I got some BST Starguider lenses, which I believe are considered good value
https://www.firstlightoptics.com/bst-starguider-eyepieces/bst-starguider-60-12mm-ed-eyepiece.html
I should have said up to Ā£150 as it could well be a fad 
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This looks great and in budget, thanks.
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Looking at the moon from your back garden will justify the price of admission 
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Iām not entirely comfortable with this 
Amazing that they can manufacture a capable instrument for that price 
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I bought kate one for her birthday it wasnāt cheap even used but it is very good and the moon looks amazing.
BUT
We donāt use it often because it takes time to set it up properly and usually when itās a clear night it is dam cold and she gets fed up but it is interesting when we do use it.
I bought the one Edd suggested about 4 posts up from here.
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Anyone still in touch with Hawk?
Iāve got him on instagram I think. Will direct him here, good thread. Iād not spotted it before.
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Top bloke Neil, must be 15 years since I last saw him. His was the first bakeoff I went to, think it was back in the HFC forum days.
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Assume you all know heās thean behind Tring Astro, now one of the countries premier Telescope outlets. 
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ISS is very visible in the sky this week, though thanks to cloud Iāve not seen it. Sky was supposed to be clear tonight - nonetheless I missed the first pass due to cloud, but was out with the dogs for the second and thankfully the cloud had nearly gone - amazed that the ISS was bright enough that it passed ācloseā to the moon but stayed visible.
But what really gobsmacked me was the two trains of Skynetā¦ erā¦ Starlink satellites that followed it at 5 minute intervals. Iād seen smaller more widely-spread strings of them before, but never so bloody many or so close together. Itās positively eerie - like some kind of a fleet, gathering for something that wonāt end wellā¦
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be thousands of them up there soon. Apparently they get less visible as they move out to their final orbit.
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more likely
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VB
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beat me to it
Coincident with Jupiter (and Saturn) being conspicuous in the Southern sky at the moā (Jupiterās bright enough it shows through thin cloud), this footage has recently been released from the Juno mission - animating many thousands of still images captured during the probeās recent flypast of Ganymede and then Jupiter itself:
Love the continent-sized electrical storms in Jupiterās upper atmosphere.
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Lovely to see that, the scale of Jupiter is phenomenal.
Luckily for us itās the right mass in the right place at the right time. Just letās through enough Asteroids of a certain size to jump start evolution. If Jupiter were smaller, too many would hit earth and not sufficient time between impacts for us to evolve, if Jupiter were bigger then not enough Asteroids would get through and the Dinoās may still rule the roost etcā¦
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I know that this might be right, but it might also be a bit anthropic. So we could have been super-evolved dinosaurs thanking Jupiter for being really big, protecting us from asteroids!
Noted, but they were here for a few hundred million years and didnāt amount to much.
The Jupiter size thing is all part of a rare earth theory, there are over half a dozen other extraordinary coincidences necessary for complex life and a few more following that just for us to exist. Thatās a whole other thread.
Not tremendously likely.
Earliest primates: Late Palaeocene, ca. 58Ma
Earliest hominins: Middle Miocene, ca. 8Ma
Earliest dinosaurs: Middle Triassic, ca. 240Ma
Extinction of most dinosaurs: Late Cretaceous, ca. 65Ma
So it took Just fifty million years for the first humans to evolve, meanwhile, dinosaurs had three-and-a-half times as long (nearly five times when you include birds) to evolve from archosaurs, and have still not produced an animal of comparable intelligence even to the earliest australopithicenes, despite having endured all of the same ecological drivers that promoted human evolution, not to mention many others never encountered by primates.
Sadly Dale Russell never quite factored that inā¦
