wuthton

How much light pollution are you battling? If it's low then you're a lucky sod and ignore the following but if it's high you will go down the road of narrowband imaging very quickly. With high levels of light pollution you're better off spending on your camera and filters (imo) than on the glass as the colour correction is neither here nor there. Below is one of my efforts with an 85mm Samyang camera lens, Baader 7nm filters and an Atik 314l under Bortle 6 skies. The whole of which can be picked up for less than an Esprit. There's also some much, much better efforts here with the 135mm.

I'd highly recommend the Zotac Ci series as they have 6 usb ports so you can avoid troublesome hubs. I've had an on mount Ci320 for a couple of years with zero regrets. An unexpected bonus is an improvement to guiding as you massively reduce the number of cables going to the floor and the drag that goes with them. Get an ssd, mine's quite small as all images are saved to Onedrive and then cut and pasted to my in house PC the following day.

I tortured myself over polar alignment when I first started out but you'll quickly start to think "it's so easy how can newcomers not grasp this?" The infinite patience of many on this forum is what makes it marvelous. I'm currently licking my wounds from asking a question on a Linux forum.

If you use the Chrome browser, chrome remote desktop is very simple to setup. https://remotedesktop.google.com/access/ If you have Windows Pro on the remote PC, Windows RDP is by far the superior option. From the lan just put in the ip address or computer name and hey presto. Wan connections require you to forward a port from your router to the remote pc as it's a machine to machine connection, no middle man such as Teamviewer.

Sorry, I'm a bit late to this. I went though the same exact process you have, I ended up throwing in the towel and buying an 85mm Samyang. No regrets, the lens is superb. The aperture mask is a good idea, I haven't touched the aperture ring for 18 months.

Are you manually imputing coordinates? If so, have a look at SGP's framing and mosaic wizard, it will blow your mind.

Level by eye is more than accurate enough, even if you're only wearing one shoe.

I too was wondering about this but assumed that Skipper Billy should have the required skills to keep the water out. It would be nice to see the final solution though.

I assume that by hinged you mean that it will flip open (like mine). In this case the inside face is facing upwards but with a roll off the inside face remains downwards (dry). The inside of my obsy remains reasonably dry but the inside of the roof is sopping wet on dewwy night which isn't great when you want to close everything up.

You might want to consider a small roll off rather than a hinged roof. My little obsy is almost identical to what you describe and I've regretted the hinged roof from day one, it is invariably full of dew in the morning. It's worse than anything else, I assume as it's a large flat surface. I've taken to throwing a couple of large towels over it to soak up the worst, obviously with a roll of this isn't a problem. A dehumidifier is a definite as well to dry everything out.

Here are mine, another little Megrez and it's Zenithstar friend.

Yes, Skype and various IM services are far more accessible to most and offer the same level of communication. But... Radio vs Skype. It's much like comparing a hand written letter to an email. It's the same communication but there's something missing in the latter

Ahh... GotYa.

Out of interest, what was wrong with the 5 volt? I've got an Atik, an 8 position filter wheel and a flattener hung off my focuser and it all moves perfectly and with very fine steps. It's even attached to the coarse focus knob on a ####### #### William Optics crayford (I keep giving the Moonlites lusty glances!).

Gah, bah, grrrr.... I've just spent an hour scratching my head as to why my subs were not in focus. The autofocus routine did it's thing, I set the camera running and the subs were junk each time. On closer inspection a dew heater had decided to pack it in and something resembling the Atlantic had formed on the objective.

If you start a new thread I'll post pictures there and let this thread get back to Dave's focuser.

You'll need some form of mechanical/sensor feedback from the wheel so the driver can calibrate which filter is which and when each is centred. I'll have a closer look at mine this evening and try to work out how it's been done. If you start a new thread you'll get much more help. I'll add some photos of the internals of my wheel if that would help.

From my limited understanding a driver and sketch for a filter wheel will be way more complicated than a focuser. The driver needs to be able to calibrate so it knows the position of each filter which is easier said than done.

Awesome work again Dave, this project is really getting it's boots on now. I haven't got around to fitting a temp sensor yet but I will get round to it soon. I've had quite a lot of use out my focuser and couldn't be more pleased but I have a word of caution with using pre-set and known focus positions. The motor does have some backlash (mine is about 1/4 to 1/2 a step) so every time it changes direction it will introduce some error and the focus point will drift away from the previously known position. As a side note the autofocus routine in AstroArt 5.0 is supreme. It takes a user defined number of exposures at each focus position and then moves the focuser back to the best point. I do one pass of 5 steps for each position followed by a fine focus pass of 1 step for each position.

You need to register the driver. See post number 57, page 3.

My sincere apologies, I meant cost effective.

Don't forget the advantage in the pulley system. Mine is 4:1, so 1 revolution of the coarse focus knob = 256 steps. You could easily make it 5:1, 320 steps. When I made mine I had doubts on whether the motor's steps were fine enough but it was so cheap I figured it would be worth a go and maybe upgrade later. As it turns out it is more than adequate, I doubt that the movement would be quantifiable if it was much finer.

I have mine attached to the coarse, it drives it fine even at vertical. I think when you begin to package the focuser you'll appreciate that the Uno is suddenly quite large and a Nano would be a better choice.

You may be pushing the limits of the motor with direct drive but there's no harm trying. As Mick has pointed out you get a lot of advantage from the belt/pulleys which reduces the strain on the motor. Nice job Mick, I must tidy up my bracket. Matt.

I used the dovetail bar. You can measure the required belt length with a piece of string.