happy-kat

That's a great link thanks. Yesterday it was high at a good time for me but way too faint, tomorrow I'm not doing the silly o'clock, best of luck to those who try that.

It's not being found in my sky safari v3 plus or v5 pro

Something i really need to do so thanks for sharing what you did

Hi, naked eye DSO M45 Pleiades could try with your telescope, M42 Orion and M44 bee hive cluster, double cluster as well.

Synscan app. If your light pollution inhibits finding stars what I do is level mount, point OTA  north and horizontal. Turn on, connect, dual encoders on (I like freedom find), 1 star alignment chose a star that theoretically the telescope will see and goto the mount will slew there, fine tune and confirm. Repeat on several more stars. I've found the other alignment options do not auto slew to the first star.

That's great, hope you have fun with it

Stelarium planetarium will get you started, could build the background for it that's your intended observing spot.

Do you recall the telescope type at the Science Museum you were looking at that engaged your son?

Were they refractors or a Newtonian? (Eyepeice at the very end at the bottom or an eyepiece on the side near the top)

chair outside dressed with a virtuoso v1 mount level and horizontal pointing north, synscan dongle, 50ED, ASI462MC, flower pot due shield, LiFEPO4 tank and a 10m usb cable getting cold outside, a plonk and go arrangement.

Me inside pc screen - ASCOM, ASTAP, sharpcap Pro, PHD2, stellarium and a mobile using scanpro app (tend to use that then the windows app) and other end of the 10m usb from the camera.

For fully hands off use my method is 1 star align as on this option the mount will slew to where it thinks the target is, fine tune the position by looking at what the camera sees in sharpcap, using 1 star alignment repeat on different targets using platesolve in sharpcap a bit too all builds a better goto response.

So far so good but getting unpredictable exposure length even accounting for the most forgiving directions of East and West below 60 degrees. The small sensor size does expose issues fast, I do use a DSLR sometimes and that can give longer exposures say 20 seconds which is useable for me. Lets see what the tracking is like with the small sensor, PHD2 wasn't quite happy the star (single star tracking) kept drifting off. What ever fiddling I did couldn't really fix it. This was the best I managed, see the scale size on the left!

Next using platesolving to assist I worked out what the drift was, aim at a star where the altaz and eq axis are parallel, due South 30-40 degrees for me (stelllarium helps here). platesolved again after 5 or 10 minutes tracking and resynced and centred and pumped the before and after coordinates into a spreadsheet and worked out the RA had negligible drift but DEC had a fairly consistent drift of 0.025. ASCOM does have an offset rate feature but the mount did not support receiving that communication.  Love the mount tracks great for visual but I've reached a block currently with what software I was using but I've found by search Astroberry on Pi might be worth trying as there's a driver for the mount where I can enter the DEC rate adjustment.

In the meantime I picked up a returned az-gti in the recent offers using my super FLO voucher I'd been saving, happy to start a journey with mount taking the pressure off getting my Pi3A+ to work with Astroberry but will be sticking with Altaz as this suits me.

A question as I thought this would be where to ask. On the base of the mount there are two concave dimples, do these serve any purpose please? I don't see any convex dimples on the top of the extension pillar looking at images.

That stack was mammoth, nice detail in the result.

Thanks for replying, I have seen that thread but it is the virtuoso gti and as far as I can see if uses a different motorboard based on skywatcher driver download support, I was only looking to see if other altaz mounts had the set RA rate override enabled or not.

Although I use a totally different setup I've found the longer I stretch out the exposure length the higher the reject list.

Having started to read your shared document, lots there, I see you have mentioned a virtuoso gti in there I am using a virtuoso v1 with synscan wifi dongle and have sharpcap/ascom/astap/phd2/platesolving playing together but in ascom the tracking rates option of RA or Dec offset rate is not enabled. I am curious to know please with your dob in ascom  is this feature enabled and the send to telescope button active? 

Definitely try things as you've done. You can also platesolve with ASTAP and sharpcap I use the pro flavour and ASCOM knits it together for me with a synscan dongle in my dob

If it's just planetary then with practice members have imaged by manually tracking the planet as it's very fast framed videos like exposure measured in milli seconds as the planet drifts through the field of view between adjusting where the telescope points, sounds very hard to me.

that's quite a light spill

Have you started first with installing the ZWO ASI driver.

nicely captured the comet, great green colour

Has the mount got the latest firmware and motor controller installs

You could take the telescope tube off and mount that on a suitable tripod. 

This thread shows the smaller 130p on a tripod, your tube is bigger though.

https://stargazerslounge.com/topic/268257-heritage-130p-flextube-travel-friendly-tripod-required/#comment-2985070

There is a mistake in what I wrote above re siril, I've corrected my original post

I had found it mentioned online somewhere re DSS and gave it a go. DSS with my data does better on comet and stars option. I also marked all 307 frames and not seeing a big difference compared to the three frames comet marked. I do choose a reference frame with the clearest space on the comet head as I think it might help with processing later.

What i did, once registered and whittled any poor frames out and date/time sorted the list I select the first frame and it opens. On the right panel on the image select the green comet icon. Using mouse wheel  zoom in and pick the comet head (the comet shows enough I can pick it out (use shift key if need to free move the mouse)) a purple circle marks the comet, select save. Repeat for the last frame and then do the same for the frame being used as the reference frame. I chose a reference frame around the middle of the list with clear starless space around the comet head. With my camera flats work best anything else gets noisier for me. Sigma clipping on the lights and comet and stars for the comet stacking mode. 

I'm not happy yet with my processing but I'm working with challenging data as I'm using an altaz mount and a noisy camera.

There's been lots of great comet images shared using different processing methods. 

3 hours ago, AstroMuni said:

No, On Siril you just need to mark on 1st and last frame

Thanks for spotting this, and also the reference frame can be tagged in SIRIL

DSS after registering mark the comet on the first and last frame and the reference frame. (Siril similar)

ASTAP you have to mark the comet on all frames

I would with sharpcap point out window during the day at very distant tree (not sun) would be my thought. I would find the display easier to tweak what I'm seeing then when it's dark you won't be far off star sharp.

If you look at a star and focus it so it is as tight as you can then swing to Jupiter then the same eyepiece will be focused.

If there's bad seeing, transparency or  Jupiter is very low in sky then Jupiter might not resolve well.