TiffsAndAstro

this might be a great help ty and will give it a go as soon as clouds go away. in a few months

It was some sort of medium format but not the plate glass stuff. It was a long time ago, it's possible it was 300 not 3000

i can focus back and forth through infinity as the stars get smaller and bigger if i rotate focus back and forth? so i wouldn't need to moving the stop?

also, chrome remote desktop seems to work pretty well. also just put the app on my phone lol. works great there too

how did you change the infinity stop? mine seems to stop past the infinity marker. still don't like dropping it to 5.6 but there is no stop between wide open 3.5 and 5.6. might try 3.5 again now its focus is locked. lol. i bet there are people choking back vomit but i find getting 'perfect' focus on lenses diffcult and this seems ok for me for now

Bit late to the party but I remember making a cost list for a 1st year project 35 years ago at uni and the film and processing cost alone were more than £3k. Was shocked when I was told no chance, lol I am politely paraphrasing my tutor's response

i pre focused it on the moon last week and taped it down. its probably the best focus i've managed so far. infinity seems before the marker on the barrel, but its probably a 50 year old lens. m42 might look better if i can grab 90 minutes on it tonight. ******* faffed about for too long with 3ppa. 30 sec test shot on orion looked great, 180 sec even better, so i've set it going after using nina framing assistant to get most of m42, all of hh and some of flame nebula. might get an hour before it drops too low. high hopes for this one then its time to break out the sct and get m51 for like 5 hours maybe?

i cropped it a little different and it worked fine. i think it didn't like having 703 sub parts to process i quite like it without stars. if im really stupid i might try it again with my 500mm mirror lens, er i mean my schmidt-cassegrain telescope tonight once m42 or andromea have fled the scene.

and m51.... 200mm crop sensor is not idea for this. or my $10 lens. but at least (i think) it shows i have everything working, ready for m42 or andromeda tonight. need to choose soon ish

blue screen of death trying to remove stars for iris nebula. siril probably just can't handle so many and such high quality stars.... also phot0metric colour calibration failed but i can actually see the iris nebula. if i squint. seems my set up is working pretty good, except my lens is a bit crap.

Finally have some test results. Will convert to jpg and post soon ish for feedback. 200mm f3.5 but stopped down one to 5.6. 30 180 and 300 sec subs all looked trail free and I never took caps off polar scope. Stars have more red than Donald trump's bank account though. Also 60x120sec on m51 and 30x120 on iris nebula. I have chance of fixing Chromatic aberration in siril than bird shape stars though hopefully. I'm still a tad suspicious that my Blue Peter style focus (here's one I made earlier) is unfocused enough to hide any trails though. Orion or m31 tonight hopefully for science.

what's a good test subject for focus/tracking that's up? everything seems very small in stellarium on a 200mm crop sensor. ngc7000 NA nebular if its high enough?# cheers for any suggestions. not keen on globular clusters

Think I'm gonna find an in depth look at Nina find out more how the magic works

ty for this. i don't use Ekos but ill try and have a google around nina and mount models, because i just don't think nina works this way as it has plate solving to find targets.

So does the GTi mounts model get updated or a model in Nina, or both or? Genuinely no idea, sorry : I can't even guess why Nina might have a model because plate solving exists. Do these models get reset on turning off/on? Should I be using my synscan app to reset alignment even though I only use it as a middle man for Nina? Apologies, this hobby seems to generate more questions than answers

Ty but no chance of a clear night. 90 minutes at most but that will do. I'll test focus again, but I doubt it will be worse than redoing via live view and Nina's display if it looks ok I'll try and get an hour on hh nebula. If it's too patchy cloudy I'll test my 500mm SCT lol

As an eternal optimist and total noob I think there will be an hour or so this evening with some stars. Having very expertly and sensibly focused all my telescopes ( ) on the moon last week and then electrician taped them down, my plan is to try them out, at various f stops and sub lengths on m51 (cos it's always visible) then post examples to see any problems. Is there anything else I could do in between rain frying my camera and laptop?

im in same boat as you then i took some shots of orion with a dslr and old lens and liked it so i bought a the gti. i've spent maybe a total of 12 hours under the stars with it so far and am so recent to nina i've not had clear enough skies to do more than 3ppa. at least it should all be ready to go if i ever see stars again.

no probs, all i did was say give nina a go its pretty easy

i think this should work: connect usb from pc to mount run synscan app on pc and use it to connect to mount. you might have to change the setting in the synscan app on your pc to use usb/serial connection. check its connected by seeing if it slews via the the direction controls in the app on your pc. run nina and tell nina to connect to the correct mount (telescope) in the drop down box that should be it. this video was pretty helpful: sadly you'll need to watch it upside down as he sounds Australian

Ask if any problems I might be able to help with the basics.

Don't even know how I would star align in Nina. I just use the atlas to find my target and press slew. The I just add that target as a legacy sequence, change iso and exposure time to my liking and hit play. I would advise connecting everything up in daylight as there will be some niggles with drivers and setting up plate solving, but lots of YouTube's on that. It's really pretty simple with help from here and YouTube

It's a free easy way to dip your toe. I'm no expert by any means but even i could set up 3ppa and plate solving very easily

your pixel size is extremely er precise

Yeah lol I also got the snap cable and camera control was clunky. I installed synscan on windows and run it to connect to my GTi via usb cable, the run Nina. With plate solving working reliably, it's ace. Now I just need clear skies to actually do stuff Id say asiair is better for cable management though a mini pc running Nina would also help compared to the rat's nest I have, using a laptop