DaveS

I just had another look on FLO and found This Page which has several camera mounting options. You could possibly put the camera on a Vixen adaptor with a ball head and mount it behind the guide 'scope. Would still recommend an OAG though

I would use a 1/4" UNC / Whit screw through the centre hole, but then you'd be stuck with the DSLR pointing along the same axis as the RC. I was going to suggest a ball head, but they use a 3/8" tripod screw, though I think you can get adaptor sleeves.

You could use one of These ADM dovetail adaptors, though with a RC I would probably go with an OAG freeing up the top bar.

Heretical to say, but I think I have all the telescopes I need at the moment. "Big Bertha", the ODK 12 light bucket on the DDM85 "Slim Jim" the 130 apo on the DDM60 "Old Faithful", the Megrez 90 that was the first 'scope I bought for visual on the AZ-GTi And the unnamed cantankerous cuss, the 80mm f4/4 "astrograph". Together they cover pretty much all eventualities.

More likely that they didn't give a tinker's cuss about light pollution. That type usually doesn't until it hits them in the wallet.

Yep, I like square format too, but ATM there are none that tick enough boxes for me.

It'll be on iPlayer soon enough.

Oh yes, and what he says in the video, if you can "buy once, cry once". But the most important purchase was the most expensive, and also second hand, when I moved from light-polluted London to darkest Dorset.

As has been said, pick a target and go deep. Be prepared to put in 20-30 (Or more ) hours, though some targets (Bright globs for instance) will give you a nice image in as little as 3-6 hours, say one or two nights imaging depending on how much astro dark you're getting.

I considered a Pulsar dome when I was planning my obsy, even drew up some plans but the cost of automating it to work with ASA Sequence was off-putting.

This is a spare ASA saddle from my DDM 85 Note the hex sockets to allow the screws to be pulled up tight.

A lot of us have ended up going to F H Brundle for track and wheels.

Thanks Vlaiv I wish we had enough clear nights to be able to use them for testing rather than imaging. Guess I will have to do some more reading and thinking.

From reading this it sounds as though it might be better to image unbinned and then bin in software. Am I reading this correctly? If software binning is better then that would save me from having to get a new set of calibration frames at 2x2 but I would lose the advantage in download times and file size. This refers to the G3 16200 which has the option of hardware binning being a CCD. CMOS cameras AFAIK can only bin in software after capture.

I think I have to take some of the blame sorry. It was that image I chucked into the ring that did it . I'm still following it off and on, but it's getting a bit beyond me at the moment.

Because I want to print to a good size, even up to A3+ (Though I can't afford an A2 photo printer). Binning 2x2 only gets me 4 MP off the sensor, less after cropping of alignment edges etc.

My processing might have been a little lax as I wasn't thinking of posting at the time, it was a bit of an afterthought. I was just wanting to see if binning and then upscaling was a viable option. Looks like it might be. Possibly too my unsharp mask was applied slightly better. This is with a masked denoise avoiding the "ball" of the galaxy

Lets see Native Binned and upscaled the other difference is that the native image had a denoise applied to the background while the binned and upscaled one didn't.

I've been following this discussion and it's inspired me to have a look at my recent imaging. My ODK 12 / G3 16200 has a native plate scale of 0.61"/px which is somewhat daft. Although the mount will certainly track well enough for that, and the optics will support it, my seeing is the limiting factor. I took a set of raw stacks, binned them 2x2 in software and processed the result into a LRGB image. I then upscaled 2x to restore the raster size and compared with the native LRGB that I put into the imaging competition. The binned and upscaled image is, if anything cleaner with the detail held with more solidity.

Thanks Geof. Looking forward to getting more data next year, fingers crossed. Thanks Peter. An extreme stretch shows more faint tidal tails but too buried in noise to be worth leaving in the image. Maybe with more *better* data I'll be able to get some colour in the tails.

Wow! that's some image! Fabulous detail in there.

Had a final bash at this using the Coregister function in AstroArt 7 instead of a simple align as that can deal with a slight lateral chromatic aberration. Plus the masked unsharp mask and masked denoise after assembly. Dunno, think it's in the region of diminishing returns until I get a shet load of new data next year.

Ooh, that is very good, and you've managed to get the blue in the tidal tails. I've been bashing my head against the same target but the Bride Vally, while reasonably dark by UK standards, isn't New Mexico dark.

Well done. M101 isn't as easy as some might think, you've got a good image for only an hour with an unmodded DSLR.

No. Orion telescopes is an importer of American / Chinese stuff, Orion Optics UK (OOUK) make their own telescopes, mostly high end, and are not known for the standard of their customer service. Or perhaps are known but for the wrong reasons.