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Starflyer

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Everything posted by Starflyer

  1. They collected it and replaced it quickly, my point is that it's sloppy and should never have happened. I love mine and wouldn't hesitate to recommend them, the optics are superb.
  2. I've owned four OO scopes over the years, an SX10, 2x VX10s and currently a CT10, all with 1/10 wave optics, and I've loved them all. I've read the horror stories and personally know someone who bought a VX10 that had a bolt loose in the tube on delivery that had badly marked the primary. Their engineering manufacturing can be sloppy, their optics are hard to beat.
  3. If an SCT is miles out of collimation take it off the mount, balance it securely on a table and look into the front of it from about 5 - 10m away. Get an assistant to tweak the collimation until everything is showing as concentric circles. In my limited experience with SCTs this is the easiest way to get them close, it'll still need careful collimation on a star though.
  4. I'm not near my PC with N.I.N.A on it, but I wouldn't use the beta version, the stable version has everything apart from cutting edge changes. ASTAP, is far faster and more reliable at solving for me than PS2 or PS3 ever were. It has to be a setting that's wrong somewhere. The screenshot you show is the Framing Wizard, this doesn't show the options that you have set for platesolving, but I can't recall where it's setup without looking on my PC.
  5. Thanks for sharing this here Leo. Quick questions; if I use the Guiding Assistant to improve PA do I need to recalibrate after each tweak to the Alt / Az position? Is it possible to use PHD2's drift alignment feature to help tweak the PA? Cheers Ian
  6. I've been following this too and intend to try it when the sun gets higher and clears the house. I tried a few time lapse captures last summer and despite having decent PA (fixed pier) I was getting some drift over a couple of hours. I tried Sharpcap's solar guiding several times and gave up, I couldn't even get a consistent calibration. I considered a dedicated solar guider but they cost a ridiculous amount of money for what they are. I'm excited to see the results people are getting with this and I'm looking forward to getting some multi-hour captures with no drift.
  7. There's a good strip down, tune and rebuild guide here for the Skywatcher EQ6, which is identical apart from the colour AFAIK.
  8. I think the only way you can rule out the asiair as being at fault is to try it on a laptop. It'd be a shame to RMA it, be without it for a while, and then hear back that there's no fault found.
  9. This may be related to your other problems. I have heard of an HEQ5 mount being fried when the outside of a power plug momentarily touched a tripod leg. I don't know enough about this and perhaps someone with electronics expertise will be along to explain exactly what happens. Essentially, you'd expect them both at zero volts, the negative on the power plug and the tripod, or in your case the camera body. But in some circumstances you can get a voltage leak that results in a difference in potential between various parts of the system, maybe the powered usb hub makes it worse, I don't know. Who are the electronics gurus here?
  10. What desiccant are you guys using? If it's the originally supplied QHY stuff it may well be saturated already from sitting there for a year or two. This is what I'm using, 100g will last a lifetime, just store it in a small glass jar instead of the poly bag it arrives in.
  11. I may be wrong but I thought that if you power it up it cools to zero and then when you connect a driver it will idle. Try powering it on but not starting N.I.N.A, leave it for ten minutes and then connect N.I.N.A and quickly check the temperature then.
  12. The dessicant tube has been attached to my QHY 268M since new, around three years, I have the camera bolted to the filter wheel so that the dessicant tube is protected by the FW, I was worried about snagging it and snapping the tube off. I use a molecular sieve dessicant and change it twice a year. My RH is usually 40 - 45%, I measured it before the last change, at the start of the season, and it was 55% at ambient.
  13. Does the AM5 have the ability to search for and set its zero position remotely? Things can and do go wrong and you need the ability to be able to reset the system into a known state remotely. Remote hosting is something I'm thinking about too, I hadn't considered only transfering masters, I would expect to have everything uploaded somewhere for me at the end of a session. It's not like you'll be in a rush for the data, if it takes a few hours then so what, and I reuse my darks and bias for a year and quite often reuse flats for a month or two.
  14. I love my 460 EX (mono), it's a shame it doesn't get any use any more. I swapped to a QHY 268M for the larger sensor, that's the only thing that's better IMHO. The 460 EX is joy to image with, it's extremely sensitive and virtually noise free.
  15. Don't be tempted to overtighten the locking screws, you can distort the mirror cell and get odd star shapes. All they need is the lightest touch.
  16. I'd be looking at paying ~ 20% of new value, and bear in mind it'll be extremely difficult to sell if / when you want to upgrade.
  17. I see the same with my 178MM, flats sort it out pretty well. Read up on taking solar flats, I'm still working on my technique. @Ibbo! Has the same camera I believe and produces cracking images.
  18. I've used these three times, solid as a rock. https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/182235490751 I wouldn't risk splitting a block of concrete by using rawl bolts.
  19. I've owned, and used whilst traveling, the iOptron Tri Pier for a few years now. It's extremely solid and I can tell no difference between using it and my permanent pier at home. It happily carries my CEM60 EC and OO CT10. I just looked at the Altair offering and it looks very skinny compared to the iOptron one, maybe fine if weight is important for you, otherwise go for the most solid mount that funds allow for.
  20. Here's my journey building a dob mount a few years ago, it's still going strong but it's due a new coat of varnish.
  21. Great build, I enjoyed reading about your journey on your site. Do you find that the IR illumination from the webcams shows in your images, do you get any odd gradients?
  22. There's a very active community of AVX user's on Facebook, I'm sure I've seen this question, or similar, asked before; https://www.facebook.com/groups/1512968022196298/?ref=share
  23. I meant that just setting it at 55mm probably won't give you the best results. Be prepared to have to experiment and tweak the distance to get the CC / flattener to give you decent stars to the edge.
  24. I went from a 314EX to a 460EX to a QHY 268M (same sensor as the 2600mm) . The 268M is sensitive but, like all CMOS cameras, is finiky over calibration frames and my flats suffered from a bright central circle (most likely from reflections with my Baader filters), I couldn't solve this and ended up changing to Chroma filters. The 460EX was a joy to use, very low noise and IMHO as sensitive as the 268M, I still have it although it hasn't been used for a couple of years. I wanted a bigger sensor than the 460EX so the 268M was the logical way to go, apart from the added expense of the filters I'm happy with it. The bigger sensor is more far more demanding of your optics, any tilt will show up in the edges of the frame and you'll need to experiment with optimising backspacing for any coma corrector or flattener / reducer, or again the stars at the edges will suffer, the approximation of 55mm just doesn't cut it.
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