AmritNZ

for clarity sake, have you officially reported the usb hub issue to RisingCam and tried to get it serviced under warranty? did they deny return/replacement, or are there assumptions about? i'm only asking this as there was someone else on another forum that assumed because it is off Aliexpress that it had no support. they do come with a 1 year warranty and the team are fairly responsive albeit it goes back to China rather than a local service centre (which I believe ZWO will have in USA/UK) - here in NZ everything goes away overseas so doesn't bother me whether it's to China or to USA but it might be a con for those in other countries, as one way would be faster than the other. gain management - correct, high gain mode has a slider for Risingcam. in reality, it's mostly pointless using either camera on any inbetween settings, with this sensor you just trigger HCG, find your respective offset (around 300 is good with the risingcam) and leave it at that. in practice, no one really switches between the modes, you just change your exposure time instead. after about a year of ownership, this was the pros/cons i had put into another thread. pros great price great service results are competitive and exactly as expected/advertised cooler works well. quickly and quietly drivers work well and natively in many suites, including modern ones like nina. has usb hub for convenience unlike some other brands, the cooler doesn't spin up soon as you power it on. only after you connect it via your imaging suite. so you can pre-connect it eg. before going out for dinner or something and then set up via your automation to have that cooler start only at the necessary time. cons you lose some backfocus compared with zwo and qhy model, important for those using OAG in particular some vignette due to additional space between filter wheel and sensor, extra 5mm compared with ZWO / qhy system which can bolt on. the vignette is manageable with flats cannot easily mount camera lenses on to it with a mono setup unless you get expensive custom made adaptors. lots easier with qhy/zwo (eg. the samyang 135mm f2.0 is a common combo with filter wheel etc) dew heater doesn't cover the window, so in humid climates, dews up. easy fix but worth noting to order the zwo dew heater strip usb hub isn't well shielded but good enough for filter wheel / guide camera which covers most peoples use case. for 5v focuser i would prefer to connect that to a powered usb hub to avoid unwanted noise issues with the camera.

not to worry, this is a property of the lens more than the camera. assuming you have the samyang 135mm f2, i have tried it at f2 and also get some pretty strong vignettes even when cropping my full frame camera to apsc size. it gets a lot better at around f4, not so much worried about the vignette but moreso the quality of the corner stars.

sorry to bump an old thread but just wanted to say, thanks so much for uploading this. i have spent a significant chunk of time downloading every single qhy5 driver around, tried various combinations of everything and alas nothing was working. had me pulling my hair out. then finally i arrived at your post, downloaded the drivers and it just worked straightaway! hopefully these files will stay up well in to the future for anyone else who is struggling with the qhy5

beautiful full disc, love the filaproms. the Orion ST80 is quite a poor performer optically so that should be a good test once I receive it about how much that side of things matters with a quark. looking forward to testing it and hope it does work out as i've just sold my lunt 35

Had another weekend of some clear skies. Just a brief moment 30mins with not great seeing but got surprisingly decent details in. It is just my 3rd session out with the quark so still working on fine tuning things, but having an amazing time with solar. attempted a mosaic too but only got to 17 panels before clouds rolled in hence it's looking quite in complete. Bresser 127L/1200 doublet, Quark Chromosphere, Astronomik UV/IR L-3 (as ERF), PlayerOne Apollo-M Max, Skywatcher EQ6. Each shot stacked 10% best of 1500 frames. Captured Sat 4th June 2022 11.30am NZT

really don't think you need ED for solar.. if it's a multi purpose scope also for night then by all means go for it though. my main scope is a cheap nasty doublet with no ED glass or flattener and does just fine with solar hence was querying the theory and whether anyone has matched the bad experience in theory to real experience in practice with solar in Ha. this is with cheap nasty doublet 127L/1200 (F9.45). I will test out the orion st80 and post up some results / review in a month or two with practical experience.

ah i was wondering about this, as i've seen the Orion ST80 as a cheap option for full disc but not seen any examples of people using it for imaging. currently to get my full disc fix after going quark, i've been putting the quark in to the Lunt35 without the rear blocking filter, so its 400mm f/11.45. i then put a 1.25" 0.5x reducer on the camera. was thinking to replace this setup with an Orion ST80, which is also 400mm but if I stop it down to 35mm I could get the same focal ratio, it would allow me to sell the solar scope to someone else who would love to get in to the hobby (they're very hard to come by in New Zealand). i don't understand the optics side of it enough to know what impact spherical abberation would have to me, would it be an issue to worry bout when stopped down and using a fairly small sized sensor camera as we generally use in solar?

