. So this is what I did and went to Davies's College in Southampton Row and a year later I had a grade A maths A-level to add to my tally.

In the mean time I recalled what Heather had said about her event for budding astronomers and I wrote her a long letter telling her about my desire to change career and to come to her one-day meeting. I am forever grateful that she took the time to write back to me and to add me to the list of participants. Later in the year I found my way back into London and attended the day where a number of current astronomers talked about how they had got into this line of work. One of them was Dr Jim Emerson (now emeritus professor) at Queen Mary College, London where eventually I went to study. I can still recall how he said in his talk that it was determination and not necessarily brains that got you where you wanted to be in work.

So, after reapplying to study astronomy at a number of universities, I ended up at Queen Mary College doing a BSc in astrophysics. I continued to see Heather from time to time socially (as she was friends with another student on my course) and she was always encouraging to me and interested in my progress. I was so pleased when she and Nigel Henbest came to my 21st birthday party - it was a real honour to have her there (but then parties were Heather's thing!). My career in astronomy carried on for a number of years until 1992. I left QMC with first class honours and a very good background in mathematics (I had even managed to pass the General Relativity course in the mathematics department). It all went to my head and I tried Part III of the Mathematical Tripos at Cambridge (which had a lot of theory of astrophysics in it) but failed. I picked myself up and dusted myself down and went to do a PhD at Durham University which I finally finished in 1990. My subject was cosmology and the large-scale structure of the universe. I was awarded my PhD and carried on for a couple of years doing research but eventually I found myself in the real world with what my mother would call a proper job in business.

However, my interests in astronomy continue and I will forever be grateful to Heather for being there at the right moment and providing me with the idea that I really could do this and get into the professional world of astronomy. We need more people like her and the other teachers that helped me along my way to inspire and to encourage.

Heather Couper and Nigel Henbest in their garden in Greenwich in about 1983.

All text and images © Duncan Hale-Sutton 2025 

 

Comet C/2025 A6 (Lemmon)

We have been fortunate to have several comets grace our skies recently and the brightest of these has been comet Lemmon. This comet was discovered by David Fuls on the 3rd January 2025 during a survey at Mount Lemmon Observatory. During the intervening months it has significantly brightened and around the end of the October it reached its maximum luminosity of about 4th magnitude. On October 25th I was fortunate enough to get a good view of the comet when we had some clear skies in the early evening. At 19:41 UT I took this wide-field view:-

 

The comet has been marked on the image with green lines (the image can be better viewed by clicking on it). It sits in the constellation of Serpens (Caput - i.e. the head) and below the distinctive crown of the constellation of Corona Borealis. The field of view this image is approximately 64x46 degrees. I used a Sony RX100 camera with an exposure of 10s at f/1.8 (ISO 1600). I took another image with the same camera and pointing in the same direction but used a focal length of 20mm rather than 10mm:-

 

This was again a 10s exposure at ISO1600 but this time at f/3.5. The comet has again been marked. Looking closely at this image you can see that the comet tail extends quite a long way up towards the crown of Corona Borealis (some 12 degrees). The field of view of this image is approximately 36x25 degrees.

Finally, I wanted to look at how the comet's position compared with ephemeris predictions. For this I took a chart produced by Nick James at the BAA and overlaid it on my first image that I took:-

 

It was difficult getting the orientation and scaling correct but by making sure that the stars near the comet overlap reasonably well, you can see that the comet does indeed sit on the predicted path. As the observation time was 19:41 UT on the 25th which is 0.820 of the day, you can see that the comet is about the right distance along the track towards the 26th tick mark from the 25th tick mark (taking that the tick marks are for midnight UT).

The comet is now beginning to fade and passed perihelion on the 7th November. 

All text and images © Duncan Hale-Sutton 2025 

 

Variable star observations in September 2025

I was able to make some further variable star observations in September. Firstly, on the 13th where the moon was one day before last quarter, I had a go at three stars with my 10x50 binoculars. Twilight ended at about 20:30 UT and the moon rose at 20:27. The skies were clear but the sky transparency was average. Here are my results:-

TX Dra, 20.59 UT, chart 106.04, K(4)V(3)N, mag. 7.4

AH Dra, 21.14 UT, chart 106.04, 2(2)V(3)6, mag 7.5

CH Cyg, 22.03 UT, chart 089.04, F(1)V(6)H, mag 8.6 

 

CH Cygni has been fading quite a bit recently. It is now approaching 9th magnitude, which makes it difficult to measure in smaller aperture binoculars. It may not get any fainter than 9.5.

 

On the 30th September the moon was one day after last quarter and wouldn't set until about 22:03. Twilight ended at 19:45 UT. The skies were clear apart from some cloud in the south west. The sky transparency was again average. I observed TX and AH Draconis again. I also had a go at CH Cygni but I gave up as it was too faint. Here are my results:-

 

TX Dra, 22.22 UT, chart 106.04, K(3)V(4)N, mag. 7.3

AH Dra, 22.34 UT, chart 106.04, 2(2)V(3)6, mag 7.5

 

All my results are in very good agreement with other observers from the BAA.

 

All text and images © Duncan Hale-Sutton 2025