daz

I love mine too Jamie!! I tell the wife it's my (new) forever scope, but I really think it is!!

That's a great image too!!

Keen to get my grubby paws on one as well!!

Hi Andy

I don't have the Feathertouch on mine, but I have an Atik One + OAG + Atik GP on my 100 with the r+p and it's absolutely fine. I use the StarSharp motor focuser on mine.

Doesn't really answer your question, but I can't imaging the weight difference between my rig and your ZWO would be that different...

@BeerMe

You can indeed book a pitch and sleep in your car - please see our dedicated web info site at http://sglsp.com/

But as Michael says, we certainly wouldn't recommend running the engine all night!

I downloaded this yesterday and works perfectly - even with no settings in, so it was a true blind solve.

Rob - happy to test your image... email to daz@stargazerslounge.com if you like...

Excellent thread!!

I am (slowly) working on a similar project but will have full automation (eventually). I was thinking of a full loop of chain down both sides, but your solution looks very neat!

1 hour ago, westmarch said:

There is a nice little app. Called AstroAid that helps work out FOV, etc.  for different combinations. Handy if you are out of reach of a PC. 

This is IOS only by the look of it

Yeah, sorry Jules - I think you're right!

14 hours ago, nightfisher said:

I have a Celestron astromaster mount (AZ) with stainless tripod that i want out of the way any takers at £10

Got a picture Jules? I need something for my ED80 while I figure out where I am getting some misalignment in my stars!

Dibs on the barlow, Dave!

I will have my Zotac Zbox ID82 Plus mini-PC which until recently ran my observatory. I have now switched to a desktop as I specifically needed a serial port.... but I also used this in the field at pretty much all the SGL/Kelling parties...

It has:

• Dual Core i3-220ghz CPU
• 8GB RAM (will take up to 16)
• 300GB Western Digital HDD (can be swapped out for larger capacity)
• 2 x USB 3 
• 4 x USB 2 (supports USB Charging in S1, S3, S4 or S5 via top or front 'yellow' USB ports)
• Gigabit LAN
• Wifi (802.11n)
• Bluetooth v3.0
• 8 Channel Digital Audio
• Stereo Analog Audio
• HDMI & DVI Output
• MMC/SDHC/XD/SD Card Reader

It comes with a 19" monitor, DVI Cable, Zotac power cable, monitor power cable, mouse, keyboard, original driver discs and manuals and I will include one of FLOs Red Screen filters. It does not have the original remote control and I don't have a big enough bag to carry it all in (but it will be safely transported to the SP).

The PC is mounted on the rear of the monitor with a VESA mounting plate. The dimensions of the PC itself are 188mm x 188mm x 44mm - it's small enough to be mounted close to the tripod/mount if you so wished.

It has a clean, fully patched but inactivated Windows 64-bit installation - you will need your licence key!

There is no other software installed, but I will happily pre-load with ASCOM, EQMOD, star catalogues, Stellarium or CdC, DSS - or any other of the popular free astro software.

Pics to be uploaded later...

I will be in the Pavillion POD (on the non-electric field) but I'll be about Fri-Mon - or I can bring over to your pitch...

I think discussions around the £175 mark would be sensible

Also, I have a collection of various adapters (mostly T2 I think) that I seem to have acquired - most of which I have no idea what they are for!! I'll take some pics and add some (hopefully) meaningful descriptions - see if anyone wants to swap for a couple of them gold-coloured coins!

Instant success!! Grrrr.....!!

So, I downloaded the latest Ansvr 0.18 and installed on my general lappy. I ran the index download utility and basically grabbed everything... 30-odd GB of data!

I zipped those up onto my USB drive and then installed the Ansvr onto the obsy PC, and then extracted the indexes. I then ran PPA on the images I took last night and they solved within about 7 seconds!

The polaris off-set matched what I was seeing last night after solving them on Nova, so am happy now!!

I now just need to test the plate solving in SGP - but I reckon I have solved the issue there as well!!! (pun intended!)

30+GB of indexes downloaded!!!

And instantly the forecast for ANY clear skies has evaporated.... >sigh<

I ran this again last night but could not get a local solve to work at all. Nova was fine, but my internet connection to the obsy is somewhat erratic and of course, when out in the field I won't necessarily have access to t'internet!

I suspect my local Nova implementation is broken, given the errors I was getting before on the indexes. So, I will re-installed Ansvr from scratch - there is a newer version anyway - and re-download the index files.

This could well explain my previous failures at plate solving in SGP!

Still trying to get my diary aligned with the local weather  Maybe a chance tomorrow evening.... Maybe!

13 hours ago, themos said:

I will do something about that in the next release, as it's pretty frustrating!

 

The weather?

Work?

Oh wait..... 

Sorry Themos - work and weather conspire against me!

Saturday looks like the next opportunity for me to test, so in the meantime, I'll Python updated with ujson and get the Nova plate solving working...

One thing I meant to say - with the ujson error, the app just sits there with the 'solving image' message, rather than registering the error and reporting back...

2 minutes ago, themos said:

been there, done that. I always stick to arcseconds per pixel!

 

Thanks Themos

I found the post with those settings, and had the down sampling set to 2.

I need to go and check the Nova site again to see what my calculated image scale was - I've just thought that I might have made an error in the unit of measurement!

Ah...... I didn't get that far back in the thread

I had errors with the 4200 and 4201 index files - so I removed them and that error went away! I could then solve the test images

However, with my own images I could not get a solve. In the end I uploaded to Nova and solved them, then downloaded the WCS files and finally got a solution. I need to play a lot more and see what the right settings are for the DSLR/Lens (I was using my 600D/18-55 lens and tried at 18mm and somewhere near to 30mm). Even with the solved file on Nova so I could get the image scale, I still could not get a local solve to work...

Still, progress

OK, more testing....

I have run PPA.py from the cmd line to see what the output looks like, and it looks like I have some issues!!

When I try and locally I get an error about not being able to load tables from the index files - so I need to check into that..

When I try and solve via Nova, I get an error than ujson cannot be found by TKinter... I might do a re-install of Anaconda just to be sure....

Ok have installed Anaconda and the PPA software.

Have registered with Nova so I have an API key. I also configured the local server settings as well...

I selected the V image and hit Nova but it is just sat there saying 'solving image'. I went onto Nova and uploaded the image and it solved in a few seconds...

Have I missed something? 

Apologies for brevity. Am on the phone 4g cos my broadband is playing up!

OK cool. Off to grab it now.

And I need Anaconda?

Will that break my existing Python 2.7 install? Not overly worried, as I can just reconfigure my Eclipse IDE to point to the Anaconda installation if it does...

Themos - just landed here from the AlignMaster question....

Do I understand that provided I can get my local astrometry server to solve an image from my DSLR, PPA should be fine?