red dwalf

first clear sky for ages last night and could not get all sky plate solver to work, i have put in all the scope focal length and camera pixel size but the instructions on how to use a basic and i could do with a hand held instruction list, i`m using windows 10, stellarium, eqmod,and trying to plate solve with all sky plate solver, i have switched to this as i was using astrotortilla very well until it stopped solving too, any help please or address to a good website for user help. many thanks

if your mount is ascom compatible then you shouldn`t need the st 4 cable, i use the zwo asi driver usually at the bottom of the driver list in phd 2, i would recommend that you use phd 2 and the latest snapshot version, google phd 2 snapshots for the most up to date version.

Looks a great setup, can I have your thoughts on the lakeside focuser please, looking at getting one for my GT 81, or my other choice is a moonlight focuser and a moonlight motor focuser to go with it, although this adds another £500 to the bill, is the spend every done L.O.L

can you recomend a reasonable price ip camera Mike, looking to install something into my obsy

super i`ll give that a try later finger crossed. i did a few 10 min subs on the horse head neb the other night before i lost it over the houses so would love to add more to it if i can get the same position on it, previously i`ve tried to align the images from different nights but always end up cropping the image somewhat. thanks for your help

i had a few teething problems using atsrotortilla myself for the first time the other night, firstly it wouldn`t solve, then i realised that i had loads of sync coordinates already stored in eqmod which loaded them as soon as the mount was unparked, i deleted them all from eqmod making sure that the wouldn`t apear again when restarted and tried astro tortilla again, it solved but was not quite centred on the target, i then checked my field of view and entered the exact high and low degrees field of view of my scope and camera into the tortilla settings, tried again and it solved a little better even with the exact field of view sizes, getting there but still not to my ocd standard i noticed at the bottom of the tortilla settings it was in JNow mode, i know that mt stellarium settings are J2000, so changed from JNow to J200 in tortilla and tried again and was spot on. result. after a couple of hours on my target, i tried a different target on the other side of the sky and for some reason tortilla wouldn`t work, turned the program off and back on again but to no avail, not sure what this problem is and haven`t had chance to try it again to see if it will work after the pc had been turned off, fingers crossed i`ll have a chance tonight but if anyone can help with the last problem i would be grateful as it looks a good bit of useful kit. Louise, you mentioned above the AT can plate solve from a previous image, how is this done ? would be very useful to get bang on the target night after night when doing lrgb or narrowband imaging with my rather small ccd chip. many thanks.

great achievement Mike, glad it all up and running ok, nothing better than sitting somewhere warm and watching the subs roll in.

check that the output folder is being used, if you don`t select a output folder or it`s missing you get no image at the end of the process. go to settings / stacking settings, move the tabs along then select output and make sure the create output file is ticked, autosave tif/fits, then output location, create output file in the folder of the reference frame. hope that helps

that's the hard part Mike believe me, processing been the worst part of the whole hobby for me, hard to get advice as everyone does it a bit different to others but i`m getting there slowly

looks very nicely done Mike, makes the hobby so much more enjoyable when you don`t have to keep setting up every night, turn on and off you go. do you have any problems with condensation ? i only get it on my tin roof when it gets fairly cold, i don`t seem to get much on the equipment itself. it was alittle cold over the last couple of nights, i had to put the heater on in my obsy which made it nice a warm, alittle too warm as i fell asleep, woke up at 3.20 am but got some nice data on the bubble neb.

seen one in use on a heq5 and they are solid

good news all round Mike

keep the pics coming Mike, love to see other builds,

managed to find your build thread at last Mike, love the pier, looks great and well finished, i bought the heq5 pier adapter from altair and although expensive it work great, then i bought a neq6 and had to buy another altair adapter to fit that, cheesed me off but i do like them and the fit lovely. dome looks great also, l toyed with the idea of a dome but as i`m a tight so and so with three teenagers bleeding me dry i went down the roll off roof method, but i must say that i like the warm room, makes stargazing so much more enjoyable, keep up the good work, all the best, Rob

well done in getting it working, are you going back to using the philips webcam, it should have a better chip inside than the tesco one, ccd instead of cmos

the visual back is the bit on the rear of the scope that the diagonal or eyepiece fits into, it unscrews.

I know they've been having a lot of trouble in China where most of the gear comes from, and on the back of low supplies the prices seem to be creeping up alittle, hopefully not to much.