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  2. Lovely report of your visit. This demonstrates their dedication to their products, and reinforces that Televue products are for life. Good enough reasons to buy from them. 🙂
  3. A bit like Nessie, fuel to keep the conspiritulists going for years.
  4. I had a bit of clear sky and tried out the mount with its updated handset. No difference in goto accuracy unfortunately. Added 30 minutes to M51 but then the clouds came back!
  5. Thank you, @michael8554, you inspired me to a more intense analysis. I realised that I used filters from the beginning which falsified the flange distance by mentioned 1/3 of their thickness (L-Pro Canon FF, 2" IDAS LPS-Pd and 2" L-eXtreme). I couldn't sleep well, so decided to remove the filters and any spacers and make another comparison with the picture from the CN thread (Canon 6D, F/1.4). The results are as follows. A starfield from the CN thread: My own Canon 6D at F/1.4 - that means it's the same setup: ASI 2600MC Pro with ZWO Canon EF/M42 filter drawer, exactly 26.5mm of an optical path + 17.5mm of the APS-C camera back focus = 44mm of the flange distance: I couldn't capture so many stars, but I would risk and say that my copy of the Sigma 40mm F/1.4 Art looks slightly better than the CN user's one. It's also possible that the difference is caused by an astro-modiffication performed on my Canon 6D. The question remains why the stars captured by APS-C are so distorted, although they should look better than with the full frame sensor. The goal is to use the ASI2600MC Pro camera with filters: IDAS LPS-P2 and Optolon L-eXtreme which make the distortion bigger. Enlarging the flange distance with spacers caused the coma to turn into radial elongation in some corners which seems to be a compromise. Is the ZWO EF/M42 filter drawer designed wrong? Or the camera back focus isn't equal to 17.5mm? I would appreciate any constructive conclusion.
  6. I've had the pleasure of meeting both Al and David Nagler at the various Astrofest trade shows i've attended. We are very lucky to have Televue in this hobby.
  7. When I just zoomed in on it I was surprised at how much it does look like a UFO with some sort of glowing propulsion system.
  8. Could be an interesting talking point esp as an April 1st story.
  9. Lol, I was waiting for someone to mention that, that pesky lens flare always shows up when pointing at a bright object.
  10. Thanks. Agreed, the WO does look the business. There was one on Astro Buy/sell for £120 but sold already. That’s about as much as I want to spend in all honesty. I did see the Bresser star tracker wedge but can’t find much by way of reviews other than Amazon. Will have a look at the IOptron. Can only be better than the SW offering. 😂
  11. Awesome report. Would love to take a tour like that. My proudest moment of reviewing scopes and other Astro equipment over the last 10+ years was receiving an email from Al Nagler asking if he could cite several passages from the review of the 21mm Ethos and the Delos eyepiece reviews on my site and include a link to the full review. I had a astro club meeting that evening and I couldn't stop smiling the whole meeting. Which was noticed more than once.
  12. Just managed to observe M3 with my heritage 130p. Very faint I may add but definitely M3. Found with 32mm then 25mm but couldn't quite get it with 10mm. Still ticked off though 👌
  13. Today
  14. Start reading here https://theskysearchers.com/viewtopic.php?t=13708
  15. Please can anyone recommend for me YouTube videos for myself an absolute beginner wanting to learn Astro photography. I late 60’s of age and understand absolutely nothing about imaging so I need to firstly learn the terms & phrases as I don’t even understand them. then the easiest beginners Software. i need to learn from ‘ground zero’ Up! I have purchased from FLO a Celestron C8N AVX 8” Newtonian reflector package, but I have a skywatcher 100ED DS Pro refractor with 0.85 reducer. I also bought from FLO a ZWO ASI 585MC camera, but still in its box unused until I can understand how to Start I intend buying from FLO the New Celestron Starsence Autogiider for guiding because it looks the Simplest guiding for a Learner The one thing I have being recently retired is Lots of Time on my Hands to learn so would like help with recommendation for the most Beginner Friendly software and YouTube videos to learn with. thank you very much, Gary (from York, England)
  16. this may be a hint as to what graxpert is doing in the background here
  17. I"m not sure what has happened with 3.0, it takes over 2 minutes to open, loads a file, then when denoising or background immediately hangs or throws the above error. the log only has the date and no further info. v2.2 worked flawlessly. Win11 23H2 64bg ram, 1.6tb free space. I tried it on an older win11 ver22h2, and it does the same. reinstalled v2.2 and that works as expected. any ideas? thanks
  18. I have the Morpheus 14mn rather than the 12.5mm. I haven't done that much head to head competition between them. They have very different distortion characteristics, so are a bit hard to compare. The Morpheus stretches objects close to the edge like 98% of well corrected astro eyepieces while the APM squashes them. As a result, the APM actually has the wider true field of view of the two. It's even a little wider than my ES-92 12mm due to it also stretching objects.
  19. OK, CO is saying 100% cloud. I'm looking out of the window and seeing 0% cloud... If it holds I'll get some doubles in. Sat shows a band of cloud coming across but nothing the other side of it.
  20. Let's not forget that RGB or OSC does have Ha signal but it only has it in a proportion which is about the same as seen by our eyes. For me, galaxy Ha is not compulsory. Olly
  21. I also fit a washer and Bob's Knobs to every Newtonian I've owned. I also spray the washer matt black to prevent any possible reflections.
  22. I believe it's best to think through what it is that your calibration frames actually do. Darks record camera noise and no light reaches the chip so you can do them in any situation in which no light reaches the camera. Flats record the illumination arriving at the chip, which should be perfectly even but won't be. Why won't it be? Mostly because of vignetting, which is not affected by which filter you use. Also by dust somewhere in the light path. The closer to the chip the dust is, the worse the 'dust bunny' it will create. This dust might be on a particular filter but is more likely to be closer to the chip, perhaps on the chip window. This means that you might need flats per filter but might not. With observatory based rigs I used luminance flats for all filters and had hardly any problems with this. If I did - once every few years - I'd shoot a filter flat or clean the rig. If using an uncooled camera you will probably do best without darks entirely and with a large dither between subs. With a CCD camera the only dark-for-flat you need is a master bias. With a CMOS camera you need a matching dark-for-flat. My real point is that there is no need to make a mystery of calibration files, nor is there any need to treat them as a religious ritual to be followed to the letter every time. If you think them through and look at how they work for you, you'll be fine. With my CCD rigs, flats per filter would have been a total waste of time and luminance flats lasted 6 months to a year. Olly
  23. Used it today on windows 11, everything worked fine standalone.
  24. The link above sh0uld work lee
  25. Done it a couple of times already but I will try again.
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