CraigT82

I bought a single length of spring off ebay. 15mm OD and 2mm wire Thickness (130N/mm). Was the cheapest way to do it but you will need to cut the spring into the required lengths and then finish the ends which is easily done if you have a blowtorch. https://stargazerslounge.com/topic/376811-adventures-with-an-old-sw-300p/?do=findComment&comment=4081880

Lack of time mostly, but also lack of interest as visual DSO observing doesn't really float my boat, especially living in a city. Maybe if I lived under dark skies. You should really do something with that mirror it's criminal for it to be sat in a box!

If the weather is bad enough for airborne saltwater to be a concern... it is certainly too bad to be using a telescope!

If you click the 'more settings' button that is highlighted in your screenshot, what is in there? There should be a usb traffic setting you can play with.

Nice one glad it works... the motor focusers are great bits of kit, and really make life easier.

Don't get too hung up on the 146.05mm spacing. That is just the point behind the scope where the spherical aberration is fully corrected. If your sensor isn't exactly there the image isn't going to suddenly start to break down. You will have a bit of room to play with - not sure exactly how much as I've never imaged with an SCT. If you have the ZWO ADC the nosepiece should unscre revealing a T2 thread, so you can thread it in-between the 5mm spacer and the camera (gender changers may be required) and it will act like a 37mm ish spacer (or whatever the ADC body length is) so you can get rid of the 21mm and 16.5mm spacers. Your barlow ideally wants to go in front of the ADC if you're using one. But as the scope is f/10 anyway it shouldn't be too much of an issue if you can't get it in front.

Nice image, loads of detail on the globe especially. I got out myself briefly last night but when adjusting the ADC the image faded from the screen and I looked up to see thick cloud coverage, and that was that. At least I enjoyed a couple of minutes of nice visuals of Jupiter and a few moons at about 150x whilst aligning the scope. Seeing looked good. Pity!

Inspired by this thread I've just been messing around with my QHY462c. I thought I may be able to get the colour reproduction straight out of the camera quite close to the true colour with regards to planetary imaging. We do see lots of planetary images with funny colour casts so thought it would be worth having a go at 'calibrating' the planetary cam. I put calibrating in inverted commas as I haven't done any of the maths or transforms described by Vlad.. all I did was: 1) download the colour calibration chart linked to earlier, and display on my phone (Galaxy S10) 2) fit meteor lens to camera and point it at the phone screen in dark room (with Baader L filer fitted) 3) bring up camera feed in firecapture, on a fairly decent monitor whihc is located so as to not cast light at phone/cam (dont think it is properly calibrated but it's as good as I've got) 4) tweak the red, green and blue levels in the capture settings until the colour on the feed from the cam matches as closely as possible the colours in the calibration chart, and note them for future reference It's not perfect - the resulting colours are not very close to the chart - but it is way closer than the default and it only took a couple of minutes. It should enable much better colour images straight out of the camera.

Yeah that looks just like the clamp that was attached to an old C8 I had a good few years ago

Nice video. Love the snazzy brick backdrop. I echo John's comments on the ES focal extenders, I've had the 2x and 3x and both were excellent. Is that an amp on the bedside table... alarm clock not loud enough!?

I think that the inner white circle is the reflective 45 degree face of the cheshire? If it is you should also see the dark spot in the centre of it, which is the peephole. This dark spot should be inside the middle of the donut

Neil this is that CN post I was talking about. The first post has a test image to look at through the ADC, works best on a monitor with the saturation turned up. Should show you what is happening when you move the levers https://www.cloudynights.com/topic/525563-for-users-of-the-new-zwo-adc-important/

Not sure on that one, no idea how the ADC could correct the dispersion with both levers being together... unless somehow one of the levers is in the wrong hole on the prism and so it's actually at maximum correction. Each of the two prisms on mine have two threaded holes in the edge of the prism. In order for the ADC to work one prism must have it's lever connected to the thick edge of the prism and the other prism must have it's lever in the thin edge. This way when the levers are together the prism wedges are opposite and cancel each other out. I wonder if yours has been fiddled with in the past and someone might have put one of the levers back in the wrong hole.

Fantastic result. Don't often see planetary images like that from fracs

Nice video. I hear a lot of people holding off from WJ as its known as a bit of a black art but it's pretty easy really, although we only really scratch the surface of what it can do.

As above, a focal ratio of around 5x the pixel size is a good place to be for lunar and planetary. Using the 4x PM with an f/10 scope will put you at f/40 so with the ASI290m that's a whopping 14x the pixel size. The resulting image would be massive and very blurry and wouldn't contain anymore detail than an image captured at a much shorter focal length. It would also require much longer exposures and that is exactly what you don't want for lucky imaging as it'll really slow down your frame rate. As an example this Jupiter image was capture at f/13.5 which is about 4.5x pixel size (with gain at 40% and exposures of 2.2ms which gave 247fps).

Did you slacken off the tripod bolt before trying to turn the azimuth adjusters? Just needs to be backed off a tad before adjusting then nipped up gently once happy. Also remember that when you tighten one Az adjuster you need to slacken the other

Just a thought... if using a phone or tablet as refence display the check the display settings and make sure it's not on 'vivid' or 'cinema' or whatever. And turn off blue light filter!

Have a look at this thread to see a good method of triangle alignment... https://stargazerslounge.com/topic/378864-16-inch-f5-with-nichol-optics/?do=findComment&comment=4120933

Great report Magnus. I'm a bit disappointed to see that the thread title wasn't "First Light for Triggers Broom" but it'll do as is I suppose! Seriously nice looking scope. Regarding the mirror cell, I have some preliminary designs sketched up in AutoCAD if you want to take a look? My intention is to fabricate one for my SW 12" mirror which is larger as you know, but might give you some ideas. Let me know. Cheers

Very nice Trevor 👍. Good to get out and get some practice despite the conditions

That is fantastic. Lovely to watch. Very nice work 👍

My Fullerscope is early 80s so knocking on 40 years now. Plastic drain pipe tubing doesn't take much looking after 😄

Wow Neil those are impressive. I had one of those f/11 across a couple of years ago and loved it, views were pin sharp but just a bit dim compared to my Fullerscope (not really a fair comparison being 8.75")

Oh yeah sorry just notice the date in the title! Yeah no worries go ahead.