tooth_dr

filter wheel £30

Yes a cheap manual filter wheel is perfectly acceptable

How do you find the stock focuser? I have to say I dont like it at all. It's spongy to use, and it has some lateral image shift between in and outward focus adjustments. I've tried adjusting the grub screws, and there isnt really a point where it's nice to use, with no lateral movement. I can see why it was swapped out now. Perhaps I have a poor version, but I have nothing to compare it to.

That is something I hadnt thought of. I have a decent dell i7 laptop, but unlike my old dell, this one has only one HDD bay. It does have a CD driver. This is really genius, thanks for sharing, away to order this and new SDD

No problems. I’ve also had a 8” and it is a one handed job.

The 250? I just weighed it for you

I’ve a 250px, it’s pretty portable and I’m very happy with it. It works for imaging too depending on mount. I had a 300 but it never got used as was just a bit on the big side for carrying in and out of the front door.

I decided to go back to the smaller 8mp CCD sensor as I wanted to image around the full moon in Ha. The scope is performing well at that size of sensor with current collimation, so I might stick with it for the time being.

🤔 I thought I had replied to this thread but it’s disappeared

Hi Daemon Plenty of detail and nicely framed. It looks a tad green to my eye with some gradient - hope you dont mind I had a play with it - I selected just the galaxies with lasso tool and inverted the selection and ran GradXTerminator on the image. Then I ran HLVG on the image, and brought in the histogram a tad at the black end leaving a background of 23-30. All the best Adam

What tomato says, those lighting/thunder bolts are perfect. Though I used M8 x 75 mm for mine with washers, and i feel even that was overkill in concrete. The fibreglass is going to tear long before the bolts pull out.

I am having a bit of a mental block here with my NGC6888 image. I have removed the stars and made what I think is the 'colour layer' from the Oiii and Ha, but am struggling to work out what way to go about adding the detail and stars etc. I cant use the Ha layer on it's own as a luminance layer as I will lose the outer shell, so what way do I go about blending the Oiii to the Ha. And the stars? Leave in and process around or remove and add back in later? I appreciate this is quite an open question, but would be very grateful some pointers TIA Adam. Ha: Oiii: Colour: Final???

You can indeed use the same LRGB filters for planetary and deep sky imaging. Depending on the size of the filter and the telescope F ratio in the future, you may need 2" filters. But for now the 1.25" filters would be perfect for the planetary camera 120MM. You will need to also purchase a filter wheel, manual one would be ok for imaging planets, and then upgrade to an electronic one in the future for deep sky imaging. This is my current setup, a manual filter wheel £22 off ebay, and a set of LRGB baader filters, with a IR pass 685 filter. You are probably looking at around £250-330 to buy new Baader filters and a cheap filter wheel. Then the cost of the camera on top. As David suggested above, the 120MC might be a better option for you, it will work perfectly as a guide camera (though not ideal as an OAG), and also 100% for planets.

Wonderful set of images. Some amount of data for such short exposures.

Amazingly good! Your stars are so nice, they look like little spherical balls of light.

Very kind, thanks for that, really appreciate your comment. Adam.

It was a very brief amount of time because I was only holding the wires on to the motor and as soon as I saw something happening I let go (still too late though) I'll check that fuse now and reply.

Thanks Adam.

Legend again Ciaran, thanks for this.

Firstly Ciarán thanks for this! You have so much knowledge! Is this literally just create a layer mask then copy and paste the image into the later mask and boost the contrast on the later mask. Do you use curves to do this? I never seem to do this ‘right’. Any links or pointers? Thanks again Ciarán. I now plan another bights imaging on this then a full reprocess using the above.

Thanks Ciarán! Looks like i attached the Oiii that i applied the tone mapping tutorial to, so it has some Gaussian blur etc applied.

Thanks David, that means a lot to me 👍

Thanks Tony. I've been emailing Takahashi back and forth for some help, plus have had good advice on here, and whilst the Epsilon isnt 100% collimated with my Nikon, it's pretty decent at this sensor size, so I'll not touch it again until I'm feeling bored. It certainly collects serious data when it gets going. Below is my starless Ha stack from the Epsilon F2.8 and the Oiii stack in the ED80 F6.37 - some difference. The alignment of the scopes is also off, but I have plan to correct this when I get a few hours spare.

This is an image taken on the morning of the 3rd of October, between 00:30 and 05:47. Using two scopes I was able to gather just over 5 hours data each channel Ha and Oiii. Stacking done in APP and processing done in PS. 98-99% moon during data capture.

I have used 1.25" Baader filters in an Atik EFW2 with the 383L+ on my SW 250px which is F4.7 - and vignetting corrects ok with flats. I havent tried 1.25" with my Tak, but the 2" vignette enough to tell me that it wont work.