ShaunyC

Sweet.... Been looking for a write up like this for a while now.. Will give mine a jolly good re-greasing while waiting for some stepper motors 😁

Thanks for the write up badgers 👍

I only at 1st wanted to go with tracking but read something saying if you've gone that far may as well go goto.... Also guiding will be something that I'd be looking to adopt.. 

I have come across astro eq in my readings but then my next search will come up with me ending up reading about onestep... Then I'd read some about arduino's then some on raspberry pi's.... There's other things that's getting mixed in there too PhD, github, amongst a host of other words that have lost me my direction

Its all just created conflicting info in my head and I was just hoping to get a prod in the right direction... 

Regarding astro eq which sounds like the direction you two have gone, on the site it says closed due to covid!? So can't get any of there stuff

Hi guys sorry to be a pain, I've been searching about for days on diy'ing goto or at least a tracker for my eq3-2 mount... 

I seem to be reading loads of varrying bits but can't quite put the full picture together and it's making me more confused... 

Any chance someone can point me in the right direction of what I should be reading and taking note of some sort of guide or how to? 

Or even give me a dummies type bullet point version of the process I can than go expand on.. 

Thanks for any help I can muster together itching to start buying things

1 hour ago, Thalestris24 said:

Even with a motor upgrade it won't take the weight of the 150pds. In general, a mount's payload for imaging is taken as ~half the quoted max value. Without a camera and accessories, the 150pds is already too heavy for it. With motors it might be ok to mount just the camera. Even so, you won't have a computer interface hence no goto or guiding capability.

Louise

1 hour ago, Thalestris24 said:

One of these would have just about done you though an heq5 pro would have been much better.

Louise

I apreciate that there is better mounts out there... But "one of these" alone was over what I was willing to spend.... I want a hobby not another debt... 

Lees pictures shows you don't need to spend a fortune to get something I would be proud of.... 

Its been mentioned several times in this thread that buying the most expensive gear possible isn't what it's all about.... 

And where would the expense stop? The hubble telescope? The James Web telescope..... 

I'm looking fwd to getting out with what I have and doing my best to get something half as decent as Lees photos.... 

And I've read a few posts on here about diy tracker goto on the 3-2 so nothings impossible 👌

Atm 😉😁

150pds on eq3-2 mount  looks brand new... Only marks are on the dovetail and theres a new one of those in the box anyway.... 

I know someone's gona pipe up and say the 3-2 mount won't be enough but it seemed pretty sturdy.... And for me I think it's a good starting point at a reasonable price.... I can upgrade later if I fall head over heals for the hobby... 

When I get time I'm gona do some reaserch motorising it with rasbery pi and NEMA 17 motors, that looks interesting.... 

Jst been and collected a new toy..... 

£250.. bought new last Feb still has years warrenty and even the receipt.. Looks mint

Well happy... 

😁😁😁😁😁😁😁😁😁

Love abit of diy..... And off to pick up my 1st telescope tonight which has eq3-2 mount...

How have you got on with the diy goto? 

1 minute ago, Thalestris24 said:

You don't want a Startravel - you want an ED Scope for imaging - a 72ED or 80ED

Louise

OK thank you I'll l add this to my list to look out for 👍 

So regards the pds for sale do you think its too close to rrp? Take away the mount/scope discrepancies.. I want to get shooting and can upgrade later if I go full flow at the hobby 👍

3 minutes ago, Thalestris24 said:

You can get a brand new one for £229 from FLO - with warranty! The eq3-2 isn't a motorised/goto mount. I wouldn't bother with it. For imaging, even a eq3-pro goto is a bit weak for loading it with a 150pds plus bits. I've said before you'd be much better off with a small frac on a eq3-pro, for example.

Louise

Lol... Snap, I just responded with msg about expanding search into fracs 👍

Edit: 120 startravel in particular I think

Apparently a thread I found on here someone saying they have similar usable apature of about 114mm I think.. After taking into actount the focuser tube and secondary mirror of the pds and the multicoated lenses of st

36 minutes ago, happy-kat said:

Have you looked at the for sale section on here.

Yea been scouring for weeks the buy and sell on here, flo clearance, astrobuysell, ebay, Facebook, gumtree, wholesalers... Even started to widen my search field to refractors of similar qualities to the pds's

Got the chance of a 2nd hand telescope.... 150pds £190 looks like new in the box with wrapping on still.. Got the black dovetail bar tho, does that just me its an old model? 

Can also supply eq3-2 mount £120 which he says used just waiting on pictures.... 

I know its not the best combination bit heavy bit flimsy but have seen decent pictures done with same set up.... 

My main query is, is £310 for both a little bit too much considering I can wait till mid February and get a new set for £70 more? 

Should I go for it or not!?!? 

Thanks

Shaun

Even if it shows up red in reomended settings? I was doing 80 lights at 3 secs... 

