DaveS

Lots of delicate detail in there, looking good. And welcome back!

Probably, but I don't have them to hand. Think current draw of the DDM 60 and 85 peak around the 5A mark at 12V.

Money spent on a premium mount is never wasted. You still need to give enough exposure to get your sky background above the noise floor, and for those of us living in reasonably dark (SQI 21.5 or better) areas that still means longish exposures.

The ASA DDMs have encoders with 0.02" sec resolution and 100 Hz feedback. Susceptibility to external forces is very low.

The Mesu still has periodic error. Any drive involving reduction will, even harmonic drive where the reduction is built into the motor. In DDMs there is *no* reduction at all, and the motor *is* the axis.

Just so. In Direct Drive Mounts the motor *is* the axis, no reduction needed. And no backlash or periodic error. In ASA mounts, even the "low end" DDM 60 or 85 the encoders tick at 0.02"/tick.

That's not a Direct Drive mount.

A Telegizmos 365 cover will keep your kit dry unless we get a hurricane, and a pet bed under it will keep damp off.

This is something that's been exercising my brain, but in this case the camera I've been thinking about is the QHY 410C as it is "full frame" with pixels that are a close match for my current G3 16200. Whether the 14 bit ADC will be a problem is something to think about. Had it been 16 bit I might have jumped already.

TBH this is disappointing considering the amount of data collected. According to my records this is the result of: 79 Luminance subs totaling 13h 10m, 39 Red subs totaling 6h 30m, 36 Green subs totaling 6h 00m, and 42 Blue subs totaling 7h 00 for a total of 32h40min captured over 7 nights.. Admittedly not all the subs made it into the final stacks, since I set AA8 to reject subs with high sky brightness, elongated stars or stars with high FWHM. There's also a fair bit of H-alpha that has been captured but it was when the moon was out and is unusable.

Can you tell it's cloudy? Been thrashing this around again but still don't like it. Although this says "Fourth LRGB" there have been plenty that weren't worth saving, and plenty if intermediates that went through multiple iterations. The tools now available in AA8 are *much* better even than AA7, especially the Digital Development Process which now has sliders for Gama, Background and White Point, plus more subtle High Pass settings. Anyway, here it is, and Yes, there is a flare of light in the lower right, from the LED floods on my CCTV getting in through the camera ventilation slots after meridian flip. This is also quite a heavy crop as the camera had rotated without me realising leading to some seriously skewed alignment edges. I accepted the flare and brought the background up enough to show all the faint fuzzies. There are quite a lot of faint fuzzies. I may revisit this when it comes round again, getting clean G2v calibrated RGB, and putting all the clean subs from this run into a super luminance layer which will allow for some serious processing.

Had the same thought. Don't want the mods to lock it, would rather they cleaned it up.

Oi, guys! Spoilers! I'm not binge-watching this, need something to make mid-week telly worth watching for a few weeks. Might binge watch later when it's on iP{layer and there's sod-all but worthless drama (Hawk-spit-ding) on the telly.

Probably not aimed at us, but at a general non-scientific audience. Jim Al-Khalili does more deeper science on the box, or else Dr Becky or Sabine Hossenfelder on YT. There are also PBS America "shorts" on astro / astrophysics.

Some older folks within my memory still said things like "one-and-twenty", or even "four-and-twenty" (A vulgar song involving Inverness)

After seeing @Rodd's superb images I had another look at my data from earlier this year with the ODK rig. These were captured with G2v calibration (First order only) 600 sec Red and Green, 1050 sec Blue. Sigma stacked in AstroArt 8 then DDP and Richardson-Lucy deconvolution. Gradient Reductions, and LRGB synthesis after coregistering the individual RGB channels to the Luminance. Some rather odd cores in the brighter stars, probably from the R-L deconvolution bringing out DDP artifacts. I applied a selective colour attenuation to remove a bit of green and a saturation boost. I may put the QHY 268M on the ODK to take short subs, perhaps that will keep colour in the brighter stars.

Love these M13 images Rodd. They've inspired me to go and have another look at the latest data set from my ODK 12 rig, but so far cannot come close.

Very mice Adam. The Coathanger is a fairly easy naked-eye object here (Even for my rubbish dark sight). but you have to know where to look as it's buried in the Milky Way.

Have a look at This Page from Wex Photo Video. Plenty to choose from, just select how much.

This is the only PN that I can post. A bare 90 mins H-alpha on M27. My Fleming's Triangle was started at the back end of August so isn't eligible and I have since moved on to galaxies. Ah well... And there's some shadowing on the right that isn't visible in the original. Hardly worth posting really.

Regarding one-way trips, "suicide missions" etc, let's look forward maybe 100 years. Assuming we haven't blown ourselves to hell 'n' gone or roasted ourselves to death then there could well be Mars settlements with perhaps 2nd or 3rd generation settlers. Would they *want* to come back to Earth (Which they probably wouldn't regard as "home") with 3 times the gravity? I think they wouldn't. And remember, not so long ago emigrating to the antipodes was pretty much regarded as a one-way trip. When my cousin and her husband upped sticks and moved to NZ we didn't expect to be seeing her again. Of course, since then air travel has become massively more accessible and they've been back fairly regularly.

Given our location heading east would likely cause rucksions with our Scandinavian neighbours. The North Sea isn't *that* wide, and your cross in Norfolk could have a trajectory that might land a malfunctioning rocket in continental Europe. You are fortunate in having a long east coast with only Atlantic Ocean to land duff stages into. Spaceport Sutherland has a large expanse of open water to its north for malfunctioning rockets to fall into. Although Spaceport Cornwall faces in the "Wrong" direction, for air launched satellites this might not be such an issue, plus it's well placed for horizontal landings.

I'm not sure, possibly due to being suitably remote, plus there could be land ownership issues (Very complicated in Scotland). But if Musk wants to land rockets on old oil platforms, we have plenty, and know how to build more.

Regarding our geographical position, although we're suboptimal for equatorial launches the Sutherland Spaceport is well placed for polar orbits, which are very important for earth survey satellites. We also have a few airports with very long runways suitable for horizontal launches and landings Which Virgin Galactic is interested in, plus Skylon if it ever gets off the ground.

One problem we Bits have is lack of funds. We come up with some pretty damn good ideas but then either don't fund them enough or else sell them off to the lowest bidder. I really hope we can break the mold and make something of Skylon, but fear REL are being drip-fed the funds they need. Using an air breathing hydrogen fueled ship could side-step the argument about carbon emissions, while giving a viable SSTO vehicle.