makes sense. effectively you're increasing the focal ratio and quarks do tend to perform better at those longer ratios. very similar in performance to the atleast in my example. this lunt 35tha is 35mm aperture, 400mm focal length, f/11.45. i put the quark in there and fairly surprised with performance for a cheap small aperture. ofcourse the bigger aperture 127 f9.45 beats it, but i've also compared against 50mm and 80mm f/5 scopes and they don't come close, they need masking down aperture for quark to perform its best on band.

very timely to find this challenge, got to have my second outing with the quark this weekend and boy was it fun! still slowly picking up the processing skills and the seeing wasn't great, but solar imaging is just awesome. really handy as our nights are almost always clouded but days can often have moments of clear sky Bresser 127L/1200 doublet, Quark Chromosphere, Astronomik UV/IR L-3 (as ERF), PlayerOne Apollo-M Max, Skywatcher EQ6. Each shot stacked 10% best of 1500 frames. Captured Sat 27th May 2022 10am-12pm NZT Workflow: AS3->IMPPG-> PixInsight ->Photoshop used earth for scale in one of them, credit to nasa for earth photo. these are all inverted. the highly vignetted one is when i used 0.5x reducer, too much vignetting but did have a nice improved FOV, so decided to share anyway.

thanks for the explanation, makes sense in that regard. do let us know your thoughts if you end up talking about any problems to Eddie/RisingCam. Touch wood nothing bad happens but would be keen to hear how do they handle issues under the stated 1 year warranty. A lot of people that I know have been asking me about it and i've had nothing but positives to say so far along with my recommendations but mindful that everything is good until something goes wrong, and the biggest unknown is what happens with support side if the unfortunate does occur.

yikes thats scary. glad it hasn't come back but sometimes those are more annoying because worried it'll come back randomly at a bad time.wonder if there is some buffer issue with shorter exposures that resolved after reboot. didnt realise the recommendation is less than 80% humidity? living in Auckland (NZ), that is simply not going to happen ever lol our average annualy is closer to 90% and some nights 100%

Managed to grab more data on orion before the season is up. This is an HaRGB image from my B5 backyard. Surprisingly decent amount of detail given the short RGB integration time. 1hr10mins in each colour channel, 6hrs 18mins Ha, 1hr Sii and 1Hr Oiii. reds boosted by Ha and slightly by Sii, Blues boosted by Oiii and synthetic luminance was created from RGB.

they do the paperwork fine, so it gets through well in customs. ZWO do the same for anyone wondering, at least to certain regions that i know of from direct orders and via friends. they declare a price below tax threshold and their included paperwork matches so it flies through. but will not say more as dont really want to discuss illegal stuff on this forum or encourage it,it is at everyones personal risk. there are penalties for purposely trying to evade tax. one point to note about ordering filters via aliexpress. do it and haggle too (i did), but also message the official vendor to confirm that this is a legit reseller. i got my antlias off aliexpress and i spoke with the sales team at antlia to verify before ordering, especially for me there is no local reseller in new zealand so they were very happy to help. there really are a lot of fakes there so you dont want to get caught out, worth sending a message to optolong/antlia and wait a couple of days. it worked out a lot cheaper but would have been devastating if i got a fake, bad filters can really spoil your images and its the last thing you need after spending so much on a nice camera.

thats the same one i used and was recommended right off the bat by Eddie so seems for sure its a known thing. i would say go for it as it is a good preventative measure and doesn't cost a great deal. you will see the dew forming by means of a circle growing in size in your subs from the centre of the image. as i blinked through my frames i saw that and thats how i knew during troubleshooting. also the stars will look horrible as the dew gets worse, to the point where even on a nice Ha filter for example you'll get halos.

ah so it seems we can confirm it is a inefficient built in dew heater. was wondering if its my zwo heater strap thats been helping me or if i was previously cooling it down too quickly. not the most difficult fault in the world to work around, but an issue none the less