On 16/03/2016 17:14, wrote:
On Tuesday, March 15, 2016 at 8:05:04 PM UTC-4, RichA wrote:
On Tuesday, 15 March 2016 16:27:09 UTC-4, LdB wrote:

It's not the cheap telescope that discourages the newbie. It's the
cheapskate advanced observer that uses the minimum of equipment but
tries to convince himself and others into believing his skills allow him
to see more than what is really there. He goes on and on about the
spectacular views he has of an almost invisible smudge of light. One
exaggeration after another. Think about it, the only way to spoil a good
story is to tell the truth.
time in the world to quibble with each other on the Internet.

You'd be dead-wrong here. It was the seasoned observers who tried to temper
the expectations of novices by warning them that what was printed on the cheap
telescope box is likely not what you would see. If after knowing that a new
observer was still interested, perfect. Some may claim to be able to
ferret-out tough galaxies that a novice would simply pass-over, but that is
hardly a boast or unrealistic.

I suspect that LsD IS a novice from a visual observing standpoint.
He doesn't have fifty years of experience, he has a couple of -days-
of experience, repeated about 10,000 times.

LsD might be but here is an example of someone with 50 years of
experience in all forms of astrophotography and working form a highly
light polluted location in the UK doing deep sky imaging rather well.

http://www.deep-sky.co.uk/

The Bolton club also have some very keen ATMs and some of the other
links from this page are worth a look at too.

Basically his trick is to model the variable sky brightness and subtract
off a baseline to reveal faint nebulosity in the post processing. I saw
him give a talk on his methods last week in Salford.

Direct link to some of his CCD pictures (the DSLR ones are good too):

http://www.deep-sky.co.uk/imaging/ccd/ccd.htm

He is observing from a very heavily light polluted region - I doubt if
even on his best nights 5th magnitude stars would be naked eye visible.
Despite the handicaps of his location he is still able to image details
that naked eye observers would never ever be able to see.

--
Regards,
Martin Brown