willcastle

Okay, so I have noticed that whenever I see pictures of andromeda, that people have taken, they fall into two distinctive looks. The first has a more muted, yellow-orange look to it. The second adds beautiful blues, with these stunning jewel-like reddish/pink starts dotted throughout. 1. Can anyone explain the difference in the images? 2. Is it purely down to image capture? 3. Or down to editing? 4. What set up would you need for each ( I.e the key differences in each rig)? 5. And which you like best (obviously highly subjective!)? [these stunning images are NOT my own and I take no credit or ownership over them. They are merely here for me to illustrate the artistic differences between each capture. The first is from SGL user “frugal.” I found the second image downloaded on my phone, so the photographer is unknown. But it is a fantastic image. If I find out, I will add the name in]

Nice detailed assessment of the Halfords 4 in 1. I have fully charged mine. I am just waiting for some clear skies to get going with it. One thing I would add to your excellent summary is that the initial charge is definitely around 18 or so hours. It took a loooooong time to charge. But apparently it is vital to give it that full initial, uninterrupted charge. You also shouldn’t use the battery at all prior to the initial charge (or during, as you said above). I thought I read in the manual that it said you have to charge it after every single use too.... but I would have to check that. It might have been more relating to if you use it for starting cars? i want to really take care of this battery though because my last one cost over a hundred pounds and died after minimal usage 😕 another thing I like about the Halfords charger is that you can press a button to see how much charge is left in the battery. I can’t remember the Sky-Watcher one having that , or maybe it wasn’t quite as good. But it was a few years back so I can’t remember. As for the built in red light on the skywatcher model..... you won’t really find you use it much. Especially if you have a head torch

Just to clarify, if my camera is set to RAW and I have noise reduction on, it will change the format of the image to not be a RAW file?!

You are welcome! The canon 1100D has an APS-C sensor (same as my camera), so it would barely do more than 3 seconds. The star adventurer looks like a great piece of kit (and I seriously love Sky-Watcher products) so it would drastically improve your results but bare in mind you would need a pretty stable tripod to attach it to

Okay thanks for your reply. Does it just not work as well? I assume that darks and flats are just more effective at removing noise?

The rule of 500 tells you an approximation for how long you can take an exposure before you get star trails in your image. You take your focal length and divide 500 by that number. So for example, if you had an 18mm lens, you would do 500 divided by 18 and that gives you 27.7 seconds of exposure. That is for a full frame Dslr however. If you have an APS-C sensor (like a canon 80D), you have to multiply your focal length by 1.6. So that same 18mm Lens would be 500 divided by (18 x1.6), so 500 divided by 28.8, which would only allow you to make a 17 second exposure. Now, for an 85 mm lens, you would get about a 5-6 second exposure for a full frame camera and around a 3-4 second exposure on an APS-C camera. It means you are massively restricted on exposure time. But then I balanced it out by setting the aperture to f1.4 which means you collect more light. Even so, a 3 second exposure did show some slight star trailing. Ideally you would want to buy a mount that can track the stars. It would solve the issue

Should I turn this setting off? I brought a magazine about astrophotography (which was scarily light on actual advice) and it said you should definitely turn on noise cancellation and set it to its highest amount. But this doubles photography times (I.e a five minute exposure takes an additional 5 minutes for the noise reduction to be applied to the image). I thought I read in another forum that it is better to turn off noise cancellation and just take darks and flats to reduce noise but I can’t find that post. Can anyone advise me?

I have an 85mm lens (sigma art) and I pointed it at Orion the other night. The stars and focus were pin sharp, even at f1.4. A single, 3 second exposure showed the nebula clearly. My only reservation was that it still gave an extremely large field of view. It would definitely require tracking to fully make the most of it however. Are you familiar with the “rule of 500”?

Hi Barry. Welcome to SGL. Great choice on your first scope. It’s the one I started with too! I doubt I will ever part with it. The views are amazing. My most breathtaking views have come from Jupiter and Saturn too! But I also remember my first excitement at seeing andromeda

