CraigT82

A very nice Jellyfish. I don't think I've ever seen concentric repeating halos around the bright star like that before, very interesting. Considering the moon phase I'd be tempted to just carry on with the Ha collection and come back to it for O3 under more favourable conditions?

Well if the power goes I can't do anything even if I'm stood by the scope as it's all running off mains. Cable issues...maybe. All my connected kit is connected directly to the outside laptop via a bundled 'umbilical' so I avoid the need for a hub. The umbilical is managed carefully and ran where it can't do any harm. Haven't had any issues with connections yet, touch wood. PC shutdowns... definitely. Only the other week I came out in the morning to find the outside laptop in the middle of an update. I have done what I can to mitigate the dreaded auto updates now and scheduled then to be done I the daytime, however I'm sure it'll catch me out again. Only thing lost for that error is data and I wouldn't get any data at all if I had to stay up and babysit the scope all night. Sleep is too precious!

Just leave it going and go to bed. Software (NINA for me) will take care of the meridian flip and if you set up mount limits in (eqmod?) you can negate the possibility of clashes. Good idead to force a few flips from various scope positions in the daytime to check for any possible cable snags. Unexpected rain is the main issue so I don't leave it going and go to bed if there's the slightest chance of rain.

You would need to remove the right angle correcting bit in order to fit the camera adaptor to the back of the tube, so you'd end up with the same result as starting off with the standard straight through finder

Don't think crows have anything to do with it despite what your dealers are saying! (Sorry couldn't resist 🙃)

You don't have to get the main scope right on target with the setting circles... that's what finders are for 😉

Definitely worth the effort. Lovely image!

How happy with you with the detail/resolution from the A7iii on the redcat? That has bigger pixels (5.93um from a quick search) than any of the ZWO offerings so if you are happy with that detail then you'll be more than happy with the 294 I'd imagine?

No-one with any sense is going to look to eBay as an arbiter or kit values... That site is as bent as a nine bob note and some prices are ridiculous even in normal times, anyone paying them are the ones needing a 'reality check'. Saying that though if the op is want to make a quick buck then it should be done on ebay or on Facebook. People on here generally know what stuff is really worth.

In normal times it's usually around 66% for well looked after used kit. Lately seeing a few things listed at around 85% new though, mostly on other site but some on here too. Whether or not you want to take advantage of the current situation to make a bit more money is entirely up to you.

Thanks, only this one I'm afraid, it's quite short as I didn't have much of the radiator foil left. Not pretty but it works!

Key thing (for me at least) is for it to be as light weight as possible as adding weight to the very end of an already longish and heavyish tube is the absolutely last place you want to be adding weight. I used thermal radiator foil and flocked it on the inside to make mine, extremely light and damp/water resistant too. The branded shields you can get are nice and will last a long time but are just too weighty, not to mention expensive for what they are.

For me it is usually: Firecapture > AS3 > Winjupos (optional) > Astrosurface > PS or AP or GIMP to finish

When with imaging with a new mount it's a good idea to have the camera oriented with RA along the width of the camera sensor and Dec along the height (or vice versa). If there are tracking problems they can be easier to diagnose if the direction of movement of the stars is easily identifiable as RA drift or DEC drift or somewhere in between

Nina just sends basic commands to PHD2 to stop and start guiding (start of sequence, during slews, focus routines etc). It is still PHD2 that is sending the guide commands to the actual mount. If PHD2 can connect to your mount using the synscan app on Windows then you should be fine I think.

Yeah used prices are a bit crazy at the minute with people trying to cash in, exploiting the fact that new kit is very thin on the ground due to covid etc. To be honest I don't know how long your exposures would be with the 5se. If you can really nail the mount alignment then maybe 10 seconds? I don't have any experience with those mounts. Depends a bit on how sharp and round you want your stars to be! You might want to consider spending some of your budget on a used short tube achromatic refractor like an ST80/100. Sure you would get a lot of CA on bright stars but you would be able to expose for longer, get a much wider field of view and get more nebulosity in the images. You could then use the C5 for imaging the moon and planets and the little frac for dso.

