kyokugaisha

If you don't win Astronomy Photographer of the Year for that then there is no justice in the world! Astonishing.

Managed to get a couple of hours to try everything properly on Saturday night. PHD seemed happy as I aimed for M45 - plenty of guide stars there! Decided to just go for as many 5 min subs as I could before running out of patience and processing them to see the final picture. Have to say, even though there was a slight wobble in the dec axis that shows in the star shapes, I was more than happy with the result. In fact, I can't quite belive my little setup could produce this image! It was only 20 minutes of data with darks, flats and bias frames as well.

Well, the kit arrived and miraculously I managed to solder everything (including my finger - ouch) correctly. Had first chance to check if everything was working on Sunday night and got the magical guiding notification (for RA and Dec) in PHD after a bit of fiddling - so all is good! However in my excitement I forgot to check the graph! Only thing I couldn't do was try some long exposure shots thanks to the full moon. Anything more than 30 seconds was washed out. Proper tests shall resume at the next moonless opportunity.

Thanks for the reply QM. I thought so but was just trying to be a bit cheap and lazy

BTW thank you for this thread and all the work you and the others have done putting this together and saving plebs like me all the time and mistakes! Your results have been really impressive and inspiring.

I have a quick question about this mod. I've ordered the parts for the ST4 port conversion to use a guidescope with the EQ5 and I was wondering whether it could be used as a primitive GOTO mount. I appreciate the slew speed would be much slower than normal but if I were to use ASCOM compatible software to align it (if possible!) and moved the scope to the general vicinity of the object could I slew it to the object with the software? I was thinking of something like Cartes du Ciel or Deep Sky 2000.