knobby

The Synscan windows app is pretty good, worth a look.

Hi @Astro Alice and dad hope you spend many hours together staring at the heavens. My first proper scope was a 150 Dob ... You will have amazing views of the moon and planets (albeit small for the planets)

Heq5 ... Pretty please 😊

Quick update, mounts gone back but out of stock for 15 days ... Sad face 😪 Almost went for a CEM40 but again, out of stock. Looking forward to a good sample 🤞

Long story but the CEM40 is off the cards now 😒 going to wait for my HEQ5 to arrive ... Thanks for your help Paul.

Result ! Glad it's sorted.

All I can add is that planets are low so you're shooting through a lot of murky atmosphere and heat haze. You'll be very lucky to get much more than a blurry image till the planets are higher in the sky again. The whole idea of video / lucky imaging is that amongst the 2 or 3 minutes of video you collect , some of the frames will be during the moments of good seeing. When you stack the frames and select the better ones you end up with an image that you can sharpen. Don't give up and good luck.

Thanks again Paul.

Thanks Paul, very helpful 👍 are you controlling the mount with ascom / laptop ?

Hi, wondered if any CEM40 owners could tell me if they image with a C8 or similar and what results they get ? Also will I need 2 counterweights ? Scope / camera etc = 8kg. Cheers

How are you finding the C8 on your CEM40 ? Does it need two counter weights ?

They're really good John, what exposure length did you manage unguided ?

Cheers Tooth_dr, reaaly didn't think you'd made it up 🙂 just good to see real world experience vs figures, of course now I need to update my Gpcam mono to a 290 🙂

Is the 290 really that much better ? Interesting... 120 qe - 75% 290 qe 'about 80%'

Possibly a dumb observation but surely you can't just put the 1600 in place of the 294, you'll need a filter holder of some sort or are you just going sole mono ?

St4 shouldn't be attached to hand controller ! Might do some damage that way. If you try guiding using the st4 cable from guide cam to mount, choose on camera as mount in PHD2

You could try the windows Synscan app, way easier to use than EQ mod, seems to pick the correct com port too.

If God created the universe ... Who created God ? 😂

They're prone to doing that ... If I'm right you need to leave it turned on, as far away from another WiFi for 4 hours then reboot. Edit + Found this ...

It's pretty spooky, blue sky and a Moon looking like it's midnight 😃

Inspired by Nik Szymaneks talk on Sunday I had a quick stab at imaging the moon with an Ha filter. 72ed / reducer / Ha filter / ZWO1600 , 3000 frames stacked in Autostakkert, quick process Photo shop android. Taken at around 9 ish while sky was still blue.

Yep, thoroughly enjoyed it , thanks SGL and Nik.

I prefer the burnt yellows but the last one is really nice !

👍

That's really come out well 👍 you could try more frames and then drizzle maybe ? Might be a bit bigger but I'd be very happy with that anyway !