Starflyer

Theoretically not. I image at 0.79"/px most of the time. I know my RA guiding is not as tight as my DEC guiding and because of this I get noticeable, (to me anyway) oval stars with a guide RMS of 0.4 or more.

I really like my AZ EQ6, it does reasonably well at 1200mm FL, but I want more and I'm one of the people contemplating a CEM60 as a replacement. This is about the best it does, at lower altitudes it's up at 0.7" ish. This is with it pier mounted and I'm pretty certain the CEM60 would take that to 0.4" or better at lower altitudes.

This is now completed, thank you John, it was a pleasure to meet you.

Are you using the fan on the primary cell? I find star shapes are pretty awful without running the fan for a few minutes, even when the scope's been cooling for a good while. I plug the fan in and the stars change from horrible blotches to nice round stars within minutes.

And replied, unfortunately I'm away on holiday for a couple of weeks now.

Open to offers ?

Much as I love SGP and wouldn't hesitate to recommend it, this sounds like a USB cable / hub problem, as mentioned many times above. I went through disconnect / hangup hell with SGP and it was USB related.

This is an incredible imaging and visual telescope, an upgrade forces a very reluctant sale. Featuring the highest Ultra grade mirror by Orion Optics UK (1/10PV), 250mm diameter, f/4.8, 1200mm FL, supplied with a Zygo report. The scope is fitted with an oversize secondary (75mm vs the standard 63mm), for minimal vignetting with APS-C sized sensors. The nine point primary mirror cell is fitted with a cooling fan as standard and Bob's knobs are fitted to both the primary and secondary mirror holders for easy collimation tweaks when needed. I know I'm going to regret selling this, they very rarely come up on the second-hand market and I thought it'd be a scope for life. To date I've had five images published in Sky at Night / Astronomy now taken through this instrument. You can find some higher resolution images taken through this scope on my Flickr page; www.flickr.com/photos/57929372@N06/ I don't have the original packaging and wouldn't feel comfortable shipping by courier given their general reluctance to insure parcels containing glass. Collection only from the Walsall / Cannock area of the West Midlands. At a retail price over £1000 this is priced to sell quickly and offered for £500. Any questions please feel free to ask. Ian Recent master flat taken with a Canon 1000D

Freezing dead drives has worked for me in the past too, worth a try.

From experience the CLS filters give quite a bad colour cast, with stars appearing cyan / green. People obviously cope with this and can correct the colour cast, but I want able to and gave up on it. I've used a couple of IDAS LP filters in the past, I can't remember the designations but it was around 5 to 7 years ago. I loved them, very good at blocking yellow sodium LP and no noticable colour cast.

Looking good, but still noisy. You can always drizzle stack my bin x2 data Gav. Not sure how much you'll gain though as the pixel scale is a decent 1.58 arcsec /px anyway at bin x2. Cheers Ian

This is my recent build, iirc it's an 8GB swap disk, 12 folders, in ram with no physical swap drive. If you go to the the PI benchmark site you should be able to find the details of my build.

ST4 can be flakey, it could have just been that the ST4 connections were playing up in Dec, or it could have been that your PA wasn't good. Either way, as you're using Eqmod / Ascom you should switch to pulse guiding sooner rather than later. Maybe you had Dec guiding set to North or South rather than Auto. This is fine as long as its set to the correct direction, but choose the wrong direction and it can lead to the problem you saw. The guide log and Debug log will help others troubleshoot this for you. Deciphering the log file is beyond me though. Hope you get it sorted soon. Ian

I manually rotate, I don't think I have room in the imaging train for a motorised rotator anyway. Its not a big problem and I rarely need to rotate manually to fit a target in.

I haven't owned a Feathertouch, but I have owned a couple of Moonlites a Baader Steeltrack, and a few other 'premium' focusers. For me it's Baader all the way, the Moonlites just didn't cut it, poor repeatability poor lifting capacity and if you adjust them to lift a camera, FW, OAG etc then the coating on the drawtube wears very quickly resulting in a very rough drawtube. This is with autofocus btw, I only have experience of Lakeside and I love my two, but I'm hearing great things about the Pegasus Focuscube. Cheers, Ian