Ontario Telescope and Accessories

Ontario Telescope and Accessories Ontario Telescope and Accessories, where OTA means more. Offering shipping across Canada, and personal service to ensure customer satisfaction.

Ontario Telescope and Accessories is an online destination for hobbyists and astronomers that are looking for new equipment. Authorised dealers for iOptron, Lumicon, Explore Scientific, Antares, and other high quality manufactures. Don’t be surprised if you receive an email response from us in the middle of the night, or on a weekend. Shop for your equipment 24 hours a day from the comfort of your home.

Since we spent Wednesday talking about a solar telescope, the safety half, plainly.Never point anything at the Sun witho...
09/20/2026

Since we spent Wednesday talking about a solar telescope, the safety half, plainly.

Never point anything at the Sun without a filter designed and certified for it. Not sunglasses, not exposed film, not a welding glass of unknown grade, not a smoked-glass filter that threads into an eyepiece. Those eyepiece-end screw-in solar filters that shipped with cheap department-store telescopes decades ago sit at the focus of concentrated sunlight and can crack while you are looking through them. If you own one, throw it out rather than passing it on.

There are exactly three safe approaches. A certified full-aperture filter over the front of the telescope, which shows you sunspots in white light. A Herschel wedge, on a refractor only, which does the same job with better contrast. Or a dedicated hydrogen-alpha instrument like Wednesday's Heliostar, where the safety is engineered into the optical train and the blocking filter is not optional — which is why that scope will not show you anything but the Sun.

Worth knowing about timing: solar maximum has been all but confirmed to have happened in 2024 and 2025, and Cycle 25 is now in its declining phase. Sunspot numbers are falling. That does not mean nothing happens — the UK Met Office notes that some of the strongest space weather events occur after maximum — but the very busy discs of the last two years are behind us. If solar observing has been on your list, the argument for not waiting another three years is a real one.

Unrelated, and worth a note: the equinox is Tuesday at 8:05 PM. We are losing daylight at about three minutes a day, the fastest rate of the year. Full astronomical darkness arrives at 8:55 PM tonight. In late June it was 11:25 PM.

09/20/2026

A 70 percent Moon up until 1:20 AM. Four hours of moonless dark, down from eight on Monday. Here is how to use a bright night instead of writing it off.

Narrowband still works. A Ha filter cuts moonlight hard enough that the Elephant's Trunk at 73 degrees or the Bubble Nebula at 61 degrees are both perfectly shootable at 10:00 PM with the Moon in the sky. Broadband and one-shot colour are the things moonlight ruins; narrow filters barely notice.

The Moon is a target, not an obstacle. It is 21 degrees up in the south at 8:45 PM, and the terminator has moved on since Friday — a completely different row of craters is catching the low light.

Double stars do not care at all. Albireo is nearly overhead and splits gold and blue at 50x.

Or calibrate. Take flats, take darks, sort last week's data. Every imager has a folder of unprocessed subs and a bright Moon is the reason to finally open it.

The four hours after 1:20 AM are genuinely dark if you want them. Astronomical dawn is 5:26 AM.

Sunset 7:18 PM.

Post your first one.Not your best one. Your first. The wonky Andromeda with the trailed stars and the gradient across th...
09/19/2026

Post your first one.

Not your best one. Your first. The wonky Andromeda with the trailed stars and the gradient across the corner. The Orion Nebula with the blown-out core. The Moon shot through a phone held crooked against the eyepiece.

Two reasons. One, everybody's first is bad, and a beginner scrolling this page sees only finished work and concludes the problem is them. Two, most of you have improved more than you realise, and you will enjoy looking at it.

Say what you shot it with and roughly when. If you want to put the current version beside it, even better.

This is my first shot ever of M13

09/19/2026

OntarioTelescope.TV - Check out what I built! Lets talk about getting Really Really good focus

Planetary imaging tonight, and the target does most of the work for you.Saturn transits at 2:10 AM at 49 degrees, which ...
09/19/2026

Planetary imaging tonight, and the target does most of the work for you.

Saturn transits at 2:10 AM at 49 degrees, which is as high as it gets from here. It is 31 degrees up by 11:00 PM and 40 degrees by midnight. Do not bother earlier — below about 30 degrees you are shooting through too much air and no amount of processing recovers it.