I deleted all that.. was really red once I'd stacked only the lights...

I tried again for orion hoping longer exp would show horse head blasted through the frames even sussed out flats (I'd left the cap on from bios and darks before 😂) left them stacking through the night and woke up to pretty much all the stars looking like nebulas aha so deleted that aswell did put it into cr2 but histogram was like 3 thin spikes and nothing sorted the fuzz... I imagine that was down to atmosphere more than focus as stars seemed bright just with a glow..... 

So bit of a waste of what I was hopping was going to be a good night...

Did help me get a bit more use to the whole process now tho images, settings, calibration, stacking.. 

Until the next time.. 

I think I did the threshold I a about 15%, 41 stars.. I did notice thou if it means anything the settings was saying median rather than kapa sigma.... I have no idea what that means but not the same as the video I've been following 

4 minutes ago, Erling G-P said:

Not sure how DSS determines the scores - mine vary considerably from target to target, so I just use them in a relative way for that specific image run - I find the 'bad ones', and based on the scores, I set a threshold to weed out those from the stack.

I suppose it's all learning curve for me atm.... Must of got lucky with my 1st image of orion lol.. Jst been out again and although there's no clouds it dosent see too clear.... When you look at stars lower down there as most a halo around then so suppose the atmosphere is being too kind.... Definetly not a hobby for the faint hearted aha

I think it's must be them flats I added into the mix? Managed to get it stacking again with only the light frames.... And scores did show up but not that good 344.9

Pft.... Jst waited 15 min for register checked images for them all to have no score? And when I went to stack it just said only one frame will be used... 

Back to the drawing board it is ha

Will have to have a look into that plate solving.... 

Was generally comparing image with stalerium to find my way about.. Just been an looked whilst waiting for dss to do its things and it looks loads clearer... Think i must of tried abit to early while alot of haz coming off the land

On 03/01/2021 at 20:30, Erling G-P said:

I use a cooled DSLR, so have made a library of darks at various temperatures & exposure lengths. These I can just reuse over and over, so that makes it a little easier.

With my initial, uncooled camera, I typically put the lens cap on the coma corrector and set the camera to take darks, while I disassembled and carried the telescope & mount inside at the end of sessions. At that time I was shooting unguided and thus took 30-sec subs, so 20 darks only took about 10 minutes to make

That's pretty impressive having a library of calibration images to hand.. 

I've just been out luckily jst before clouds rolled in thought the night was going to be better tbf..  

Had ago at andromada.. Jst waiting for my laptop to get some charge in before i start stacking to see what I've got.. 

Did have a try for heart and soul nebula but got lost in the stars and couldn't seem to locate them.. Starting to see why a good mount with goto etc makes life a little easier.... Maybe would of helped if I zoomed out again but didn't want to lose focus or so we shall see soon lol... 

I had another go for flats with white t-shirt rag over lens with... But as I'm writing this realised I'd left shutter speed on fast from bios frames doh... 

I was going to ask do flats still come out dark? Even tho I had whit screen from phone close to the t-shirt covered lens? 

Or will that be downto the fact I left the shutter on fast? 

Should I include them in my stacking? 

Gona have a play on laptop with what I've got and maybe head out again later if skies clear when rossete nebula comes over after orion.. 

1 hour ago, Thalestris24 said:

See here: DeepSkyStacker FAQ (free.fr)

Louise

Perfect thank you 👌 and gives explanation of what it's actually doing

1 hour ago, LeeHore7 said:

That's what I've been doing, so I guess I've done it wrong (I've wasted so much time at least my max shutter speed was 30 seconds lol) I'm new at this also, so will use the same iso and set to av mode and let dslr determine the shutter speed 

 

Glad my question has helped you out as well Lee 😁

1 hour ago, Erling G-P said:

Getting that to match the 3-minute subs I typically take, 

30 minutes just on 10 darks... Ouch

1 hour ago, nephilim said:

For flats just set the camera to AV so it can decide on iso & shutter speed settings. Take a look at this https://astrobackyard.com/how-to-take-flat-frames/#:~:text=Luckily for DSLR astrophotography shooters,to properly expose the image.

Thanks for the link 👍 watched a few of astrobackyard very passionate about what he does.. 

Just found what seems to be a good site?? Gives what your able to see in your area...

https://telescopius.com/solar-system/small-bodies

Thank you for your comments.. 

I will try longer exp next time at 70mm, didn't cross my mind to see how long I could get before start trails.. 

I'm not sure I want to divulge into updating firmware with 'magic lantern', everything so far has been a learning curve even down to how to use Windows 10 on laptop, which I'm sure should be common knowledge 😂 I have found at wilko or argos they do a male to male 3.5 jack so will try that as a adpter.. Or will have to wait for another intervalometer.. 

Regarding flats.. On the video he dosent really say what settings you should be on iso, shutter... He mentions about getting histogram up and get the sign wave to the middle, couldn't how do you do that or is there just common settings to use?I'm gone change my screen display on phone get rid of the cracks and will try the t shirt idea... 

