Daddystu

Mines screwed up so tight it doesn't move when there is just an eyepiece/diag in there Its just right though for the 1000D and chunky 2" field flattener.

I came in the house to run my setup last night and I fell asleep for 4 hours! I woke up at 5 am and everything was completely covered in dew. Soaking wet. All extension cables - laptop screen and keyboard. However, ethereal dawn had brought with her Orion in all its majesty so I capped off a few M42 subs before drying and packing away. I was a little surprised everything worked and I didn't get an electric shock though.

Not bad. Try adding in some longer subs for the outer spiral arm detail. Mines ambitiously capping off 10 minute subs of M31 now. As you're not guiding just yet you could try for 3 minutes duration.

I surrounded mine with ice blocks (in freezer bags) for 20 minutes before going out tonight. Had a touch of condensation but I think I knocked a few degrees off. A 7 minute sub at 1600 ISO wasn't 'too' noisy.

I agree with the other replies. You appear to be doing it correctly. Once your polar home position is set and you've rotated to place the circle over polaris at correct HA then just return to home position and do 3 star alignment.

Welcome from another Newport resident - struggling against the light pollution

It does get quicker as you become more familiar with the setting up procedure. Especially if you have a permanent set-up. In the future i'd like to setup an obsy around my pier to cut set-up times even further. How did your images come out?

I guess i'd agree that a 4.2 is achievable on stock cooler with good system fan setup but if you want to go higher (using voltage adjustments) you'll need at least a very good after market air cooler. some of the stock coolers are very bad and HWMonitor will show excess socket temps when running for example prime95 or folding tests. I also agree that the OP would not have to overclock this rig to meet his requirements still it'd be a shame to have such a setup and not overclock it... to me anyway

That's a pretty powerful system! Will overclock well too. Is it suitable for AP purposes? Well its suitable for anything i'd say especially with a decent graphics card thrown in (and an SSD). Far in excess of what is required for AP IMO. I'd suggest upping the PSU to 730W or higher for future proofing against upgrades ie graphics cards. 520W does seem low for such a powerful system. Remember, if you are overclocking it don't save on the cooler. you may want to go liquid or high end air with push-pull fan config.

Another thank you from me. I've made good use of your site over the years. Invaluable, as I can rarely afford retail prices.

As the Rock would say... "It doesn't matter"!

The consumable side of MTB is what made me sell my full suspension bike and buy a HEQ5 Totally fed up of replacing chains, cassettes, hubs, wheels, headsets, BBs etc.

Thanks for your input Jesper. I have had a fiddle with the techniques you mentioned and I shall be processing the core region separately to the outer arms. That re-process of yours looks miles better and although the outer arms are still a little faint it does show that there is a good level of detail in my data. Many thanks.

M31. 90x60 second subs and 10x300 second subs stacked together with associated darks using groups in DSS. 20 bias frames in main group but no flats used. I have tried to process this in a number of different ways using CS5, paint.NET and GIMP. The problem i'm having is keeping the inner detail when enhancing the outer spiral arm detail. This image is my best compromise between the two thus far. The blue channel has been increased slightly relative to the others as the red channel was giving me noise that was difficult to process out. Comments/criticisms/re-processing attempts most welcome.

I have trouble opening my .tifs in GIMP. You're right about the cost of photoshop though. I'd prefer to get a dob if I had several hundred quid going spare!