DaveS

...Or my Swimming Sea Dragon has gone tropical! This is 12 hours [SII], and 6 hours each HII and [OIII] in Hubble Palette. Capture with 130mm f/7 TS Apo, ASI1600 and 3nm Astrodon filters in Nautical Dark, encoder guided. Stacking, Trichomy and DDP in AstroArt 7 then into Affinity Photo as a 16 bit TIFF for Selective Colour, Curves and Clarity. Exported as JPEG I think I shall leave it there as regards to data capture, at least until after we gat real darkness back, though I may well reprocess it.

Late August through September into October, as the summer constellations rise late and start moving west, the nights are getting dark earlier, so very nearly keeping up.

I call mine The Money Pit lol.

Definitely.

SX aren't exactly known for selling cheap kit! Wonder how many they're sold? These Moravian cameras look to be good value, but get 'em before the new year.

Thinking about it, possibly the biggest improvement in my imaging was the most expensive and most recent, when I upped sticks and moved from light polluted London to dark sky Dorset, Bortle 8 SQM 18.25 to Bortle 4-3 SQM 21.66. Galaxies are now, at last, doable.

I've been kicking around ideas for a new imaging computer with enough grunt to deal with the 124 MB files from an IMX 455 camera, and have been leaning towards AMD. I've been Intel / Nvidia up to now because I did a fair bit of video editing on Avid which, at the time, was very snooty about what hardware it ran on, and would turn its nose up at AMD.

Any reason for going Intel rather than AMD? The latest Ryzen processors are pretty powerful and cheaper than Intel.

I think that unless you're an imager crunching huge data sets then an i5 with 8 gig ram would do for quite a while.

I started off roughly where you are now, with a Megrez 90 ED doublet on an HEQ5 and no guiding. This was a step from an original visual set up, but with the intent of imaging later. I then added a WO flattener and my Canon 550D bodging out pretty dire unguided stuff. The first big step up was when I started guiding with PHD and controlling the camera through APT, though my PA was still iffy due to having to set up almost from scratch each time, and rushing the PA. I was still using the DSLR so compounding the sins. Big step number two was when I could afford a cooled mono CCD and filters, this made almost (Or possibly more) as much of an improvement as guiding. From there on there have been more steps up, but they have been largely incremental rather than game-changing, the first two were the big ones.

Might have a look for the BD set, though being BBC it'll be pricey.

Yep, seen it before and on iPlayer, but always worth watching.

Before you spend a penny on kit, buy This Book and read it twice, from cover to cover, then come back and we'll try to answer the inevitable questions. Steve is a mod on here, AKA "steppenwolf" Also check out episode 1 of SarGazIne, is the section you won't have seen until you registered. But be aware that AP can be addictive and a slippery slope to bankruptcy. I started out with a little 90mm ED 'frac and HEQ5, now I have kit worth a nice car .

Starting tonight at 7 o/c on BBC2 with Prof Brian Cox, and each night at the same time this week.

You haven't said if you are guiding. If not, that would be the first thing to address. After that I agree with Bryan, a camera upgrade will make the next biggest improvement. leave the OTA upgrade till later.

Had a look, and may get the 2" mounted H-alpha as Baader have been notably lacking in delivery. Waiting for FLO to get back to me about my order.

The ROR I'm building for my ODK12 is 2.2 m square. It's *just about* big enough but getting around the counterweight bar in some positions is a real squeeze. That's with no warm room as control will be remote from indoors via RDP. DDM mounts don't have brakes or clutch so it's possible to move the 'scope around by hand.

On in just over 10 mins.

Well, they do a 10nm bandwidth 589 nm filter. But in 50mm it's a bit pricey Here and I'm not convinced of the optical quality.

That's interesting. I dimly remember reading about the Na tail, but didn't realise it could be imaged from here. Maybe in an area without Na lamps nearby ()Eg, the Bride Valley) it might make an interesting project. Now off to EO to look up the price of Na filters.

I did consider the OSC version of the 6200 (Same size as the 2400) and looked at filter drawers that could take a multi-narrowband filter. I think I ended up looking at TS as they do a range of drawers and holders. But in any case, I'm strictly mono so will hope that a monochrome version of the sensor becomes available, else it's the 6200 and its eye-watering file sizes.

Sort of yes and no. I had a hankering after a bigger 'frac than my Megrez 90 and ended up with a TS Photoline 130 f/7 but have stopped there, even though at one point I seriously considered a 180mm triplet, either CFF or TEC. In the end I went for an ODK12 to satisfy my aperture fever. The 130mm is mounted on an ASA DDM60, the ODK12 is on an ASA DDM85.

A wee bit blue in the core perhaps, but otherwise good detail in the dust lane. The Tidal Tail is exceedingly faint, you need a lot of data from a dark site to reveal it I took 15 hours RGB and 8 hours L from a nominal 21.66 location and still barely recorded it.

I was kicking around filter sizes for a possible IMX 455 camera installation and came to the conclusion that I would need 2" / 50mm / 50.8mm unmounted. But I'm holding out until I see what other players in the field come up with, especially SX.

Interesting camera, and a mono version would be even more interesting, possibly even more so than the IMX 455 based cameras. Had a look on the ZWO site where there's more info including a price. Wondering when it will hit the @FLO website? I also wonder if anyone else finds the 54mm thread worryingly small? After all the SX 35mm sized cameras have 72mm thread.