Just had a look for dslr controllers on google play where loads to choose from is there one people generally use? 

Also I take it you have to plug a lead in... Which will require a USB to USB adapter of some sort? Or is it wireless? Canon 600d to hewawi p20 pro(still runs android) 

Next time I will also drop the iso once I've found what I want to snap.. 

Thanks you for all your help

Soooo..... 

Happy new year to all 👍

I got that adapter t ring thanks Dave, which took me a while to suss out how it twists on but got there in the end, one thing to be careful of is at 1st zooming in or out can't remember which, is once lense gets to end of travel it twist out of the ring... Lucky enough I had decent grasp of it 1st time it happened... 

But anywho as eager as a fat kid at a rowntree's factory 1st chance I got I pointed up to the sky (this was couple of weeks ago) focus is well off but managed to get single frame... But unfortunately I had no way of viewing it other than on the camera lcd.. 

But one thing I did realise was I didn't fancy putting my camera on the rubbish £5 tripod I'd bought again... It barley held the camera and lense up, was difficult to get in position smoothly with ough it wanting to move somewhere else and the mount end littrely came off in my hand.... So thing was put on hold for a while... 

A good few days ago I managed to get hold of cheap laptop on fb £65, after seeing some not so plesent images left on it I decided to re format it, which wasn't as hard as I thought but did take some time.. Next thing was to download dss and cr2 photoshop... 

Quickly uploaded the single best frame I had (which was naff to say the least) and had a play with the photo shop tools... I didn't really know what I was doing and just followed the steps in this video.. Massive help this video has been 

So without further adue this is what I got 😂

OK so a little disappointed with that but it did help me get my head around layers, stretching and curves... And  didn't dare  put the camera on the tripod for a better attempt... 

Yesterday my friend at work fetched me a tripod in which was alot more stable.. And last night whil I was struggling to sleep I noticed the heavens had cleared up at about half 1 so thought sod it let's try again.... This was pretty much my rig.. 

A wheely bin dragged around to my back door that has tilt turn window in 😁

Was abit worried the street light was gona spoil the attempt as orion was pretty much above it at the time but wasn't too bad. 

I played with camera settings shorted delay time from 10sec to 2sec now I had better tripod and didn't take along to settle down, 2 second shutter speed, and didn't realise till half way through I'd left iso on max 6500 which was while I was getting it lined up doh... 

I decided to set lense to shortest zoom 70mm rather than max of 300mm which last picture was taken with and also sussed out how to zoom in on live dispay to try get star as tight as pos. 

Get introvoltmeter plugged in and window shut have brew in my dressing gown but that wasn't to be the case as in my quest to buy introvoltmeter I somehow stupidly bought a nikon one another doh, so had to stand there pushing button.. 

In the end I got 59 light frames, 10 darks and 10 bios... I tried to get flats but was struggling to find a white source, tried phone dispay but have cracks in glass which was quite evident, then tried bit of card with light shined on it, paper with light shined being behind it but in the end I gave up... 

So for the 1st time I tried my hand at stacking which wasn't that hard tbf just followed the video and used same settings, did take an hour or so to stack them mind.. Very slow laptop I guess? God knows how long it would take with 500+ images... 

Got the autosave tif file loaded in to photoshop which didn't take me too long to play with since I'd already semi learnt where things was and what to do.. Then just played with settings to what I thought looked OK.. Didn't go to mad with saturation, wanted to try localised saturation with paint brush like in the video but I guess that's one of the elements missing in the older cr2 version? Also was bit of a pia getting it into a file format I could transfer to my phone the psd wouldn't show image and would 'save as' jpeg as too big.. Ended up saving to Web? God knows what that means but here it is... 

So if possible I'd like to class this as my 1st dso not the single frame from before 😂 it's not amazing compared to what I've seen on this site but it's a start👍

Still on the lookout for a telescope, nearly bagged 150pds OTA locally but put me off by putting price up more than it was advertised on astobuysell... And I'm really after a 130 tbf with a mount.. 

Thanks for reading if you made it this far sorry its abit long just wanted to share my experience so far..... 

Ps I took this image the other day on a walk which I thought was amazing, bit off track I hope you don't mind, but can't say I've ever seen a full rainbow before never mind a full double 😲

OK thanks will stay away from the fungus one... Was just hopping to get something sooner... Just joined a couple of local photography groups on fb maybe someone has an adapter lying around if not will have to order one from ebay or wherever... Really anouying as the skies clear as a whistle tonight 🙄

Will have to settle with a pic of jupiter saturn convergance on my mobile for now

Just looked on that jungle site says they a have same lens but for Canon af... 

Says has fungus in lens? Is that a bad thing? 

With postage will still be cheaper than the lens I've bought and buying an adapter and also be here quicker