CraigT82

What are you pointing the scope at whilst using the camera? Is this in the day ot at night? The changing light levels on the screen show it's working ok. I'd probably test it without the Barlow first if you can? Point the scope at a far off tree or spire using an eyepiece first then gently switch out the ep for the camera and refocus

A very nice set! I have lightroom but never used it, might have a play around with it

Lovely and sharp. I find it hard to focus I'm the blue skies but you've nailed it there

That's another beauty Mike. Did you manage to get it all in one frame? Rubbish weather here for me too this week but had a quick pop at it this eve

Very nice and moody. Tough to capture the moon at this phase. Is that the triplet you're using?

Not bad at all for a point and click. All the main features visible and identifiable

Very nice. Love the colour.

Thanks John. Considering I'd prettyy much written off this week and next, weather wise, I'm just glad to get something.

Pretty terrible conditions out there: High winds and scudding clouds, but was just about able to grab a couple of thousand frames on the Montes Caucasus, with craters Eudoxus and Aristotles in shot. Fullerscope, 3000 frames though red filter (600 stacked), APM 2.7x barlow.

Is that the radius of the curved field that's 1/3 of FL?

That's a very interesting blog. Thanks for sharing!

Unfortunately it's not that simple, else everyone would be doing it! Fast achros can even struggle to bring all the wavelengths within just one colour band to focus at the same point. However I've seem some very nice narrowband images taken with achros.

Yes it's a real change in minerology, I've looked at it quote a lot! This is a monochrome image but the albedo change can be seen

That's great! Is there a weather sensor and will it close automatically if cloud or raid is detected?

Yup... Jinghua optical company I think? (JOC)

Yes the movement between individual frames is accounted for during the alignment phase of the stacking procedure. The key for this is that the exposures are short enough to limit the blurring caused by the movement on any individual frame. The overall objective of the stacking is to increase the signal to noise ratio as you know, and this is what allows for aggressive sharpening without image breakdown. Below is a single raw frame, and a sharpened version of the same frame. Note how noisy the sharpened version is.

To illustrate vlaiv's first point in his post above, here is a sample of lunar video showing the shimmering effect you've noticed. The exposures for this video were only a couple of milliseconds. The next image is 1000 frames stacked: Still blurry but with much better signal to noise ratio. The final image is the sharpened version of the stacked image (the frequency restoration)

Really depends on length of scope. A 12" f6 newt will not necessarily weigh much more than a 12"f4 newt, but will put a lot more strain on the mount due to lever arm moment. My 220mm f7.5 newt is nearly 6ft long and only weighs about 13kg, but most of that weight is at the ends. I'd probbaly need a 50kg rated mount to do any real DSO work with it. My EQ6 barely holds it still.

It's not really noise as it's real signal. In long exposures stacking doesnt get rid of it as the star's image will be smeared on every long exposure. However other post processing techniques can reduce the smearing effect to make the stars more pint point. However if you're taking lots of very short exposures of a star and the seeing is causing the star to shift by a few pixels from frame to frame, then stacking software could align the star to a fixed point before stacking the frames.

In theory yes. But difficult to achieve in practice. Depends on the resolution you're imaging at (or focal length if visual). Some expensive mounts don't require guiding at all, they use sky models and encoders to know exactly where they are pointing.

A lot of schools are relying on parents to pay for stationary and textbooks. Not sure how many will be able to find money to pay you for an afternoon talk?

No I dont think so, even changing primary collimation on a newtonian will introduce cone error

Have you heard of cone error? It can be quite difficult to have the main scope optical axis exactly aligned with the mount's RA axis, especially with moving mirror scopes.

Thanks all 😁

Looks good, I like it!