DaveS

Camera drawing Here Filter wheel showing dovetail adaptor Here

No, because there is nothing to connect the filter drawer to the camera without the QHY adaptor ring.

The Old Arab Sat On His Camel And Howled. Courtesy of my prior head of physics.

Meteor showers might as well not exist as there's no chance of seeing them (Or anything else) through this permacloud.

Have a look at This page on the Astrograph site. The FW and OAG have some further drawings and dimensions.

The 17.5mm is the distance from the sensor to the end of the circular dovetail. BUT There is no thread on the dovetail so you have to use the supplied adaptor which gives you the 23.5mm figure. From what I've been able to work out from the Astrograph site, and after emailing Rupert, the adaptor is screwed on to the rear face of the FW using the six small screws. The adaptor itself also has a 54mm thread for attaching to other filter wheels etc.

According to the FLO site the diagonal is 28.3mm, while a ZWO 1.25" filter I had around measured 25.8mm, therefore not correctable as it's smaller than the diagonal.

I think you will need 36mm unmounted to be safe.

1.25" filters will vignette at any f-ratio.

I saw This on the BBC site and wondered how it would affect FLO.

Just be aware that, depending on the distance from filter to sensor, 2" mounted filters may vignette with IMX455 cameras, especially with something as fast as the Epsilon. Also, as Olly found out with the FSQ85, Takahashi can be a bit optimistic in their image circles. Their "44mm" might not actually cover the sensor.

I also got a brief clear slot a few nights ago which gave me time to get the camera focused, and check the collimation which looks pretty much spot on.

You can just see the wooden blocks that hold the magnetic sensors that tell Talon that the mount is parked and it's safe to close the roof.

After another long delay, time for an update. I have now installed an IP camera so I can monitor the obsy from any location, including my phone In mono with the roof closed, also showing the LED string I have around the obsy to give a bit of light for working. And in colour with the roof open. And after heroic efforts with the Talon software (Including contacting the developer) Rupert Smith of Astrograph managed to sort out some intractable problems that had me tearing my hair out. He really is a top bloke, I cannot thank him enough.

I would have had a go in AA7, but that file looks PI only. Don't have, and don't want, PI

I've seen this coming for a while, with all the high-end Tak and 10 Micron stuff appearing on FLO, and wondered what was going on, whether IKI was defunct, but see it's still there.

I've started to save my image files directly to my NAS, 4 x 6TB NAS spec drives in RAID 5, a bit over 16TB nett. The files I want to work on are copied into a 480GB PCI NVMe.

That is phenomenal. I've just been scrolling around the full res on Astrobin, and it's gorgeous.

I don't know about official, but in a private email exchange with a reputable supplier I was informed that the QHY268 would be coming in Feb.

On in 10 mins.

Tonight at 10.10 (NOTE the later time) BBC4 "Beyond Venus" Chris et al asking where in the Solar System is the best place to look for life.

Interesting discussion. I think the push for short focus triplet / quadruplet (Or even more complex) 'scopes comes from us imagers who want wide fields, with 0.95+ Strehl across the spectrum and right into the corners of a 16803 sensor. For this imager, although I have a hankering after something mad like a Vixen VSD 100, realistically I'm happy with what I have.

Neutrino detection is now very good, much better than they were in 1987 to catch the neutrinos (I think it was only 7) from that supernova. In fact, given how much more sensitive they are, and how close Betelgeuse is (600 LY, vs 187,000 LY) they may actually saturate.

The neutrino flood comes directly from the collapsing core, while it takes an hour or so for the shock wave to make its way to the surface of the star. The speed of the neutrinos is only slightly less than light, so would still get here an hour before the light. Plenty of time these days for every telescope that could see Betalgeuse to slew to it.

The "summer" constellation have the advantage of being visible from late spring through to early autumn. There are plenty of targets in Cygnus that are still doable even now.