CraigT82

Fantastic Neil, can't wait to see what you can do with the Orion once you've got back into the swing of it

For me the refractor images really stand out... The first one is something special indeed! If that was mine it'd be going up on the wall. Really love the waning phase too, we do not see enough of it.

Another big fan of the SW motor focuser here. With a little imagination and bits of alu angle they can be fitted to pretty much any focuser/OTA. I've had the fitted directly to a focuser shaft and also by using pulleys on the focus shaft and motor shaft with a toothed belt between. This way you can spec the pulleys to make it as fast or as slow as you like. Bombproof little units, had three so far and not a single issue between them.

Here you go...

I did think about doing something like that with my H130p, would have needed to saw off the protruding part of the existing focuser and attach the new helical one somehow. Trouble was I couldn't find a suitable replacement as they mostly have very short travel. The one linked to has only 1cm travel. I ended up buying a TS optics 2" single speed Crayford and bodging it on, as detailed below. Worked well.

Unfortunately there is no real way to upgrade the focuser on the Heritage 150p to a different one, not without some serious surgery. The dual speed focuser units are for the solid tube 'explorer' OTAs. Some have success with tying a piece of string around the top of the helical focuser, leaving two 3" or 4" long lengths hanging off to hold onto and move the focuser with. The idea being that it makes fine focus a bit easier and helps to prevent image shake as you're not touching the scope itself when focusing. On my Heritage 130p I drilled and tapped an M4 hole in the top part of the focuser and screw in a 75mm long bolt which acted as a lever for helping with fine focus.

Nice shot. Was hoping to get an image of this last night too but clouds had other plans despite clear forecast... c'est la vie! Is that the Meade 127mm triplet? How do you find it? They pop up used every now and then and I'm often tempted, seem to be decent value for money.

Noting wrong with composites of different exposures. It's done in DSO imaging all the time. Would be impossible to get any kind of decent image of M42 without it.

You can use PIPP to edit a long video into shorter ones. https://sites.google.com/site/astropipp/

Thanks, I've still got the Fullerscope, it's fitted out for white light solar at the minute but I haven't got round to using it much yet. Yes it's the coma correcting barlow. Shouldn't really be necessary for planetary if the target can be kept bang on-axis. It should theoretically help with lunar though, when using the full sensor size at native FL, and you're capturing data outside the diffraction limited field.

Very nice work Peter, fingers crossed for tonight's transits but not looking good here at the mo

Looks good to me, great animation 👍

Nice shot, doesn't sound like you did anything wrong in sharpcap, you can use the RoI feature to cut out the planet on the sensor and increase the frame rate. A 2.5x powermate would do well too.

Nice work Simon, that Saturn is sharp as a tack!

Very nice Lee 👍

I think these scopes do need a bit of modding to get them working properly. The primary mirror cell in mine wasn't working as it should so you might want to take a look at yours. The floating triangles were locked solid and the edge support studs were well off the mirror's CoG line. Pics and stuff here... https://stargazerslounge.com/topic/376811-adventures-with-an-old-sw-300p/?do=findComment&comment=4081862

Thanks. I think that's actually more of an an error that I've made that's crept in when I was processing the rings and globe seperately, I need to reprocess and repost when I have the time.

Before you start capturing you want to set your exposure to correctly expose the very brightest parts of the moon without any white clipping, preferably with a good bit of headroom too. Don't worry about the dimmer parts, they can be brightened up later in the processing flow. As with planetary imaging you want short exposures to freeze the seeing, so 5ms of thereabouts. You wan't to set the gain to allow you to achieve this short exposure time so if it has to be high gain then that's fine, but the moon is so strong a signal you may find you can get those short exposures with low gain. You want to be able to capture as many frames as possible during the still moments so yes you want as many frames per second as you can get, not sure what that is with the full sensor size of your camera? The moon doesn't rotate relative to us so you can capture for as long as you want really. Well until the shadow lengths start to change anyway.

I use the skywatcher pillar for my rig. It is kept in the garage and I roll it out to the front garden or rear patio depending on where my intended target is. In the front garden I have three steel spikes in the ground and the pier feet sit on them. Worked really well when set up and polar aligned (using sharpcap pro which took about 5 mins each time). I could regularly do 20 min exposures with no vibrations at 0.93"pp, when the seeing allowed. I did modify it slightly though. I cut down the pier by about a foot, as I only use newts this was sensible for me. I also added larger castors to make it roll easier with almost 100kg riding on it. Also the bolts that hold the pier adaptor to the pier are rubbish and needed changing right off the bat. If the forecast is good for a week or so I'll leave it in place and throw a motorbike cover over it and put it all back in the garage when the weather turns.

Thanks for the kind words all. Yes seeing was very variable for this session. At times it was so mushy I thought the focuser had slipped. Forecast is looking good for Sunday with potentially high pressure over the UK so fingers crossed for having another go then.

Very nice shots Mike, always fun to go over old stuff again and see what you can get out of it now. With these three images I think it comes down to how you view the image. I know some will view the images at 100% and zoom no further, in which case these images are pin sharp and faultless really. If you go further in and really zoom down to 200-300% they do start to look a bit too crisp maybe... But that's nit picking really. So I guess it comes to how you wish your image to be viewed: at 100% or even further in. Personally I usually try to process so that the image looks right when viewed really close in, which may leave it looking a little soft at 100%.

Seeing last night was average overall, with some good moments but not many. I did do a nice long session and capture a total 25x 2minute videos on Saturn from 10.19pm to 11.11pm (BST). I junked 8 captures and kept 17, so a total of 34 minutes has gone into this. Stacked best 10%. Firecapture>AS3>Astrosurface>Winjupos>Gimp. Skywatcher blue tube 300p with QHY462c, APM 2.7x barlow and ZWO ADC. FC reports FL of 4300mm (F/14 ish) and resolution of 0.14"PP. Capture details were: Exp - 4ms, Gain - 60%, FPS - 251.

Imaging Saturn with the 12"

Nice shots indeed. Best tutorial I've come across is buy the author. Lengthy but shows you exactly what everything does...

Hi, I just noticed this line in your first post, did you do any wavelet sharpening in siril? I've never used it so not sure if it can do that. Wavelet sharpening is a key part of processing planetary images... actually the most important part after stacking I'd say. I'm not aware of any Mac apps that can do wavelet sharpening, Perhaps there are some but I only know of Registax and Astrosurface which are both Windows only (or Linux under wine for registax). For what it's worth I bought a used Lenovo Thinkpad off gumtree for £100. It has a 250Gb SSD and two USB3 ports. I do all my astro imaging with it, capture and processing, been going strong for about 4 years now.