MartinB

Nice work on a big pair of nebs. It would be worth filling in the gaps if you get the chance, even though there wont be much there.

This is staggeringly good!

It is a very attractive and "busy" area of sky and this is a very nice capture. Good luck with your ongoing project.

If you are after planetary nebs and galaxies I think you could do with something a little larger. It is a little over your stated budget but "about" £1000 might give you a little leeway but a skywatcher ED pro 120 would be excellent for PNs and larger galaxies. It would also be comfortably manageable for your HEQ5

You've captured the flames very nicely. Some lovely colours in there

Yes I have a nodal ninja. I haven't used it a great deal so far but have been pleased with it. Seems I now need to invest in a bucket for the water!

Lovely image Dave, you are the master of reflected sky! Do you get much parallax error with your mosaics or are you using a pano head?

Cartes du Ciel is free, reliable and works very well with my CGEM mount.

That is a lovely image Johannes. Very nice colour rendition

Ooh that's outstanding! Beautifully processed. Do you have quite a dark sky. Who wants a supernova messing up the image anyway!?

Very nicely framed and I too like the colour. Excellent work.

Great image. Whenever I get to this situation I ask my wife! After hours of processing it becomes very difficult to be objective. Leave it alone now and have another look in a years time! I like what you have done with the last rendition except I don't like the complete elimination of green. I like the aesthetics of the gold and blue but green equates to hydrogen and it seems a pity to eliminate it all together. Regardless of whichever process choice this is a cracking image.

I used to use Astronomic 13nm filters but convinced myself that I would be better off with Baader 7nm. I definitely wasn't wowed by the difference. Now it seems I must have 3nm. Well actually, I don't think so. I've seen comparisons which give hints of improved contrast. I've been given 7nm and 3nm unprocessed data for comparison and could really see very little difference. All this brings to mind the sort of discussion you get in HiFi circles where speaker cable costing £1000 per meter "blows away" a cable costing £500. Good to hear about the Chroma 3nm pricing though.

When I started colour imaging it was without a filterwheel. I had to change each filter manually. I think I was the first person on the forum to invest in a motorised filter wheel, a 5 position Trutek. It seemed a ridiculous extravegence at the time. 10 years ago I got a QSI camera with an integrated 5 position wheel and am still using it. It is a relatively minor hassle, the good thing being that you do longer imaging runs so that you only swap around your filters during the day. Convenient though an 8 position wheel might you only need one if you are working roboticly from a remote location.

A great choice for an all round scope is a MakNewt. I have a Skywatcher MN190 which I bought second hand several years ago. It is great for imaging with a useful focal length and gives near apo refractor views when observing. It is usefully fast with a decent aperture and has a great flat field. In other words it covers the bases for both imaging and observing. The downside is it is pretty heavy and at the limit of an Eq6 if there is much wind around and it has the usual inconvenience of newtonian design i.e awkward viewing angles. You could spend a few grand more for a SW Esprit which is an airloom quality scope and would probably give an Eq 6 even more of a challenge.

Thanks Happy-Kat

Last week I was on a sailing trip from Gocek, Turkey. After an evening enjoying Raki and Mezzes I wandered along a path behind the restaurant with camera kit, more in hope than expectation. I couldn't quite get down to the sea unfortunately. Despite the bright lights in the bay behind me the sky was actually reasonably dark and no moon to worry about. This pic was taken with a Canon 6d and 14mm Sigma lens at F1.8, 30 secs ISO 1600. Subsequently savaged in Lightroom! If you look hard enough you can also see Saturn, Jupiter, Sagitarius and Scorpio.

I like that! Nice composition Helen.

I suspect you are right!

I have Flo to call on for help. It may be down to connecting the cable whilst the controller was turned on. They are going to have a look at it.

Whilst imaging scale is far from irrelevant I think it is easy to get too hung up about it. Think of all the fantastic images that have been taken with 9 micron pixel chips and a Tak FSQ106. If you are planning to produce large poster size images then it's definitely worth squeezing the pips, similarly if you like zooming in to the max to analyze pixellated bits of the image then fair enough, but, there are other things that may matter more. For instance, larger pixels will collect more light over a given exposure time meaning lower noise so you will have more faint detail even if it isn't immaculately resolved. Most of the time you can't get any where near the theoretical optimal sampling rate anyway!

That looks great, just right for the 135mm

That sounds like a fantastic place to visit. That's a lovely Milky Way although I imaging where you were it was casting shadows and spoiling your night vision!

Thanks Jambouk. The leads are correctly placed and all was fine immediately prior to taking out the and controller and replacing with the wifi gizmo. I am wondering whether the firmware may have been corrupted for some reason or whether the wifi has somehow damaged the mount board. Would it make sense to try a firmware update?

I fairly recently purchased a new EQM35-PRO mount and it has been working fine. I decided to try the synscan wifi set up. My phone connected to the synscan wifi without any problem but neither the Synscan pro app or Sky Safari could find the device. I checked on line and believe I have all data entered correctly including port number and connect to network in the synscan connection settings. So, having wasted a couple of hours of my life I decided to revert to the hand controller for this evenings anticipated observing only to get the message CAUTION! BOTH AXED....NO RESPONSE! Lovely! I can scroll through the menus ok but can't perform any sort of alignment or activate the motors with the hand controller. I was using a lithium battery pack but changing to a 13.8v power supply makes no difference. I have had a browse around online and have found another person who had experienced the same sequence of events but there was no info as to how he resolved the issue. Right now my mount is non functional! I could try updating the firmware but I'm in a hole and think I should probably stop digging! Can anyone offer me any guidance?