So proud of my new scope 😆😆

Wow so my new scope arrived and I was running through all the different options for guiding. I thought I would share my experience and hopefully other beginners might find something useful from this. I purchased a skywatcher evostar 80ED Pro with a HEQ5 Pro mount and it came with two green dovetail bars. I already had an ST-80T that I wanted to mount on top but the “dovetail bar” that came with that was a small useless plastic block. The biggest, most annoying hurdle with this process was that on each dovetail bar, there were metric- and whitworth-threaded holes, with different diameters. What I ended up doing, was taking off the evostar dovetail and attaching that to the top of the evostar scope rings. This was important because this dovetail bar has a slot in it, that allowed me to correctly space the guidescope rings. I only had two whitworth bolts (fortunately that were quite long and had nuts with them), but I used each of those to attach the dovetail bar to the top of the evostar rings. The whitworth bolts were both cut down to size, and the spare part of the thread was used to attach one of the guidescope rings to the top dovetail bar. Note that I had to drill out the thread of the ST80 rings, as they were metric threads, where as the dovetail had whitworth threading! I screwed the length of whitworth bolt down from the top and used the nut and a small washer to tighten it down. For the second ring, I placed it in the slot of the dovetail bar and used a small length of metric thread, that I could then bolt from each side (effectively clamping everything together). Finally, I attached the dovetail bar that came with the HEQ5 (I think it might be the standard, medium dovetail bar that you can purchase separately), to the bottom of the evostar rings. I think I used the bolts that were originally in the bottom of the ST80 rings to bolt those down, and then added in the lateral screws to make sure the rings couldn’t rotate. It was considerably harder work than it needed to be but I am pleased with the results. It cost me nothing but time and a bit of effort. I know that the guide rings don’t have adjustment bolts, but at least with the current set up, there is no determinable flex, and with an 80mm scope, it shouldn’t be hard finding a guide star. I am a fan of having the matching green dovetail bars. And I have attached the guide camera and DSLR and can perfectly balance the mount. So overall, a great result.

Now you are starting to look at much bigger scopes. This is a lot bigger than the 50mm you started off with. But yeah it’s a good scope. Comparable optics to the 80mm I suggested; just bigger and therefore collects more light

Fair enough. Those particular terms don’t confuse me but I guess for the sake of someone who would find those concepts confusing then it’s good to clarify. Perhaps you are confused with the fact that I never mentioned “resolution of detail” however? My post was about FOV and therefore framing of image. But yes generally speaking “zooming in” is a horribly imprecise term. I don’t see the harm in “crop factor” however. In my opinion it is a very simple and unambiguous concept. I can’t see how anyone would think that allows for the capture of more detail but I guess they might...?

If I personally wanted a small-ish travel scope, I would get a star travel 80T. It is cheaper than what you are looking at but it’s a decent little scope. I have often just got that out to enjoy the views. If not you could maybe try something like a celestron c90 maksutov. It is £165 and part of celestrons “travel and spotting scopes” range. It’s pretty small

I think these lithium batteries are the way to go. The jumpstart kit will keep me going for now and I will definitely upgrade to the lithium one when funds permit

I have read a few articles on this and yes it can definitely be used for that. As a straight through mini scope, you will get an upside down and mirror image view of what you are looking at. Some people have reported it can be slightly difficult to achieve focus. The box does come with a little spacer that can be used to move the eye piece slightly further from the scope, to help you achieve focus. It doesn’t come with an eyepiece however. The quality of the optics however, are meant to be especially good for such a small, 50mm scope (some would say slightly over kill for its intended purpose as a guide scope!). Hopefully this helped a bit. I guess it depends what you are specifically hoping to observe with it and if you wanted to put it on a small tripod etc. It’s relatively expensive for what is essentially a finder scope to a larger telescope

Yup. Everything AdeKing just said is spot on. And you also taught me something new there: I actually CAN use the celestron power tank (after all that) by using the adaptor cable. Thanks for your contribution

APS-C cameras have a 1.6x crop factor. So they are more zoomed in. Additionally, the focal length of the evostar 80ED is 600mm, which again, gives you a more narrow field of view than the 80mm you were using

Excellent. Thanks a lot. Yes you are totally correct, I am not going to use a field flattener just yet; I have run out of funds 😃

Great. Thanks for confirming. It’s a nice, tight view of the two nebulas. Cant wait to get out there imaging

Hello everyone, I just had a go, on stellarium, at trying to see the FOV of a skywatcher evostar 80ED, with an APS-C sensor attached to the scope. Does this look about right? or did I do something wrong? It seems very zoomed in (which I actually quite like).

Will do! I am going to be much more active on this forum again. I used to practically live on here 😂 have you captured any pics on your nexstar? Or are you just observing?

I have my new beautiful mount waiting for me at home, where I will be tomorrow morning. I can’t wait 😆 so I wanted to get a power pack ASAP

Well..... I wasn’t going to get a jumpstart pack but for 50 quid I can’t complain. You sold me on it 😂 There is a Halfords five minutes down the road so I got one just now

Cool thanks for reply. I may just get one of these for now. At least to get me up and running. I mean, £50 is so cheap for a 17Ah battery. Do you know what the current is for the 12v sockets? I know the HEQ5 needs a minimum of 2amps? But then I’m guessing it isn’t an issue if you had it that long