wuthton

If what you mean by huge mega pixel camera is a camera with huge pixels then yes there is a lot of point. At a short focal lengths, high precision mounts make absolutely no difference whatsoever. My trusty, old Atik 314+ and Samyang 135mm has scale of 8.25"/pixel and I'll do the Daz doorstep challenge with that on the cheapest tracking mount you care to name vs a DSLR on a HEQ5.

This is exactly my point... for me.... IMO... the cheapest way to a great astrophotograph is spending your money on pixel scale, not guiding accuracy. It's heresy I know but I believed it with CCDs and CMOS has just cemented my opinion. I really, really believe the default advice for newcomers to this fabulous hobby should be "keep your focal length short and buy a good camera" NOT "You need a HEQ5".

I've got a Moravian G2 8300 screwed onto a Redcat 51, would I see any improvement in my images upgrading say from a EQ3 pro to a HEQ5?

You've got to love Skywatcher. When designing the AZ-GTI did they just have a guess at the thread size of a counterweight shaft and get it wrong or did they purposefully make it different to every shaft available, including all their own?

@vlaiv You know the answer to that request just as well as me, and yes the minimum mount for the selection of scopes and cameras would the in HEQ5 class. I'm more referring to.... "I want to try astrophotography with my DSLR, what equipment would you recommend for a budget of £400?" - Without fail someone will chip in with "The HEQ5 is the minimum requirement for AP". It makes the corner of my eye twitch every time I see it.

My apologies, that statement wasn't directed at you specifically but I've got a crisp, ten pound note that says anytime you've suggested cheap mounting options for AP someone else has mentioned the HEQ5 in the same thread. This is exactly what I'm talking about, any boyfriend, girlfriend, wife or husband would be impressed to see this these following morning,

Everything you said was true but I think you've slightly missed my point. I'm talking about beginners with modest budgets, they're not "serious", they want to take a nice image to impress their significant other indoors. When they ask for advice on this forum they are told... every single time.... without fail... You need a HEQ5 MINIMUM. It's just not true. The Az-Gti is £700 cheaper than the HEQ5 and at <250mm you're not going to see much difference in the quality of images you can achieve with either.

For me the entry point to AP is a handheld DSLR with a 50mm lens pointed upwards at night, from then on the more stable your mounting the longer you can go with your focal length and with that, the more money you'll need to spend. Fixed tripod - 150mm Star tracker/AZ-Gti - 250mm EQ3 pro - 400mm EQ5 pro - 500mm+ "I want to image with a 200PDS" - You're gonna need a HEQ5 minimum, how is this "entry point"? I actually joined this forum after many years of lurking because a chap with a modest budget was being pushed towards a HEQ5 and I offered a cheaper solution. I occasionally wade in on similar threads but I'm nearly always drowned out in all the HEQ5 drum banging and I just don't understand it, I never have. You regularly see newcomers with modest budgets ask about equipment choice and without fail the HEQ5 is recommended even if it's double, triple the stated budget. The bottom line - if I was buying my first setup today with a budget of £1500, I'd have a cooled camera with a lens, on a cheap mount before buying a HEQ5.

Dynamic Background Extraction (DBE) in Pixinsight is your friend for this.

With the dew heaters at 50% (they could probably go lower) all my kit draws 22 watts, on paper the Jackery should last nearly 11 hours which is about right in my experience.

The difference between my Baader (7nm??) and my Astrodon 3nm NB filters is huge and I mean huge, LRGB less so. With that said there is now much more competition in ultra-narrow filters than when I bought mine, including some from Baader.

My Zotac c320 has been in my micro-obsy for a few years with no problems. My main recommendation would be to buy one with 5 or 6 usb ports so that you can avoid pesky hubs.

I use a Jackery 240 for my portable setup, it comfortably provides power all night to 2 dew heaters, a cooled ccd, guide camera, AzGti, filter wheel, autofocus and a raspberry pi. They're not cheap but it's a superb piece of kit, I bought mine for our camper van but it's now been "borrowed". https://www.amazon.co.uk/Jackery-Portable-Explorer-Generator-Outdoors/dp/B08RNPYLQW

If it's to pair with your Esprit, I doubt you'll find any advantage of an OAG over your guidescope apart from it being more compact. At over a metre of focal length is where OAGs start to shine and they become worth the faff of setting them up.

