JamesF

Can't imagine I'll be seeing much.

Looking at the Met Office forecast for here, every single one-hour or three-hour window from now until the end of Friday is showing cloud :(

James

Finally screwed my courage to the sticking place and downloaded Big Sur (11.1) to install on my late 2013 13" MacBook Pro.  The 12GB download took around twelve hours and had to be restarted because it failed in the middle.  Fortunately it restarts from where it got to rather than the beginning.

The upgrade went smoothly and my machine is not bricked :)

Now I just need to download Xcode, which is another 11GB and more awkward to restart as far as I recall.  I thought it was bad enough that the previous version was 7.5GB :(

James

Here is fine if you wish.

James

1 minute ago, Mr Spock said:

Because part of the agreement was to have a soft border between NI and Eire, the movement of some goods from GB to NI now have to go through border controls just like an export.

I think the same now applies in Gibraltar too, though it may end up even more complicated because I think they're still going to have free movement between Gibraltar and Spain.

James

I think my biggest concern as a consumer regarding buying anything of significant value from the UK for delivery to the EU (or vice-versa) now would be the harrassment if I were unfortunate enough to need to return it.  Perhaps it will be simpler than I expect though.

James

20 minutes ago, laser_jock99 said:

In Warwickshire the night time crime went down 30-40% with the switch off......

That'll be all the astronomers getting out with their telescopes instead.  I hear they're a right dodgy bunch if they don't get their fix of clear sky.

James

First half of the year was pretty good for me.  I got a lot of time outside and quite a few clear nights.  Very much enjoyed it.

Since the summer however, it has been abysmal here.  Very few decently clear nights and many of those have been write-offs due to poor seeing.  It has been exceptionally cloudy and, over the last few months, extremely wet.

So here's hoping that as 2021 begins we're back to the clear nights again...

James

I have this vision now of a bamboo satellite :)

The plantations where they grow the first and second stages are going to be seriously impressive...

James

It looks to me as though in converting the image to FITS you have also changed it from greyscale to a depth of one bit per pixel (so each pixel is either white or black rather than a shade of grey) and inverted the result.  The various greys making up the galaxy are therefore now all black, hence what you're seeing where the galaxy should be.

James

Oh, it's almost certainly worth having a look at the AstroEQ project, for inspiration if nothing else (though you could probably borrow a great deal from it).  It uses an Arduino to create a generic mount drive system.  It doesn't get you a handset, but it does provide an EQMOD-compatible interface so it can be plugged into a PC and controlled from a planetarium application there.

James

Several sites I found state that the DEC and RA gears on the GP-DX have 144 teeth, so 144 rotations of the worm are required to rotate the axis by 360 degrees.  If the motor is driving the axis directly (or via a 1:1 gear ratio) and has an internal reduction of 1:120 then I guess that means the total gear ratio is 17280:1.  That gives a figure of approximately 4.986 seconds per revolution of the motor assuming I've done my maths correctly, which is pretty close to what you have calculated.

James

Or (more helpfully :) it's this: https://www.meade.com/coronado-personal-solar-telescope-pst.html

James

2 minutes ago, Neil H said:

Silly question time what is PST ??????

Pacific Standard Time :)  UTC-8, I believe.

James

It is, though I don't know if it's the package I build or if Radek built his own, so there may be differences.  One option may be to install my build over the top of the default Astroberry one (assuming mine does work as at the moment I can't recall which cameras I tested on the RPi other than the actual RPi cameras), but that's definitely getting towards a last resort.

Perhaps I should download a copy of Astroberry and give that a whirl as well.  That'll have to wait for another day though as 3.6GB will take hours to download and my wife has bagsed our bandwidth tonight for an Android update on her phone :(

Is the QHY5 the original model?  If so I'm surprised it doesn't see that as I wrote my own driver for that camera and assuming it has connected ok then there are no other library dependencies or anything like that.

James

Well, that's unexpected then...

I'll dig out some suitable cameras and give them a go myself.

James

Could you run it and see what version it claims to be?  I'm not sure what's actually in Astroberry.

James

Which version of oacapture are you using?

James

Or just post here if you wish and I will see what I can do to help.

James

A bit of guesswork as I've not looked at the software at all...

Based on the comments on the SaN page you link to, without modification it appears the code won't work with anything other than an IP camera.  I'd guess the software is fetching frames using HTTP and that the camera in question has a mini webserver built in to deliver them.  That does simplify things a fair bit, but would probably mean that a lot of changes are required to get a USB camera to work.  Some may be supported via the Linux V4L2 interface, but an awful lot aren't.  Your USB camera appears to be UVC-compliant, so V4L2 should support it.  However, you'd almost certainly still need additional code to handle controlling the camera and grabbing the frames.

James

4 minutes ago, Ouroboros said:

The Earth's Moving? 😲 Is it safe? 

As long as it isn't Vogons doing the packing.

James

I don't see that it should be a problem.  I imagine it would probably work even if it weren't properly centred, though some of the spikes may not be as clear.

James

If only the pair of them weren't also being occulted by large quantities of cloud :(

James

9 minutes ago, MylesGibson said:

They do have drivers available, but they only go up to Windows 7 on the site I found (link in the question)

My suspicion is that they may not be the manufacturers of the device, possibly just rebadging someone else's product.  Should that be the case then the actual manufacturer may have win10 drivers available even if they don't.

James

8 minutes ago, Eddie Jones said:

Update

Think I've found it!   

Some kind of fibre on the nearest baffle to the focuser (had to take off the focuser to get to it)

I've had something similar to that before, with a small piece of fibre or swarf close to the edge of the objective on my ED80.  It resulted in diffraction spikes similar to yours, but only in one part of the frame.  Took me some time to find it :)

James

2 minutes ago, MylesGibson said:

I'll have a look tomorrow. got annoyed and packed it away for the evening!

Often a wise move :)

Given those bits of information it may be possible to work out who the original manufacturer is and see if they have device drivers available.  An even longer shot is to download a Linux install DVD and boot it into "try out" mode.  It's possible that Linux might recognise the device sufficiently to give some clues as to where to get device drivers for Windows.  That's probably getting towards a "last resort" option though.

James