happy-kat

When using a altaz mount in the northern hemisphere then the best direction to aim is East or West below 60 degrees. Unfortunately Orion is now more southerly so will show star trailing quite quickly. You can get red dot finder to mount in the flash hot shoe should you mount your camera on a dove bar and remove the OTA from the mount.

The bee hive cluster is placed well you could use your 100mm.

Stopping down might be needed to improve star shapes across the frame.

Focus where a third intersects can even out focus.

And being a canon if you don't have a laptop but do have an android phone see if your camera is supported by DSLR Controller, need an OTG cable. Great for focusing great for camera control.

I use a collimation cap on mine, you can make one from an old 35mm film canister, drill a hole dead centre in it.

There is a member imaging with this telescope in the no eq challenge thread.

If a DSLR is used the telescope might not have enough in focus travel distance to reach focus though some overcome this by using a barlow which given the planets or Moon as intended targets you might be using one anyway.

The mount would track in tiny left right up down movements which keeps the object in frame but doesn't track field rotation. This can be worked around by keeping exposure lengths within limits eg a several minutes long video of Jupiter might start showing rotation (I don't know how to calculate when how many minutes).

Have fun trying this new target, at least it gives a target when it is big and bright.

3 hours ago, shropshire lad said:

I have been using DSS but lately I'm not too happy with the final stacked image .. my raw files look good but the final image from DSS is way too bright I have removed and reinstalled it but no better.

 

Are you processing as well in DSS? I use the auto-generated fits file which is linear and I ignore what it had looked like in DSS.

I find DSS ok to use and if I get problems and it does not stack then it is usually because the stars were out of focus.

Depending on what image of the Moon you are after you could also try using your guide camera as it's probably got smaller pixels.

The video stacking software handles selecting the best frames, I like using Registax to process but autostakkert is easier to use, the wavelet sharpening is excellent in registax.

For capture sharpcap or. Firecapture or asicam on a mobile device. Can do raw video you take a minute or so of high frame rate, select a ROI it helps keep frame rate higher as not capturing lots of black blank sky.

For the Moon tend to take video so no calibration files used.

What will you be shooting the Moon with?

Hi. If the tension is just right then the telescope will move between position with enough tension to hold it on the AZ3.  If the telescope is pointing upwards then there are minor changes you could make to help with having the telescope hold in more steep elevations if you find your telescope sags.

The slow mo control run out of movement so periodically you'll need to rewind them.

You may need to adjust the tension of the azimuth adjuster wheel bolt to loosen it, for altitude there's a nylock holding that though that one needs to have some tension.

sky safari you might need to change the port if it is not connecting try 11882

This is my star overlay test with the two 0.5mm spacers removed. This looks good to go and makes it easier to setup, I screwed the EVOFF straight to the 50ED to eliminate tilt. 6 1 second images and 2 5 seconds there are enough stars to show the trend I think of the corners and any slight none perfect stacking would round with kappa clipping.

I should probably repeat setup test with the ASI camera to know what bits to use with that.

No I haven't, I have a 1.6x shorty barlow by astro engineering. I did notice that when focused there was only say 4mm or so of available inward focus travel left so I don't know if there'll be enough with the barlow as well.

Yet to build an image layering the 1 second files to check the corners against the previous test image to compare the effect with or without my DIY spacers on the FF.

50ED, EVO-FFv2, 1100d, Virtuoso v1

M44 nice starry Beehive cluster, 2mins 54 seconds of a mix of 1 second (as testing FF), 5, 10, 15, 20, 25 and 30 seconds only 21 lights. Moon was somewhere... 4 degrees, cold, moist and murky. DSS, StarTools and HLVG run in Paintshoppro and saved down in IrFanview to jpg. I did use flats (and dark flats) but they were prior to the great whopping 4 dust bunnies from last night.

particularly like the last image

Clear last night so got to try focus and the FF without using my DIY .5mm spacers.

The cardboard baktinov mask worked well, though I had not thought to save an image from the DSLR to the phone to view in gallery if I had I would have spotted I was slightly off centre. Here's a crop of the spikes, the only star last bright enough was Sirus, while it was clear it was very cold, moist and murky.

Do you know which 130p the telescope is? As the f5 one generally doesn't come to focus with a DSLR as there's not enough in fucus travel, could look at moving the mirror up or use a barlow which you might likely be doing anyway if imaging the Moon.

You can use Registax to process Moon images whether stills or videos, is fairly old now and free but works well. GIMP is free too and could be used for other editing of your images.

The interval from memory is exposure length plus gap between frames, delay is only the gap before the first frame taken, the numbers are hours, minutes, seconds.

Nice to see another of your images with this little cracker.

I wonder if that brings goto to that mount now with the smartphone controlled comment

Captured and processed in 2021, a very quiet year

December Pleiades 1100d | 50ED | EVO-FFv2 | Virtuoso v1

with a light bucket like that you would be surprised at what DSO you could capture, several members with large reflectors on altaz tracking mounts here.

https://stargazerslounge.com/topic/228101-the-no-eq-dso-challenge/page/160/

you'll need to work within the capabilities the mounts has and may find 20 seconds your restriction on exposure length

As far as I can read the ASI533MC has only a Anti Reflective window, you might want to do your own reading to check, a IR UV filter would be needed and see what other people with the camera are doing.

The L Extreme probably includes IR UV line blocking too, check the specs.

With viewing on a mobile the signature is hidden, it would be helpful to add what camera, telescope etc was used please?

Infrared is often blocked by the camera, but not reading what camera was used can't say if the camera natively blocked IR