JamesF

Regarding the use of 2" diagonals and eyepieces, isn't the baffle tube the limiting factor with larger diameter field stops? I don't know as whilst I have a 2" SCT diagonal, I don't use it on my 127 Mak. I feel sure the baffle tube only is only about 30mm diameter though? James

Oh, certainly. But if, say, the Moon fills the field of view with a given eyepiece and you can only make out enough of M31 to fill, say, half that, then it gives you a clearer idea of what it is that you're seeing, or if you're trying to work your way from M31 to M32 (which is much further away than you think it would be when you can only see the core of M31 and you're still learning how things look). James

Absolutely this. The 127 Mak works very nicely for globs and the brighter planetary nebulae. It's also good if you make a filter from Baader solar film and use it to view the Sun in white light (but understand all the safety issues before you do this). James

To expand on this a little, M31 is about 3°x1° whereas the full Moon is about 0.5° in diameter, so if you think about how the Moon appears in any given eyepiece, that gives you some idea of how much of M31 you can see with the same eyepiece. James

Five or six frames per second is the best this camera can do at full frame size because of the limitations of the USB2 interface. It should achieve that though, and I'd have thought it would be sufficient for focusing. What exposure time are you setting in Sharpcap? Obviously anything more than 0.2s will mean you get even lower frame rates because the exposure time then becomes the limiting factor. Another thing to consider is what else you might have connected to the same USB bus as the camera. Bandwidth is shared on each USB bus, so anything else that is taking bandwidth can reduce that available to the camera. James

One other suggestion I've seen online is to unplug the camera, make sure any drivers for it are deleted (in device manager?) and then install the ASCOM driver before plugging the camera in again. James

I wonder if SharpCap can use the DirectShow driver? I think it might be able to. Could be worth trying to install that? James

Oooh, ooh! I could slap whoever did this, actually... Looking at the photos in the documentation, it looks like the CD is called "Meade SkyCapture". But SkyCapture is also the name of their own capture application and they may well not be the same thing. Can you try downloading the top link from this page ("SkyCapture Software Download"). It's possible that you might find the ASCOM drivers in that zip file. James

Ah, right. That's not helpful then James

Ah, perhaps I misunderstood from the excerpt of the documentation that was posted. I thought the CD contained both the ASCOM platform and the ASCOM drivers separately. My apologies. Their documentation does appear to be out of date, as the most recent version I can find, here, still seems to suggest that the ASCOM drivers are present, but that's talking about v6.1. James

No. I'd expect that each vendor will supply their own drivers for their cameras. I think you should try installing the 6.5 platform from the ASCOM site, then go back to the Meade CD, ignore the bit about installing their ASCOM platform and just try installing their ASCOM camera drivers. I'd hope that process would just find an ASCOM v6 installation on your PC and go ahead with installing their drivers. If it objects because the ASCOM platform version is not 6.3 that would be quite disappointing James

Does the driver refuse to install with the 6.5 platform you already have installed then? I'd kind of hope that all v6 platform releases would be backwards compatible for v6 drivers, but perhaps that's not the case. James

Similar situation with the Skywatcher 127 Mak (screw-on cell). I guess all of them are a very similar design. I agree that taking the corrector off shouldn't be a major deal if you need to and if you should need to collimate afterwards, whilst I'd say it's not as easy as for a newt, it's hardly a nightmare. Just takes a bit of patience. In fact it's just occurred to me that setting the OTA up horizontally on the mount with a camera on a stand a metre or so in front, feeding a view of the front of the OTA back to a screen where you can see it whilst twiddling the collimation screws might be quite helpful as a way of getting things pretty close. I'll have to try that next time. In my case however, it's usually the nut behind the OTA that causes most of the trouble. James

Oooh, what did you use? I went with stainless pan-head (of course) allen bolts and domed nuts when one of ours failed because the dishwasher ate the cheap and nasty "metal" the manufacturer used for rivets, but something lower-profile would have been preferable. James

I tried, honestly I did. But every time it appeared on the screen my brain just forced me to look at it. I don't know why. James

Thank you, Chris. Much appreciated James

Could someone take pity on a tired old pedant and remove the greengrocer's apostrophe from the topic title? It's probably just me, but they make my brain do horrible things James

Are you sure it's not really woven liquorice? James

Well that's that idea blown out of the water then Perhaps Sharpcap doesn't support the Toupcam cameras (I thought it did), or maybe it picks up the dll from somewhere else. James

Rebadged Many (most?) of Meade's cameras now appear to be made by Touptek, but are branded as Meade -- similar to Altair, Omegon, Risingcam, some of Orion's cameras and others. Touptek also produce the capture software which is also rebranded for each vendor. Touptek produce a driver/interface library for each of the vendors of rebadged cameras and SkyCapture probably uses that. Sharpcap probably could use it too, but I'd guess it doesn't right now, so would have to use Meade's ASCOM driver instead. I don't really do Windows I'm afraid, so I can't help with that bit. I've no idea if it would work and I'd actually be a little surprised if it did, but assuming you have no Touptek cameras the hacker in me would be slightly tempted to try finding the meadecam dll(s) included with Skycapture and copying them over the equivalent toupcam dll(s) in Sharpcap to see if it might recognise the camera that way. I'm fairly certain that approach wouldn't work on MacOS or Linux, but as I said, I don't do Windows: it might be a bit more relaxed about the library changing name. It might even completely break Sharpcap to the point of needing to reinstall it. James

SkyCapture will be using Touptek's own interface for the Meade cameras I would imagine. That seems to be the way it works for all of their other rebadged cameras. James

Agreed. A dark would make certain, but it's quite a distinctive pattern. I'm just not sure why the OP never noticed it with the other OTA. Longer subs now, perhaps? James

Light scatter from part of the optical train, possibly? An example image might help to determine the cause. James

I used smaller motors (NEMA14, I think) for my conversion and the leads were even shorter, so I got some 4P4C (commonly called RJ11, IIRC) connectors and fixed the sockets to the motor mounting brackets with the motor wires soldered to the pins. Then separate cables run from the control unit to these sockets. I have a nagging feeling that the cables might actually just be ST4 guide cables that I had lying about. I put some heatshrink over the four wires for each motor, too, just to keep them together. It's not pretty, but it does the job. James

I managed to avoid this with my EQ3-2 conversion (which is uses AstroEQ, but the motor side of things is pretty much the same, but the drive belt runs right on he inside edge of the pulley (slightly different from yours, in that it doesn't have the side plates -- I perhaps used a different type of belt/pulley). Then in the end I got nervous and 3d-printed a new lever with a thinned down top edge to ensure clearance James