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Very nice! I caught it looking similar to your 20.40 sketch.

I used to take moon shots on my driven equatorial mount but last night I used a manual alt-az mount. I took 10 batches of 15 exposures at one second intervals. This took about 8 minutes in total as I had to manually realign the telescope between batches. I tried to process all 150 images in Pipp and Autostakkert but the field rotation gave me a rather odd result with duplicated craters. See top and bottom of lower, second image. So I processed just 20 consecutive images and stacked the best 10. I tweaked the result in Affinity Photo to give me the upper image which I am pretty happy with. But, is there a way of using all 150 images with some sort of "derotation" process? Thanks, Jim

Someone being daft near Yeovil, not far from me. Reiterates that care is needed when using these devices anywhere with planes nearby though this person was obviously particularly stupid/malicious. Somerset man jailed after shining laser at passenger plane https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-somerset-68838349

Snatched a few through the gloom ...

Thanks Steve!

Put simply it does not control motors but provides a connection to planetarium apps (including Rowan's) for manual mounts. DSC = digital setting cirles, enabling use of encoders without 3rd party hardware.

It's a WiFi-ready combination of 6200MC with ASIAir Plus v2 inside. 😁

I found my 585 produced sharper images if I had an IR filter in the optical train. taken with an ED72. 180 x 30 second exps

Or wifi VR goggles 😁

Perhaps the question should be the other way around ?

+1 for the 585. I'm using the uncooled camera with my Askar 120-APO. Waiting to see if a mono version is in the pipeline... M51 is a great target for the 585 plus lots of other galaxy's and smaller neb's.

Hi all. I just wanted to tell any folk who don't know, if you want stress free easy and incredibly accurate Polar Alignment, then I cannot recommend highly enough the IOptron IPolar. I tried it for first time last night and I was amazed at how silly easy it was to use and the results were literally perfect! The software you download to Laptop to use the IPolar is silly simple to understand, it's everything you need, and literally nothing else, no frills, no fancy super complicated settings etc etc. My tracking has never been as good, not even close! Plus I didn't have to be on my knees breaking my neck looking through my mounts polar scope, struggling to get it as perfect as possible! SERIOUSEY worth the money! ( Remember to check compatibility with your mount/gear. Also, It requires a Laptop or other computer device to run it's software )

Put me down as an opposit - photographer - visual is out for me. Tried it, got the tee shirt (didn't fit!)

I recently got a ZWO 585MC cooled camera, to pair mainly with my Tak TSA 102 f/8 refractor. This gives a better field of view, smaller pixels, and higher quantum efficiency compared to my other camera (a ZWO 071MC Pro). One benefit of the smaller sensor is that I don't need to use a flattener. I managed around two and a half hours last night on M51 and got the result below (from stacking 149 60 second images in DSS and then some further processing using GraXpert, Affinity etc.). An IR/UV filter was used. Although the moon was up, the end result was fairly reasonable, to me. Autoguiding, autofocussing etc. was all managed by an ASIAIR Pro and I used my RST-135 mount.

Looks like a WiFi camera

Me too, but I made an exception 😅.

NINA help needed please Learned people, The night before last I was acquiring images with NINA,OK . My screen layout is to have a narrow camera panel on the left, an image panel in the middle and a narrow sequencer panel on the right. Whist an exposure was in progress I clicked the OPTIONS tab in the left pane. My screen became entirely green with no sub panels. I could not get rid of this screen, but the image capture was unaffected. Last night I started up NINA with the target focused and centred, again the sequence was successfully captured captured despite the green screen.. This afternoon I started up to try again and no green screen and the three panels I wanted were available. The image panel top was low on the screen and the drag up action would only raise t a small way. What do I need to do? Chris

I decided to have a go at the Iris Nebula when the stars appeared briefly last night. I only managed to get 20 minutes of total integration of 10 second subs. It was over the northern part of my garden which is heavily light polluted due to street lamps and Heathrow in the distance so I have previously avoided it. There were also many intermittent cloud bands. I tried several apps for stacking and stretching but the best one for bringing out the blue nebulosity turned out to be Astro Pixel Processor, unfortunately there is no structural detail visible which doesn't really surprise me! I realise this is precisely why I have the Seestar, the forecasts last night showed continual cloud cover, I wouldn't have contemplated setting up my astrophotography kit. If I had set up my longest scope the iris nebula would still have been a tiny blob. Setting up the Seestar took just over 5 minutes.

Hi Chris, Yes this was using the Starfield. Its a great scope. We should probably meet up sometime as we are in the same part of the world! Vaughan

@Giles_B My goodness you've been spoiled my friend! I've only had 3 nights this year! lol I was actually imaging M101 last night with the Moon roughly 40 degrees apart from my target. I have looked at my data yet, although the subs coming through looked sorta ok. I'll have to wait n see later! ( I know, it's probably silly shooting so relatively near to the Moon but I'm hopeful! )

I have everything mounted on a perspex board with screw holes located so I can move it between my newt and frac as needed. I have one USB and one power cable going through the mount, excuse the messy cabling but I was traveling

Oh dear! That was what i already feared ( I was about 90% sure! ) it was! It's junk like that which puts potential long term passionate astro-nuts off the hobby for the rest of their lives...really not good!

This just popped in my FB feed, it is not 1st of April so, it might be legit 😏 A new ASIAIR or something?

Thansk for the suggestions. Michael suggested similar thing, but without the tube I do not see any tracking either, unless the nut is undone more than i thought so it is completely slipping. I will definitely look into getting a a new power supply.

Mission Accomplished. As they say, pictures speak louder than words. This is M3 with a more or less OK alignment. I don't have a proper DSO camera so this was with my cellphone through a 15mm eyepiece on my 8" DOB .. 80x magnification. the Aluminum segments that you find in most plans are definitely not needed. Wood is a lot easier to deal with and lined with a bit of door tightening rubber it runs extremely smooth.. no jerky motions of the objects whatsoever even at 800x. There is some drift at this power, but it is smooth and mostly to not exact alignment/speed setting. I captured all of this on video of the Moon and will be compiling it into a nice 10-15 minute video of how I made the platform from start to finish with the key lessons learned. The price tag is really small for this one, given the performance I am getting. Next time I am doing it with Plywood. When you break it down , there are just few parts: Plywood - about 30$ EQ 2 Motor - 37$ from Aliexpress with shipping Wheels and pre-cut iron rod 0.8mm - 10cm long - about 10-15$ Some spherically curved bolts - 2$ Regular wood screws - 1-2$ optional: Li-Ion rechargeable 9V batteries - about 8$ (which I bought) A hand-held controller for the speed of the motor - they go for about 2$. I will make one as it was very frustrating having the fine tune the speed by going back and forth from the eyepiece to the motor. All in all , a nice price tag of around 80$. A new one (albeit prettier) sells for about 500$ here with the same motor and same performance.. I may make a couple of these for a 12" DOB and sell them for 250$ each. Already two people expressed interest. It is far below my hourly wage when I count the time I need but it is fun and always nice helping out an astro buddy :). The biggest advantage of building one your own is you get to simply make it fit your telescope exactly and you understand how it works. Also you can cut the segments exactly for your needs. By the looks of it, this one should be OK for the 12" as well , which I already have on the way. It provides tracking for about 90 minutes, which is great and so comfortable that I found myself forgetting to reset the telescope after an hour of observation.