Steve Ward

Just a quick grab today , seeing awful still so didn't spend much time messing about on it ...

Had to take two bites at this , was out at 06:30 hoping for some early steady conditions ... no chance ... 😒 Quick video here showing the distortion I was seeing ... Left it an hour or two and had another look , marginal improvement gave me 15 frames to stack from 600 ... !

Beautiful ...

Thanks Michael ... I bought mine for general , wildlife and aviation reall , it will sit on the Sigma 150-600 for the most part. But being a solar snapper so's to speak it was always going to end up on the back of the Tal 100RS at some point ... 😏

Managed to grab a couple of hundred frames with the new EOS 90D before the clouds rolled over , seems to do the job rather nicely ... I need to try and find a way of zooming in on the preview screen in EOS Utilities for checking focus , this was a lucky session as I'd just shot a load with the 550D as usual and just swapped over the bodies ... 😏

Even milkier today but the seeing wasn't too bad despite , it so I managed to find 60 decent frames to play with ...

Pretty much identical conditions to yesterday , the detail's OK but the disc is flat again , pushed it as far as I dared then backed off a tad ... 😏

There seems to be a problem with your video , all I see is the bottom audio line and hear some very muted mumbling ... ?

Nasty white , 'azy , 'orrible sky today so a pretty flat offering I'm afraid ... 😒

Appalling seeing today , really had to hit and hope as I couldn't judge focus it was so watery ... caught enough to get something though ...

Thank you for that sir ...

Small half chance gap was pretty much as good as it got today , 19 frames stacked from a set shot through cloud but AS!3 levelled them out for me nicely ... When the big bit of blue came along it was back to the dreadful mush so the cloudy version is the one I stuck with ...

That's witchcraft not 'simple' ... I'll stick with solar for the time being , it's easier to find ... 😆

So you just point the 'scope anywhere , take a snap , the software recognises the part of the sky and then slews to the correct position ... ?

But how does it get you to the target initially , I understand how it can "tweak" the pointing to centre a target once an initial image is taken but not how it gets to the target in the first place. Easy enough with planets , Moon or even M31 , M42 where you can pretty much aim by eye , but for some 'invisible' narrowband target it must need tht initial alignment ?

I understand the basics of plate-solving , well I thought I did , but how does it point the scope in the right place in order to take an image to plate-solve from , or am I missing something here , so please enlighten this dinosaur ... 😆 I assume you have to input the relevant info first as you would to do a basic go-to alignment without all the added complications that are being suggested , seems like a classic case of being asked to sprint before actually standing up from here ... 😏

I would assume that you need to do a Go-To 1,2 or 3 star align before using NINA or any other software to slew to a target. TPPA is just polar aligning the mount , i.e. making sure that it rotates accurately in relation to the celestial pole , this has nothing to do with pointing accuracy of the Go-to which needs to know ... 1. The starting position of the telescope / mount , generally the Home position. 2. The location of the mount on the Earth's surface , hence the co-ordinates you input. 3. The time , date , year in order to know what is where in the sky at that particular time in order to be able to slew to a particular object. The more accurate the infirmation you enter the more accurate that initial slew to target will be .

My HEQ5Pro sat atop a 14' high wooden pier for about eight years without issue and now sits on a wooden Berlebach Planet ... 😏

Could you save your image as a .png or .jpeg so that it's automatically shown on the post rather than having folk have to download it just to view it , thank you ... 😏

Hello and welcome to the forum ... Please save your images as either .jpeg or .png format so that they can be seen in the post without having to download them first. No disrespect intended but I for one will not download unknown files from an unknown source , especially from someone's first post. Regards , Steve.

Had to wait a while but eventually a tiny patch of blue drifted by in the right place , grabbed 22 decent frames before it closed in again ... 😏

About 5000 visible to us , but the Earth gets in the way of a lot of them so we can never actually see more than about 2000 ... 😏

Who's Nina ... 😄 I'm talking about when you first power up the mount , I'm guessing NINA bypasses the common way of aligning for some new-fangled computerised method so I'll bow out of the conversation now and leave it to the whizz-kids to sort you out .... 😏

When you are initially setting up the mount ( you haven't specified a mount so I'm assuming a Skywatcher Go-To of one sort or other) you have to input Date , Time etc and there will also be a Timezone and Daylight saving question too. As we're now in BST (again assumimg you are in the UK) then you need to press Yes to the Daylight Saving prompt. Failure to do so will send the scope pointing 15° off your intended target ( 15° / hour rotation)

Sounds like the time input was astray , daylight saving missed maybe ... ?