All Activity

Lots of reviews online if you search, they are one of the major USA astro suppliers.

I think i got it all figured out. Since Moon orbit eccentricity is about 5% i think for the purpose of establishing a correlation only, i can approximate and say the angular speed is constant in which case i can use this figure and subsequent formula.

Welcome. Hope you have lots of fun. 🙂

Wow

It never occured for me to ask but does that AF lens have manual focus control when not connected to a camera body?

Well I failed with my idea of having two layers, one stretched by me as a guide layer but I'll try again later. I couldn't add two layers lol it kept replacing one. I think you're correct about the effect of cloning, I just wanted to try for myself and see. will update if I get it working in some way.

Can't be certain, but it might be from a Kson mount Electronic Telescope Manufacture 20 Years - Buy Electronic Telescope,Reflecting Telescope,Astronomical Telescope Product on Alibaba.com

Her English was very good. She could speak on any topic, even science stuff. Sometimes her pronunciation was way off. For a while I was trying to understand when she said someone was 'trying to devil up' - I figured it out, it was actually develop! Originally she was from a small village in Transylvania. I know it's shameful, but in ten years I never learned any Romanian

You may get away with it just about due to the relatively low image scale. Adam

This GoTo handset was in a box of bits that I bought. Does anyone know what mount it is used with please? The only connection is the USB plug on the end of the curly cable. There are no sockets on the handset, nor is there any text on the rear.

i have this scope @magnahrl and i really rate it. It has brought and does bring me a lot of pleasure. That said in your family of scopes i'm not sure it brings any new capability versus the 6" Mak, 8" SCT and 8" newt you have??? In my family of scopes i would swap you my CC8 for your 6" Intes 🙂 The CC8 is a bit undersized (using the flashlight test) at 185mm ish and that makes the secondary a bit chunky in percentage terms and also using the flashlight test the secondary is anyway a bit bigger than specified. Still, I really enjoy it's contrast and general capability (in a compact package) at medium magnifications on DSO (including planetary nebula) and collimation holds really well (i drive down a rough track to my viewing spot and it doesn't care). For planets the diffraction spikes are a big distraction (for me) and i think the quite thick secondary support (that makes collimation so robust) contribute to those spikes being fairly prominent on the brighter planets even while the details on the face of Jupiter in particular have at times been excellent.

Image looks great, just needs lots more total exposure time to reduce the noise. My experience using clone and heal tools is that it's best to do so after stretching your image. If you do it on linear data, initially it may look better but when you later stretch the image, the clone/heal "repairs" stand out like a sore thumb. I have not found a way to do a temporary screen stretch in GIMP to assist in working on linear data, and would also be interested in hearing of any way of doing the this.

Sorry, I don’t have access to a HEQ5 any more else I would have tried this combination out for you. What I would say is you would be imaging at 2.39” per pixel so you have some leeway to play with. The RASA8 and dew shield combination is a bit of a sail in windy conditions but I see you have a nice roll off roof observatory which would offer some protection. I can understand why you would like some first hand experience, it would be frustrating in the extreme to buy a RASA and then not be able to use it because the mount wasn’t up to it. It might be worth asking FLO if they could advise?

The software I use is Raspberry Pi specific: https://github.com/AllskyTeam/allsky It's quite comprehensive, very configurable - to the point of taking your life over! And does have a meteor detection module/plugin that's still experimental. I haven't used it. As you'll see from the full night timelapse below, the camera is sited under a busy flight path of Transatlantic and domestic flights. There are multiple satellite flares there too. So I suspect it might be hard work training software to pick out meteors from all the noise. I could be wrong The PoE is stable, but as noted above, getting the right gear is important. The current Pi 4 reports the odd "under volt" when it's busy, such as when it's crunching the images to make the timelapse. I've already upgraded the PoE switch that supplies the power and I'm going to replace the splitter for a higher rated one. I had some teething problems initially, long period connection drop-outs but not loss of power. It turned out that the Pi was connecting via WiFi, which is a bit flakey in that spot - outside an aluminium caravan! The Pi was set to prioritise WiFi over Ethernet. Now corrected that but still have the WiFi connected as back up. The Pi has crashed to unstable states a couple of times, VNC not connecting so unable to go in and fix it, but did have SSH. A bit complex really. I have a mini PC on site also. That lives inside. I can VNC into that then SSH to the Pi to reboot it. That's mostly just a hazard of remote computers, not particularly PoE, and it's rare. PoE has been better than I'd expected. It's not a very long run and only Cat5 cable, maybe 20mts. I do have all the bits to run power and ethernet separately or even just have the camera on its own via a long USB 3 cable. None of that was needed. Anyway, last night was very clear oop north. April 25-26.mp4

Version 3.0.1 is available... I'll test it later to see if the bug/incompatibility was fixed...

Hello and welcome.

Taken before the clouds took over

Dirk, you might try contacting the Webb Society. They had a couple of copies of volume 1 at the recent astronomy show on their sales table. They will post items too. At the same show I bought a copy of volume 4 (The Glories of the Milky Way).which is out of print but they had been sent an odd copy from the publishers. If this fails it might be worth putting a wanted ad in the classifieds.

Fascinating reading thank you. It's something I've thought about several times but not quite got round to ( the usual story 😁 ) A couple of questions if I may: 1. Do you use any software to detect meteor trails or do you have to manually look through every image? 2. How reliable is the POE at higher currents? Is it better than using say wi-fi and a small local power supply ( apologies if there are design decisions for this in earlier posts that I've missed )

Good service again. Added some books and another Oklop bag for my smaller APM LZOS refractors . Ordered late evening on Tuesday, dispatched, Wednesday and arrived Thursday. Incredibly well paid as well.

A warm welcome to SGL

Truth be told we call it "rândunică" but maaan , I really have no ideea how to explain "â" and "ă" sounds. So many english speakers use "rindunica" which is what also many children do . Still prety close to Latinm probably because those pesky Romans did ocupy a large part of Dacia and Latin was lingua franca long before the franks 😄 Simplest example : Latin - 'salutare' / Romanian - 'salut' / English - 'hello' ( or 'greetings' )

Adding a few more books to my library after the delivery last week. This haul courtesy of FLO. One issue is I do not own The Night Sky Guide Volume 1 and it it seems to be out of stock everywhere. The completion-ist part of my personality will scratch away at me if I cannot locate a copy. While I greatly admire those who make their own scopes, I lack those skills but I am curious to learn a bit more, hence two more of the books. Also bought another Oklop bag. This time for two smaller APM LZOS scopes. It’s my third one and I quite like them.

@almcl your findings and concerns are as mine. Judging from image 2, I would say that collimation is good, and the concentre/cheshire method of collimation may be just as accurate as tri-Bahtinov collimation. It has the added advantage (for the former) that it can be done at any time, so won't interfere with observing or imaging time. The advantage of the tri-Bahtinov is that it is easy to do with imaging gear in place. This makes it an easier method to check collimation during imaging or during a season. No need to remove the camera, so no need to retake flats.

That was Elementary school.