OK so your scope's FL is 1250mm which is pretty long for DSO imaging. You will also be limited to short exposures as the mount is an Alt Az and so long exposures will suffer from field rotation. These factors point you to a large pixel camera, as large as you can get to be honest. The larger pixels will give you a larger pixel scale which will help to hide mount tracking errors and will also gather more light to make most use of the shorter exposures you will be limited to. If we are talking ZWO then I'd recommend seeing if you could get your hands on a used 174 which would put you at a smidge under 1 arc second per pixel. Be warned though, that you're most likely not going to ever achieve nice tight round stars with this scope and mount. Getting a scope of 1250mm focal length to track precisely enough to produce nice little stars takes quite a meaty mount and some good guiding kit. Saying that though you should certainly be able to get some beginner level images of nebula and galaxies to show your friends and family. Regarding the colour or mono question... if you want to shoot Ha then you will want a mono sensor. You could then add later some S2 and O3 filters and produce nice tri-colour narrowband hubble palette images but the downside is that narrowband filters let in so little light that long to very long exposures are needed, which your kit isn't likely to manage. Another option, if your LP isn't too bad, is to get a colour camera and one of the Optolong L-enhance or L-extreme filters, these will let you produce pseudo-narrroband images which are quite attractive and very popular at the minute. Considering that your exposures will be limited to short ones, your best bet will likely be taking the kit out to a nice dark site and shooting broadband (i.e. normal colour camera or mono with RGB filters). Hope that helps Edit: here is an image of M42 taken with a 5se and a ASI385c, the user doesn't state what the exposure length was. https://www.astrobin.com/x30krw/?nc=user Here is another M42 taken with a 5se and a dslr (240x 5 sec exposures) https://www.astrobin.com/lzv1g9/?nc=user

You could consider RTV silicone adhesive to glue the mirror onto the cell (3 blobs) and getting rid of the clips. On mine I found 3.5mm tall blobs too tall and let the mirror move too much, then I tried 1.5mm blobs which caused funny star shapes, and now I'm on 2.25mm blobs which hold the mirror firmly with no loss of collimation as I slew around the sky and also no diffraction effects from the clips.

Some cracking shots there. Visually must have been incredible

Sorry I missed the part earlier where you said you had filters. What filters do you have? Imaging filters have different properties to visual filters so you would need to use specfic imaging filters with a mono camera. Also a filter wheel is pretty much essential as you really don't want to be taking the camera out and swapping the filters manually in the dark each time you want to switch. What other kit to you have? Scope? Mount? What are your skies like in rerms of light pollution? Just for info here are a couple of links to astrobin (hopefully the links work and you can see the images without having to log in to astrobin) This one to an image taken with a 178m camera: https://www.astrobin.com/n2vxd2/?page=2&nc=user This one to an image taken with a 385c camera. Note that this this particular user has opted to go for lots of short exposures (3000x 3 seconds). https://www.astrobin.com/jf24tx/?nc=user So see that very nice deep sky images are possible with both cameras. Deciding which one is optimal for you requires a bit more info from yourself on your kit and circumstances

Thats a really nice effort, well done. First thing I noticed though was the background sky was totally black (black point has clipped off some of the data) which does make the target object stand out but you are wasting some of your hard earned data by doing that.

Oh yeah the sun is notoriously hard to focus on if there are no sunspots! Moon would be good but something like a distant pylon will work well

Did you check what the zoom level screen was showing ie. Was it zoomed right in at 1:1, or fit to screen? ('Auto' i think for that in sharpcap). If you can try it all out in the daytime on a distant object it should be easier than messing about in the dark.

Looks pretty decent to me! I think you might be a smidge out of focus. In my opinion, for lunar imaging there is no better way to focus than to zoom right into the terminator area and scutinising the live images whilst tweaking focus back and forth. There is so much high contrast fine detail that it is easy to see when you've really nailed it, especially when seeing is good. Bahtinov masks are just not precise enough for lucky imaging work. I'd be very careful with the topaz AI stuff as it is easy to introduce fictional detail into the image, but yours above looks fine and is nicely processed.

That is truly beautiful 😍. One for the wall if ever I saw one