Starflyer

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?

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

1 hour ago, iwols said:

Thanks So the 55mm back focus isn't a problem if you only have the filter wheel in your chain

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.

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.

36 minutes ago, bottletopburly said:

@Budgie1  @windjammer  would I be correct in thinking the Adu value for the 490ex would be approximately 8000 Adu  for taking flats ?

 

Dave 

With my 460EX I used to aim for 1/3 to 1/2 way along the histogram, 22000 to 30000.

Here you go, it's covered here;

https://www.cloudynights.com/topic/708336-nina-eq-mod-question/

1 hour ago, Astroblagger said:

Thanks you all for your help mount connected now. Turns out it's a FTDI cable updated drivers for the cable and set  correct com.port. iv updated the lat long in eq mod. Can live with it does this alarm come up every time you connect the mount it's no bigi I suppose. 

In EQMOD you can set the epoque to J2000 or JNow, it sounds like it's set to JNow, you should be able to change it to J2000 

Are you aware of the AVX Facebook group? There's a lot of very knowledgeable AVX owners there.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/1512968022196298/?ref=share

Any luck @AMcD?

It's been a long time since I've done a mosaic so correct me if I'm wrong.  I seem to remember that if you don't have the sensor aligned with RA & DEC and do a meridian flip then the angles are really screwed up.

I may be misremembering this, as I say, it's been many years.  It's easy to test before you go away, take an image close to the meridian, do a flip, take another and look at the angles.

It's this a new scope or old?  I ask because my Coronado SM II 60 showed a similar image when the ITF filter was failing.

16 hours ago, Astrobug said:

Getting back on this old post, is there anything usefull with the new version 4.2+?

NINA has everything and much more than SGP, the development is fast paced, the community is super fast to respond to queries on Discord and it's free.  I was a long time user of SGP until last year, the lack of or very slow development and poor stability made me try NINA and it's changed my imaging.

I have the same setup and experienced this issue at one time.  I don't recall the exact steps but hopefully I can put you on the right track to sort it out.

I had a dig around in the ASCOM Profile Explorer, it was showing 5 slots, and I either manually changed the FW entry to 7 slots or deleted it and let the driver recreate it on reinstall.  I remember going round in circles for a while, but the answer is to be found in Profile Explorer.

2 hours ago, Adam J said:

I have a 15volt power supply, measured it before using it and it came out at 16.2volts. I would leave a margin for error....

Adam

I was just about to say, it's probably 15v nominal, may be a fair bit higher.

Just my thoughts; get the right tool for the job or risk an expensive mistake.

CF is more thermally stable than aluminium or steel but it still contracts to some degree with temperature drop.

I don't own a CF frac but I have a 10" CF newt and I've owned the aluminium tubed equivalent.  With the VX10 I had to refocus every 1°C temp change, with the CF10 it's every 4 or 5°C. 

The people saying it's not a problem, we have the tools to trigger the sat trails aren't in possession of the full facts or have a very short sighted view IMO.

It's getting to a point where the professionals could miss a dangerous asteroid or comet that's inbound.

And, at some point we'll need to get off this rock; population, resources etc, and if there's a collision of these satellites that causes a chain reaction we'll be stuck down here.

I use a 174 with an OAG at 1200fl and have plenty of stars.  I get some vignetting with the QHY OAG prism, but I wanted the sensitivity, large(ish) pixels and large sensor.

Cracking images!

I'm struggling with full disk flats too, I'll be following your thread to see what the advice is.

On 29/05/2023 at 16:02, david_taurus83 said:

? I didnt know there was a star list in there now. I use the older stable 2.1. Will have to have a look though I have an autofocuser anyway but still use CdC for slewing to near south for PHD purposes.

Use PHD itself for slewing south for calibration.  Open the PHD2 menu; Tools / Drift Align and click Slew, this will take you to the ideal position for calibration, close the Drift Align tool and calibrate as normal.

I believe there's an option in the latest dev build to make this process slicker.

Bluetooth is a terrible protocol for mount control.  Even for audio it's unreliable, but it doesn't potentially cause damage to expensive equipment if your audio drops for a split second.

Personally I'd never trust any form of wireless control for a telescope mount.  Try a wired connection, I'd put money on your problems disappearing.

Stunning images!

You could ask if this is still available, it's a good starter camera, already modified, and for a decent price.

https://stargazerslounge.com/topic/398782-astro-modified-canon-eos1100d/

53 minutes ago, Ibbo! said:

I like the 178 for my setup but it is tight to get full disc.

To get 60fps with my pc I have a PCIe drive, with ROI I can get well over 100fps when doing planets.

Thanks for the fast reply Steve.

I think my SMII 60 is a bit shorter focal length than your Lunt so I should get a full disk with no problems, do you need a tilt adapter?

The 178MM looks a better fit than the 174MM which would be well undersampled, thanks for pointing that out @Zakalwe.

Thanks for all the replies, I've been away so only just catching up.

Due to the pixel size I'm considering the 178MM now, does the rolling shutter make a difference compared to the global shutter of the 174MM?

Also do people shoot at 10bit to get 60fps at full resolution? @Ibbo! I see you're imaging with the Lunt 60 double stacked with this camera, any comments on camera choice from you?  Your images are outstanding btw, if I can achieve anything close to them I'll be happy.

10 hours ago, Dave Smith said:

I would certainly recommend the 174MM camera. It has a large chip which gives the full solar disc in one with my Lunt 80 and runs at just over 100 fps provided you use USB3 leads. A tilt adapter is effective to stop the interference bands.

Dave

Thanks Dave, so the following should get me going, anything else I'll need?

https://www.firstlightoptics.com/zwo-cameras/zwo-asi174mm-usb-3-mono-camera.html

https://www.firstlightoptics.com/adapters/astro-essentials-m42t-female-to-m42t-male-tilt-adjuster.html

Ian