Planetary is the one branch of this hobby where a light-polluted backyard costs you nothing. Saturn is bright. Your neighbour's floodlight is irrelevant. What matters is seeing — how steady the air is — and altitude, which is why the transit time is the whole plan.

The method is the same as Friday's Moon: shoot video, not stills. Two to five minutes of high-frame-rate video, then stack the sharpest ten or twenty percent. A Barlow to get to roughly f/20 or f/25, a small fast camera, and patience while the seeing settles.

Honest expectation, because this is where people get discouraged: the live video preview will look like a wobbling blob. It is supposed to. The detail appears in the stack, not on the screen. Judge nothing until you have processed it.

The disc is 19.6 arcseconds tonight and the rings are tilted only about 8 degrees from edge-on, so they read as a narrow ellipse rather than the wide-open hoop from older photographs. That is the geometry right now, not your scope.

Sunset 7:20 PM.

Photo Credit: Manuel Guerrero

C11 Edge.
SaturnC SQR PlayerOne planetary camera.
Televue 2x PowerMate.
Firecapture.
Autostakkert. 30% stack of 8000 frames.
Wavelets. Registax6
Minor touch in PS.
Etobicoke, Ontario

Where the money should go, in order. We get asked this most weeks, so here it is plainly.The mount comes first. Not the ...
09/18/2026

Where the money should go, in order. We get asked this most weeks, so here it is plainly.

The mount comes first. Not the telescope. An excellent optic on an inadequate mount produces oval stars; a modest optic on a solid mount produces round ones. If your budget forces a compromise, compromise on aperture. We carry Sky-Watcher across the range — Star Adventurer trackers, HEQ5, EQ6-R, up to the EQ8 series

Then focal length, chosen for what you want to shoot. Wide targets like the North America Nebula, the Veil and Andromeda want 200mm to 500mm. Galaxies and planetary nebulae want 1000mm and up. Refractors from Sky-Watcher, Starfield Optics, Explore Scientific, Askar / Sharpstar, William Optics and Takahashi; imaging Newtonians and SCTs when the aperture matters more than the field.

Then the camera, and it matters less than you think. A cooled one-shot colour camera does more for a beginner than a mono camera and a filter wheel, because it gets you finished images while you are still learning. ZWO is what most of our customers run.

Then filters, and only the ones your sky actually needs. A dual-band filter is transformative from a city backyard and close to pointless under dark skies. An OIII does more for the Veil than any amount of aperture.

Then the boring things that decide whether the night works at all. Dew control, power, a guide scope, a field flattener with the right backfocus. This is where most first-year frustration actually lives.

Not everything is on the shelf on any given day, and several lines we bring in to order. Call or email before you plan around a date and we will tell you honestly what the lead time is.

First quarter Moon at 4:43 PM this afternoon, which makes tonight the best lunar imaging night of the week — and lunar i...
09/18/2026

First quarter Moon at 4:43 PM this afternoon, which makes tonight the best lunar imaging night of the week — and lunar imaging works nothing like deep sky.

At 8:00 PM the Moon is 17 degrees up in the south, 52 percent lit. It is usable until about 9:30 PM and sets at 11:19 PM. Early evening, which suits a Friday.

Deep sky is about collecting photons for hours. The Moon is the opposite problem: you have far more light than you need, and the enemy is the atmosphere smearing the detail. So you do not take a long exposure. You shoot a video — two or three thousand frames at high speed — and let software throw away the blurred ones and stack the sharp few hundred. That is lucky imaging, and it is why a modest scope on a good night beats a large scope on a bad one.

Where to point: along the terminator, the line between light and dark, not across the bright limb. At first quarter the sunlight is grazing and crater walls throw shadows kilometres long. Tonight that line runs through the Apennine mountains and past Ptolemaeus, Alphonsus and Arzachel, stacked in a row near the middle of the disc.

You do not need a planetary camera to start. A phone held to the eyepiece will record video, and the same stacking software will process it.

Sunset 7:22 PM.

