CraigT82

Doesn’t matter if you measure on the AC side or the DC side… the current varies with the power consumption just the same. You just get a smaller value for current on the AC side as the voltage is higher. Here is a (rubbish) video I made using the one I linked to:

What you’re paying for there is a shiny case, nice leads and an LCD display. It still only reads down to milliamps, same as the cheapo Amazon one, so precision is the same.

That does like a nicely made bit of kit but if you don’t want to spend £65 one of these can do the job for a lot less money… Decdeal LCD Display Electricity Usage Power Meter Socket Energy Watt Volt Amps Wattage KWH Consumption Analyzer Monitor Outlet AC230V~250V UK Plug https://amzn.eu/d/0rLbE73

I’ve loaded up an old EQ6 with a SW300p weighing in at over 30kgs and 1.5m long for planetary imaging and some visual. Tripod is key, I used a cut down wheeled pier. if you have tracking and an electric focuser- removing the need to touch the scope during observing - you’ll be fine.

That probably explains it then, I’ve often found that the seeing just as the sun is setting can be very good but then deteriorates quickly after sunset. I’d love to see what the big frac can do under good seeing, that scope is on my ‘must own someday’ list. Cheers

I used Baader No1 brown grease on my old EQ6 when I striped and reassembled it, ran sweet as a nut afterwards. It is very thick and very very sticky (not completely unlike the original skywatcher grease), just what you need on mounts that might have somewhat less than perfect tolerances. The bearings I bought to replace worn ones were all pre-greased and so these were left as is.

Nice scope and nice shots too, thanks for sharing. I put the images side by side to make a better comparison (top is frac, bottom is mak). The mak180 seems to be resolving a lot more fine details, more than I’d have expected from its 30mm advantage. Did you also use a red filter with the Mak too? How did the two scopes compare visually? I’d imagined them to be pretty close and then only if the mak is thermally managed.

Just seen the image your included in the OP... Wow! Beautiful diffraction pattern, and a real plethora of galaxies in that image

That’s a really nice scope, well done. I like the primary mirror cell design in particular, very simple but very functional, do you need to lubricate the central spherical surfaces to give a smooth collimation motion?

Just to add… if you get dew on the scope tube during a session, that’s an indicator that the tube has cooled below ambient temp and has hit the dew point temp which may be a good couple of degrees cooler than ambient, depending on the humidity. I’ve read somewhere that even temp deltas in the tube of only 0.5 degrees can start to noticeable degrade the wavefront. My old Fullerscope was terrible for radiating heat, the plastic tubing must have had a v. high emissivity as I used to get dew soaking the inside the tube as well as on the outside. Wrapping it up with the screwfix radiator stuff linked to earlier in the thread put a stop to that and helped the scope perform at it’s best - in my opinion that is, as I didn’t do any proper testing or data gathering to quantify the benefit of the insulation.

The idea is to stop the tube walls of the OTA from cooling below ambient (via radiative emission) The tube cooling below ambient is bad news because the air inside the tube which is in contact with the tube wall will also cool and become a source of temp deltas inside the OTA which as you probably know is a situation to be avoided. Other sources of temp deltas within the tube are the mirrors, and the warmer air rising off them and this is where fans can help. Tue holy grail of scope cooling is to have ALL the air inside the tube at the same ambient temperature as the outside air.

Awesome work!

For the data rates the camera is outputting you can think of it like this: When capturing in RAW8 (which is what you should be doing for planetary), 1 pixel = 1 byte. So say you have a 400x400 RoI that's 160,000 bytes which is 0.16MB for a single frame. So if you have 10MB/s of transfer rate capability you'll get 10/0.16 = 62 fps. Obviously other factors may affect this. Don't think that a camera with smaller pixels will have a smaller RoI than a larger pixeled camera, and hence will have smaller files to transfer. The smaller pixels mean a smaller RoI (in terms of square mm) but there's still the same number of pixels within that RoI, and it's the number of pixels which dictates file sizes. In terms of costs and affordability, have a look at used kit. I recently sold on here a QHY462C for £175 and a rather good USB3/SSD laptop for £125.

Illuminating from the inside of the tube like that to line up the template is an excellent idea... I'll steal that next time I upgrade focuser... if you don't mind!

You don't need to spend more than £100 on a laptop, that's what I paid on gumtree for a used lenovo thinkpad with 2x USB3 ports and a 250gb SSD. Mind you with the current situation around supply used prices will probably be significantly higher at the minute.

Better than new! Nice work 👍

RAW8 is is the one to use, that will produce an 8 bit capture which will appear monochrome on screen and when played back. but actually contains colour info once de-bayered (which is what Autostakkert 3 will automatically do - if you use that). I'm not familiar with ASICAP but I'd start off with using a high gain (say 3/4 max) and a short exposure ideally around 5ms but certainly below 10ms if you can. The image on the screen will appear quite dim but that's ok, you can brighten it later. Pump up the gain even more if you need to - short exposures are vital. Don't fall into the trap of trying to get the preview image on screen to look 'nice'. If the settings are good it will look very dim and very noisy but don't worry about that. I find it helps to find focus by using the debayered preview and with a lower gain and more exposure for a birghter, cleaner and colour preview image, and before capture I will set those settings back after focussing and before hitting the capture button. Good luck!

Those Jupiter images are almost identical apart from a little rotation, how sure are you you haven't mixed up the recordings or stacks and both images are from the same scope?

Good to see the detective work is paying off!

Here is a good comparison and an example of what the Mewlon family can do in expert hands...

That screwfix stuff is exactly the stuff I have used on my Fullerscope and my SW300p (two layers of it). If it were me I'd cover everything, but no harm to try doing just the metal tube at first and see if you get some benefit.

For planetary you can always stick a uv/ir cut filter in the imaging train somewhere.

I echo John's comments, Venus is best for me visually (and imaging) in a blue sky.

Alas... it was not to be, the clouds found me just before 9. Never mind! 🙄

Looking good here in Bristol. Got the 300p out for a bit of visual observing... alongside the H130p. Also got a 90mm aperture mask for the 300p so will try that too.