PhotoGav

Excellent, yes, a simple beginners guide to radio astronomy that you can attempt at home with a baked bean can, a ball of string and some sticky back plastic to produce an image that shows the event horizon a little more clearly is what I’m after!

On the subject of helping... I would be happy to give a talk / workshop on anything to do with imaging, including capture and/or processing, in the areas of deep sky, or solar, or a bit of wide field, or maybe time lapse or even a touch of planetary. I could also talk about taking Astronomy GCSE in later life, if that would be interesting. Anyway, my hand is up should their be an interest in something that I can share my experiences in, good and bad! As for talks I would like to attend - something about spectroscopy for beginners and radio astronomy for beginners would be great, please!

Good stuff, thanks William. Good luck with the upgrade, Jon, and I hope the house move went well. How is it in the Atacama desert with your new observatory?!

Jon, I used to have the files on my Dropbox account, but it looks like I must have deleted them. I can put them back there this evening when I get home from work. In the meantime, here’s the QSI (now part of Atik) website support page with their email address: https://qsimaging.com/support/technical-support/. They might well sort you out quicker than I can if you fire a nice email at them! Good luck, well worth the upgrade. I’m looking for an email address for support to upgrade my skies... and now we are about to enter two months of no astronomical darkness... I despair!

This is a wonderful piece of work with impressive dedication to get those integration hours! How strong is the signal in Ha and in OIII? Which is stronger? I’m guessing OIII from the colour.

Thank you for your thoughts - that is what I decided originally, so will stick with it. If you can’t work out what a particular object is, please do just ask!

One thing I nearly added was a small graphic for each deep sky image with object name, catalogue number and distance. I decided not to as I thought it would be information overload. Perhaps I should add that?

Marvellous, thank you. I hope they found it educational, inspirational and just lovely to watch!!

Thank you!

Thank you @MartinB & @Xiga. Martin - I hope your talk was well received and the members are all converts to ‘the way of the sky’ after your evangelising! It’s great sharing the joy with folk isn’t it?! My only trouble when giving talks is that there is so much to say, I rarely manage to stick to time (I blame people asking so many questions!!). Please feel free to make use of the video in future. I have started using it in a similar fashion to the popular BBC Natural History 1 hour programme format of 50 minutes of programme followed by 10 minutes on how it was made, except that I have a 10 minute programme followed by 50 minutes (plus!) on how it was made! Ciaran - I have emailed the link to the Sky at Night magazine (no answer), but will try and send it through to the TV show part of S@N too - thanks for the idea.

Thank you @Erling G-P . I’m doing what I can to get the video seen. I’m a bit of a social media dinosaur and am struggling to ‘get it trending’. The more shares the better! As for educational potential of the images... I have just returned from running a revision session for the GCSE Astronomy students at Marlborough College, using my images to catalyse the learning. It’s working very well and is just wonderful to ‘do something useful’ with my images.

Thank you @tomato - I think you’ve gone and crossed the line now, but I would love to see this aired... anyone with TV contacts?!!?! I can dream.....!

Thank you @Allinthehead & @Barry-Wilson.

Booked to arrive on Friday and leave on Tuesday. Really looking forward to this lovely event, whatever the weather... but please can we have less water this year!

It’s to do with this: http://astrophotographycourses.co.uk/index.html - though I’m sorry to read that they are stopping the courses from September...

Thank you @Ruud, @Star101, @don4l, @wigggyy & @maw lod qan. I’m delighted that you all enjoyed the video.

Thank you all for your kind words. Dave - here's hoping that the BBC notice the video!!!

Thank you @Freff, @Laurin Dave, @upahill, @wornish. It’s taken me quite a while to make this (I should work out how many hours of imaging alone!), but I’m happy with the result. To hear it from others is very encouraging, thank you.

Thank you @andrew s, @vlaiv, @Debo & @tich. Without SGL this video would not have been possible!! (Yes, that definitely includes you Vlad!). Please share as much as you can - I would love it to be seen by as many as possible. Let's spread the astronomy word!

I have always wanted to put together some kind of video story using my astrophotographs. While sitting in the Marlborough College Chapel around Christmas 2017, listening to the choir during the Carol Service, it struck me... those heavenly voices would be the perfect soundtrack. I spoke with the Choir Master and he agreed to help out. He has done the most amazing job with the soundtrack, bringing my images to life. I hope you enjoy my latest production - A Cosmic Adventure:

Brilliant, look forward to this filtering through to us mere mortals in the not too distant (or expensive) future! Thanks for sharing the link. Quantum everything is the future!

Good to hear that guiding is up and running. Regarding the Weather ASCOM, you need to select ‘no device’ in the SGP drop down menu to remove it from the equation. If it is selected but not connected it will continue to use the last weather state it knew about. Not really much use though... you obviously want to get the thing working properly! Which cloud watcher are you using? Are you sure you have both it and SGP set up correctly to save and read the state file to the same place?

It looks like you will need to use the ASCOM drivers for multiple ZWO cameras to show up in PHD2 - check this on CN: https://www.cloudynights.com/topic/640869-new-guide-camera-not-connecting-to-phd2/ As for POTH / SiTech ASCOM - two roads to the same temple! Continuing good luck with the set up process... you'll get there... eventually!

Thanks Steve - that is probably exactly it. Tom, you might check that and de-tick it, that way you are fully in control of what is happening. Auto anything can be good, but only when you want it and know it's happening!