Photo Credit Reddit user Efficient-Twist6592

We have carried Sky-Watcher USA for years, across the whole line — the Esprit apo triplets, the Quattro imaging Newtonia...
09/16/2026

We have carried Sky-Watcher USA for years, across the whole line — the Esprit apo triplets, the Quattro imaging Newtonians, the EQ6-R and HEQ5 and the EQ8 series, the Flextube and Classic Dobsonians, the Star Adventurer trackers. It is the range we point most people at when they want serious capability without a Takahashi budget.

The one worth talking about this week is the Heliostar 76.

It is a dedicated hydrogen-alpha solar telescope. 76mm aperture, 630mm focal length, f/8.3, with Sky-Watcher's Solis etalon and Trifid tuner giving a sub-0.55 angstrom bandpass out of the box. In plain terms: a bandpass that narrow is what separates seeing a plain orange disc from seeing prominences arcing off the limb, dark filaments snaking across the surface, and the mottled texture of the chromosphere. Historically you got that number by buying a second etalon and doubling the price. This one arrives already there.

It comes as a working instrument, not a starting point — tube rings, V dovetail, solar finder, 2-inch dual-speed Crayford focuser, 11.5mm blocking filter in its diagonal, clip-on sun shade, a 20mm 70-degree eyepiece, a phone adapter and a hard case. 8.4 lbs, so almost any mount will carry it.

$4,720.00 for the telescope. $5,410.00 packaged with the SolarQuest mount, which finds and tracks the Sun on its own with no alignment and no polar scope.

The catch, and it is a real one. This telescope does one thing. It will not show you the Moon, a planet or a galaxy — the blocking filter makes sure of it. If you want an instrument for everything, this is not that instrument. It is also not a stocked item; we bring it in to order, so ask us about lead time before you plan a session around it.

What it does have going for it: the Sun is the only target that does not care about light pollution, moonlight, or staying up past midnight. It works from a downtown balcony at two in the afternoon.

https://ontariotelescope.com/products/skywatcher-heliostar-76mm-h-alpha-solar-telescope

The Veil Nebula tonight, and it is the best argument for a narrowband filter you will ever look through.The Moon sets at...
09/16/2026

The Veil Nebula tonight, and it is the best argument for a narrowband filter you will ever look through.

The Moon sets at 9:47 PM, leaving seven and a half hours of dark. The eastern Veil transits at 10:30 PM, 78 degrees up — near enough to overhead that you can ignore the horizon entirely.

The Veil is the blast wave of a star that exploded in our own galaxy, long enough ago that the debris has expanded to three degrees across. It is enormous, and it is faint in a specific way: almost all of its light comes out at two narrow wavelengths. That is why it responds to filtration better than almost anything else up there.

Visually, in an 8-inch scope with an OIII filter, the western section is a genuine sight — a long curved thread of grey light. Without the filter, in the same scope, on the same night, most people cannot find it at all. It is the one object where a filter does more than a bigger telescope, and a 2-inch OIII runs $184.20.

Imaging: OIII and Ha, or a dual-band filter if you are shooting one-shot colour. Wide field again — 300mm to 500mm gets the whole complex, including Pickering's Triangle in the middle, which is the part most people miss.

Sunset 7:25 PM.

Andromeda is the target tonight, and the mistake most people make with it is focal length.The Moon sets at 9:12 PM. M31 ...
09/15/2026

Andromeda is the target tonight, and the mistake most people make with it is focal length.

The Moon sets at 9:12 PM. M31 is 43 degrees up in the east-northeast by 10:00 PM and 59 degrees by 11:30 PM. You have about eight hours of moonless dark.

Here is the thing nobody tells beginners: M31 is three degrees across. That is six full Moons end to end. Put it behind a 1000mm scope and you are photographing the core and nothing else — no dust lanes at the edges, no companion galaxies, no shape. It is the single most common reason a first Andromeda attempt looks disappointing.

What works: 200mm to 500mm of focal length. A 60mm to 80mm apo, or a fast camera lens on a tracker. At 400mm you get M31, M32 and M110 in one frame with room to spare, and the dust lanes read properly.

If your only scope is long, shoot the core deliberately and crop for it, or shoot something small tonight instead. Do not fight the focal length.

Sunset 7:27 PM.

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670 Hardwick Road Unit 5
Caledon, ON
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