Starflyer

I have everything mounted on a perspex board with screw holes located so I can move it between my newt and frac as needed.

I have one USB and one power cable going through the mount, excuse the messy cabling but I was traveling

Take a look here, it's a great thread about the QHY268M generally and worth a read.

On 18/03/2024 at 21:41, Flame Nebula said:

Did you ever image with the VX10? 

Only deep sky or the odd bit of lunar

57 minutes ago, Flame Nebula said:

A bolt loose in the tube. The stuff of nightmares. These sort of stories make me think twice. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

There's a good strip down, tune and rebuild guide here for the Skywatcher EQ6, which is identical apart from the colour AFAIK.

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.

On 17/01/2024 at 08:31, tomato said:

Oh, and it looks like last night I managed to fry my Rising Cam IMX571 camera, I was a bit shaky plugging the power lead in at it looks like I somehow momentarily put a reverse polarity 12v into the camera!😱An odour of burning and a whiff of smoke followed,  and it won’t connect anymore. Lesson learned, plug in then switch on.

At this rate I’ll have to dig out my G2-8300.😊

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?

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.

I'm on the old driver firmware too btw.

1 hour ago, Stuart1971 said:

Another question, my QHY268 no longer cools to zero degrees on connection and power on like it used to, but I have never updated the firmware or the driver in nearly 2 years, I still use an all in one driver from 2022, and USB and firmware from 2021, as shown below, so how has this change happened…? As I see it was changed in newer 2023 driver versions…🤔🤔

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.

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.

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.

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.

On 17/11/2023 at 07:50, JamesGlasgow said:

Thanks for all the help. Looks like panic is over.  That’s the problem being new to all this and watching YouTube, when something doesn’t look the same, panic sets in. Then I didn’t want to touch anything in case I made it worse. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?