Malcolm, Nice to speak. I have an NEQ6 permanently mounted in a micro-observatory which currently has an RC8 on it. I also have an Az Gti with a Redcat 51 both with Moravian cameras. If you told me I could only keep one rig , it would be a very difficult decision, I'm really enjoying the Az Gti and I'm planning on taking it to the Carribean this winter, there's no way I'm doing that with the NEQ6.

I'm sorry but this isn't true, you can take some fabulous images with some very modest equipment if you keep your focal length short and your sampling rate high. If I was re-buying today, a big mount would be a long, long way down on my list of priorities. A cooled camera and some nice filters would take the top spot for the big money.

Thank you very much for sharing this, I'd given up on trying to update mine as it just refused to connect. I too used a Lynx cable and it worked like a charm.

If you're keeping your focal length short, there's nothing wrong with the Az Gti with a couterweight on a wedge which should be in budget. It has full goto, RA and Dec axis and can be guided if you want to add it on in the future. You would need a computer and some software to polar align it using the camera, it'd be a pain without. I use a Raspbery Pi with the excellent Astroberry/Kstars/Ekos combo. With that said I'm reasonably certain that if you ask 10 Az Gti owners how they polar align, you'll get 10 different answers.

No injuries or fatalities have been reported as the collapse has been expected but it's horrible to see such an iconic structure in such a sad state.

Derek, great choice of mount but if your scope choice is primarily for astrophotography then I'd highly recommended that you cancel your order and choose something else. The elephant in the room is pixel scale, the 250pds and a DLSR will give a scale between 0.7 and 0.8 arcseconds per pixel which simply means it's impossible to take a "good" image unless you setup at the top of Everest. The focal length is also against you, it's not a matter of beginner vs advanced it's just more difficult, more time wasted. As suggested above an 80mm F5-F6 ish refractor or camera lenses will give you much more satisfying results, cross my heart and hope to die. Attached is one of mine through a 135mm Samyang with an Atik 314L on a NEQ6 and there's many more superior efforts in the thread below.

Throw out the anchor!!! Forget tuning your mount for now (unless PHD will not calibrate), the best way to bypass a bit of backlash is to have each axis slightly out of balance thereby the weight is always bearing in one direction. You take some pain after a meridian flip but it sounds like you're a little way off that. But as above, while it's cloudy get everything mocked up indoors. Check that the mount is slewing in approximately the right direction, sort your home/parked position, mark your balance points and sort out your cable management and snag points. Niggling little problems are so much easier to sort out in daylight.

I'm going to politely disagree. Natural selection by it's very nature means that the next generation will be faster, more intelligent and disease resistant with better senses of sight, smell and taste. The direct opposite of the second law.

It's the mind boggling clash of theories.... Darwin's evolution where with the passing of time life evolves into something better and improved opposed to the second law of thermodynamics, entropy and constant decay. I'm going with Darwin.

Upgrading your mount, optics and adding guiding will all give modest improvements to your images. Moving from DSLR to mono CCD is easily the biggest leap forward you can make, particularly narrowband if you have light pollution. Don't overlook the cost of the filters, I'd have a cheaper, small chip, second hand CCD (eg. Atik 314L+) with good quality filters over a bigger chip with cheap filters. If the budget is getting stretched just a Ha filter and a very short focal length is a good starting point. I can't comment on cooled CMOS, I've never used one.

My resolve to drop it has faltered, I've had designs on using my obsy pc for something else and I've been hearing good things about Wireguard as less complex alternative to OpenVPN so two birds, one stone. Wireguard server I used a 1gb VPS and this excellent install script https://github.com/angristan/wireguard-install and then allowed the randomly determined port through UFW. It could alternatively be served from a Rpi on a home network. Wireguard Client I used this guide to install the client on the Astroberry https://www.wundertech.net/how-to-connect-a-raspberry-pi-to-a-wireguard-vpn-server/ and the Wireguard Android app on a chromebook. All in all it took about 20 minutes to get up and running, it works like a charm.