michael8554

It's not clear to me whether at some point you ran PHD2 with guiding off, or ran the Guide Assistant, to examine the mount's inherent RA behaviour. Unguided RA jumps similar to that shown in the guided shot suggests a Warranty Return. Or a strip-down, which will invalidate the warranty. Michael

The OP's astro modded DSLR may have been reassembled with a small amount of sensor tilt........... Michael

"Why could you not alter the lens shape to focus the same area of sky at a different point?" That's exactly how a refractor with a wide angle of view, differs from a refractor with a narrow angle of view - the lenses have a different shape. Those Fish Eye lenses you can screw onto the front of a camera lens do that too. And a Focal Reducer on the back of an OTA appears to widen the angle of view, aka the Field of View FOV Reflectors alter the FOV by having deeper or flatter mirror shapes. Ultimately the focal length, which is determined by the lens or mirror shape, determines the FOV. Michael

The 120 sec sub has elongated stars in the middle. Inspect a short exposure taken with high ISO, to minimise tracking/guiding errors. It looks like there may be a tiny amount of tilt too. Michael

If you didn't use Flats then the centre bright-up is to be expected, it's not a problem with your shooting or stacking. Michael

Hi Carl A good start, the Canon 6D gives a very clean image. Did you Dither as you aren't using Darks ? Centre of frame seems bright, are the Flats working correctly ? Michael

Hi Steve The Starwave 0.8x Reducer V3 isn't that common, and may behave in an opposite way to other FRs. You won't be able to get back to the 63mm backfocus with the filter drawer in that position, can it go in front of the FR without vigneting ? Michael

So have you solved the problem of "No picture to save" you had in your other DSS post ? Michael

What camera, OTA, CC ? Top right corner has the best star shape, but up/down elongation and focus gets worst the further down you look. Suggesting Tilt. Michael

Yes Michael

I'd have thought that first you do a star alignment of the mount. Then centre a star, and then synch Stellarium to that position. Are the PC, mount, and Stellarium date and time the same ? Michael

Wait a few more days and all the leaves will have died and fallen off.......... :-< Michael

The first screenshot shows the normal "stacking completed" display of the RGB adjustment sliders. But the second screenshot shows "No picture to save" Puzzling. Start over and show a screenshot of the result after only clicking on "Register checked pictures" (you did tick all the images to be stacked ?) Needs to show the list of subs and their statistics. Michael

You need: 1. Meade #64 Adapter for ETX 60 Onto which you screw: 2. Your Rebel XT with a standard Canon T2 Adapter attached. The "Qualide T-mount adapter for Canon" may be suitable. Michael

Never heard of a 600Da, do you mean a 60Da ? Below about £500 a DSLR or Mirrorless is a good choice, but with £1K you should look for a cooled astrocam. Michael

Hi Mikey If you're not guiding you can Drift Align the PA using the camera on the OTA.. Pointing south near Dec=0 for the Az alignment of the mount. and then east or west for the Alt alignment. Or adapt the finderscope to take the camera and use SharpCap. But that will entail swapping back and forth of course. Michael

The suggestion is that overloading the mount causes poor GoTos. Overloading may cause the bearings to bind. May overload the motors, causing them to burn out. May cause the clutches to slip. Mat cause poor tracking. Etc etc.... Failing to be close to the third alignment star won't be a date or time problem, as centring the first two stars will already have pulled the mount's starmap into fairly close alignment. But should still be checked of course. Wrong date or time will merely fool the mount into thinking some targets are below the horizon etc. "reset the handset as it said warning reverting to previous CE or something similar" Not familiar with Skywatcher stuff, but that may be a clue ? Michael

Capturing planets with a 1/3" sensor camera can be challenging. At f/30 I had to use a Flip Mirror. To centralise the target with a parfocal cross-hair eyepiece, before flipping to the camera. As Craid said, over-expose the camera in the hope of seeing a glow to one side. Michael

"The guiding was reported as .5 total RMS." On it's own that would seem good. But it's the individual RA and Dec guide errors that need to be similar for round stars. Those DSS shots are not helpful, post a jpeg of one of your subs, stretched if necessary. Michael

I have "Astronomy Now" and the US "Sky & Telescope." Although they try to cater to a range of abilities, in practice you should try them all and decide which one suits YOU. Michael

You can see from the graphs that corrections aren't applied until the guide error reaches over 1 arcsec. I assume that ASIAir doesn't have the Minimum Move setting that PHD2 has ? That setting would allow corrections to start at a smaller error. There are no overshoots, so it would be worth trying increasingly more RA Aggression, to bring those over-1-arcsec deviations back more quickly. Overshoots would indicate too much, so try each increase for a few minutes, and see if the RA error figure is better or worse. Michael

Barlows are often used to extend the focus point outside of the focus tube of Newtonians, to where a camera sensor would be placed. So I mean the focus point will be much further away from the focuser with a DSLR and Barlow, than with an eyepiece. Find daytime focus with the DSLR and Barlow, using the eyelevel optical finder, on a distant landmark. Then without altering the focus, try an eyepiece, pulling it out of the focuser until you see a roughly focused image. With luck that may still be inside the focuser, and you could attach a "Parfocal Ring" onto the eyepiece barrel, to give you the correct insertion in future. But if it's outside the focuser you will have to add an extension to the eyepiece only. Michael

I'd be surprised if such a complex distorted star image could be measured for HFD. But it would be interesting to see the HFD as focus goes through best Bahtinov setting. Michael

Meade uses the format "10th August 2022" - simples. Michael

I don't have a CEM60, but my guess would be: The mount may have an internal sensor for where Zero is. Once the mount has done a "Goto Zero Position", you loosen the clutches and position the scope in Zero Position. Michael