tooth_dr

Thats fab. Have the same scope and also used it with a 1000d, never got as good an image as that.

Yes it’s a single 20 minute exposure from my epsilon. I love winter too, we get some darkness. Nothing better then pulling up into the drive way after work and opening the obsy and starting imaging before dinner 🤣

Very interesting thread @wimvb you really have very little darkness for 3-4 months. These are my figures at 54oN. I still did take this 1200s (F2.8) image on the 21st June. It would take a keen imager to stay up and gather just a few minutes per night at this time of year though! The north/west never gets really dark now here.

Thanks guys. I don’t use the levesdome hardware. It’s a Shelyak controller.

Thanks Steve - imagine it being able to open and close and start imaging when it's clear all by itself

Thanks! When it first went up I was worried as it looked really narrow and tall. But I reality it’s big inside. Well big enough for widefield scopes. We will see how it fairs with my 10” come galaxy season

Thank you. My father has worked in the phone industry for 50 years doing this very thing. He’s 70 now and still works full time, so it wasn’t really an issue.

That video worked well and showed the problem. How are you supposed to collimate the scope of the mirror flops around?

It’s certainly looks bigger on the inside than from the outside! My mount is the Mark 2 but on a normal pier so it still needs to do MFs.

Lovely, beautiful starry image.

Still use the ED80 myself 😎 no need to change a good thing

No bother John, 2 years since I first used it, and would have no intention of letting it go! Looking forward to your first light with your new camera!

M42?

Very nice, I like that a lot.

Looking very good. I tried flats etc, and in the end I bought a tilt adapter, and the rings are gone. Worth the £40.

First light last night. All systems not fully set up yet, and the dome isnt syncd so just moved the slit to the right place using Dome Tracker. I ran the autofocus system on the Tak Espilon, first time since adding in backlash compensation, and I think it has worked quite well. The V-curve was quite flat so I will need to run over the settings again, just on default ones. The scope has been moved in and out of the house, this is it's first outing since Feb,so I will need to check collimation too. Platesolving also wasnt quite working, so I just manually lined it up by eye with Sadr. I was also drinking wine before I went out, so that may or may not have contributed - but I couldnt resist the brief clear spell to get an image under my belt. This is a single calibrated 20 minute sub with the Takahashi Epsilon 500/F2.8. Guided with a finder guider/290MM with RMS just under 0.5, on a Mesu e200. Optolong 7nm 2" Ha filter.

.

Excellent Ciarán. An improvement for sure 👍🏼

My most recent one came with a black flexible coupling as well as the silver ones above.

I dont think that is fair, it certainly worked for me. I had to slightly adjust my positioning on a couple of occasions to get a star, but this was for targets that are outside the swath of MW stars, and generally have few guidestars regardless. If OAG was your sole goal, I wouldnt recommend it, but as a guider on a finder scope - perfectly fine.

My 120 was fine when used with a 50mm finderscope but didn’t perform as well with an OAG. I then bought a 290 which works really well with the OAG. There will be an abundance of stars with either camera in a finderscope so no need to worry about having to move it. Mono would be more sensitive than the Colour version. I bought the USB3 version of the 290 to double up as a solar imaging camera. It costs more but otherwise as a guider performs the same (no better)

I think this thread should be removed unless there is legitimate proof it’s a fake ad.

Wowsers! That is something else. I would love to produce an image like that, honestly that is just my cup of tea the ways it's been processed

Very cool indeed. Great suggestion @paul mc c

Lovely full disk 👍🏻