RobH

Heavy Duty Steel Pier. £200. 11 inches in diameter, 1/4 inch steel walls, 1 inch thick base. Top plate is aluminium drilled and tapped for an AP1200 and a Meade super wedge, plus a custom adapter I used for a CGE at one point. It was in my observatory for many years and has had a variety of scopes on it. I had it half full of a mix of engine oil and sand to dampen any vibration, and it was so solid that you could give it a kick while imaging at a respectable FL without any effect! Included are 4 x 20 inch long 16mm stainless steel threaded rods and nuts for mounting it to a concrete base. It could do with a paint job, but is perfect in every other way. I paid £300 for it back in 2006. As you can imagine, it's heavy, so postage isn't an option, but I can deliver or meet up to 100 miles away from Weymouth, Dorset for an extra £20 for fuel.

Astrophysics portable pier with pier top for an AP1200 included. The top plate has also been drilled and tapped for another custom mount adapter, and could easily be modified to fit any mount. this model is the 10 inch diameter, 42 inch high model. I'm prepeared to drive up to 200 miles from DT4 to deliver for one way fuel costs (£30) so could easily meet up. I will be in Nottingham at the end of the month so could bring it with me if anyone interested is in the area, Looking for £350 ono.

Mount now sold too.

You could always buy secondhand.....I noticed some baader filters have just come up for sale on here. if you see an Atik16HR, or starlight xpress H9 come up for sale, they have small but very good chips, and go for around £500 now, and objects like the crescent nebula will fit nicely on the chip with the setup you are talking about. Any Sony 285 chipped camera will do a great job.

The scope and mount will be fine. personally, I like Atik cameras......very reliable and good after sales service, which it's unlikely you will need! Dont go for anything with an 8300 chip in though ( what camera seems to make a big difference with this chipthough....QSI seem to make it work quite well, but the Starlight Xpress version in the H18 is a waste of time)...the chip isn't terribly sensitive compared to the sony chips, and for narrowband you will want as sensitive a chip as you can get. the best filters are astrodon, but they cost a fortune. Baader are very good value for money, and better than astronomik.

Scope, reducer and robofocus now sold.

Might just be able to make this one......of course, I won't know for sure until much closer to the event.

Thankyou all....I'm deeply touched by your warmth and kind words :-). I may yet do some imaging in the future, and will be keeping a high quality small rig, and might well do some teching in the future too, but, after not using my big rig for so long, and having a lot of money tied up in it, I decided that it was time to let it go. I'm far from rich and had to sacrifice a lot for that gear, and the money is needed for other things. It's tough staying out night after night, and also spending weeks working on a single image, so you need to be 120% enthusiastic, and for me, once I can do something well, I tend to find that it's time to move onto something that I can't do and learn that!! Life is too short to spend it doing one thing !! I do have a few images left to process, so will be posting again, but not for a while I suspect, although myself and Mrs H enjoy the star parties a lot, and have made some fine friends through the forum, so, when work allows, we will be seeing you for some chilli and beers!! i

I'm selling up most of my astro kit....hasn't been used now since early 2015....first up is a top line and unique rig particularly suited to imaging galaxies and planetary nebulae. AP1200 CP3 GTO equatorial mount with 3x18kg stainless steel CW's and all required cabling. AP now only make a smaller and a larger mount, but the 1200 is the perfect size for pretty big scopes while still remaining readily portable and has a payload capacity of 140lbs of scope. I have had no issues at all doing 1 hour exposures with this mount and still keeping perfectly round stars, all at a focal length of 2400mm. Basically, the only limiting factor to exposure lengths is cloud! I also have an AP portable pier, and, once the obsy has been taken down, a steel very heavy duty pier, both with pier tops to fit the mount. The steel pier will be advertised separately as it'll be a while before I can get it out, but will be £300. Custom 12 inch F8 Ritchey Chretein. The scope started life as a GSO solid tube. It was immediately then sent to Ian King and rebuilt as a truss scope, then had the focuser decoupled from the primary, the secondary modified so it can be collimated laterally as well as tip and tilt, a feathertouch focuser added, and finally 1300 euros worth of completely new 18 point mirror cell built, collimatable to micrometer resolutions.......in other words, everything a GSO scope needs doing to take advantage of the great optics and turn it into a killer scope. On the photos you can see a homemade dew heater that I have put on the secondary. This is included too. Any other bits and pieces I find that are specific to the scope will be part of the package. It is also equipped with robofocus, which I will add for an extra £150. I also have a couple of Bahtinov masks which are included in the price, and also some extension tubes for the rear, which you use depending on what F ratio you use the scope at. If one was to buy, for example, a teleskop service 12 inch truss RC and bring it up to this standard, it would cost £5000. I am also selling an Astrophysics CCD67 focal reducer, which brings the scope down to F5.3, with an image scale of 1.14 arc seconds per pixel on an Atik 460 binned 2x2, meaning you end up with a very fast system with no sacrifice in resolution from UK skies. I will send copies of images taken with the scope on request. Prices. AP1200. £6000 12 inch Ritchey Chretein. £3750 AP CCD67. £120 AP portable pier. £350 Robofocus system. £150 Price for whole package inc all cabling, usb autoguide adapter etc. £9750. I'm happy to split. Until the mount and scope are sold, I will hold onto the reducer and robofocus. I am of course open to sensible offers and will deliver up to 200 miles from Weymouth, dorset at no extra cost. Bank transfer only please. Cheers Rob

I had an ST120 for many years. It's a good basic scope for widefield views, and the eyepieces it came with, and the diagonal ( a 90 degree one, not 45 degree erect image one which you will need for terrestrial views) were fine....not the best by any means, but fine for starting out. Trying to get decent results at higher magnifications than you can get with the supplied 10mm eyepiece is a waste of time. It's a basic achromatic short focal length lens, and these sufferfrom chromatic abberation and can only take so much magnification before the image becomes a blurry mess. Don't get a barlow with it.....the last thing you want is more magnification. Used for what it's designed for, widefield views of star clusters etc, it's a great scope for the price, but if you want high magnification views of the moon and planets, then get a Mak or similar, as has been suggested here earlier.

Again, work gets in the way.....I'm away for 3 weeks from the 4th March :-(

That is dust close to the sensor, probably on the glass screen in front of it. I notice you use a camera with the 8300 chip, so the camera has a shutter. Check that the dust particles stay in the same place each exposure ( stretch your individual subs). With the SX H18 I had, the coating was rubbing off the shutter and depositing dust every cycle, so it was impossible to remove the effect using flats. With a QSI camera, you probably don't have a problem but it's worth checking.

Having owned plenty of SX cameras, and having had no end of trouble with them, I wouldn't touch an SX imaging camera again ( love the lodestars though) The Atiks I've owned have been as reliable as you can get. If you're planning on getting an 8 inch RC, then going for the smaller pixels of the 490 isn't worth it. You'll probably end up binning the camera at those sort of focal lengths anyway. I use my 460 binned 2x2 with my RC, and get 1.14 arc secs per pixel (at F5.3), which is fine for most seeing conditions in the UK anyway.

Ive never compared the two different environments, although, considering the camera isnt temperature stabilised, you will get more thermal noise indoors. Could you be confusing thermal noise with hot pixels chased by a sensor defect in this situation?

Yes, I have a few but use darks to get rid of them ( in the past, I've had a wonderful PHD graph guiding on a hot pixel!)