Shelster1973

Is working a dream now. The DEC axis stickiion has all but gone. Will never be fully gone due to it being a sleeve bearing, but it is no where near what it was. You can see the latest PHD2 graph in this thread (also replaced my Az bolts with fine adjusters so I can dial in PA a lot more acurately. As for grease, the one I got was this one. It is sticky and does not run off, so works great. Also put some under the mount when I remounted to help with the PA.....that worked good.

I was forced into haviong to strip my AVX down a few weeks back. Had a very unfortunate incident when the DEC axis froze solid.....then had to take the whole DEC AXIS off and find out what had gone wrong. There is a thread on it here which as some pics in there...those of a nervous way, be warned, some are not very nice. Managed to get it sorted in the end and replaced all the inner greases with a some teflon bike grease and since then it has been very smooth to move in the DECD axis. Am very tempted now to do the RA axis, but am going to hold off for a while as have just got it all back together. Have to say, I did not find it very difficult to to work on, but I have an engineering background, so can get my head around these things very easily. Unfortunately I did not take any pics to do a guide while I was doing it....I was mainly concentrating on getting my mount back up and running

Just wanted to say a great big thanks you to all the people at FLO who sorted me out with my shiny new CCD today. Arranged for me to go and collect as it is just down the road from me and when I eventually found it, all was good. Didn't think I was in the right unit to start with, but my spidey senses started tingling when I saw the wall poster of various imaging targets and then was fully confirmed by the FLO compliments slip that was on the chair in the vestibule area. Also decided that I was going to get a filter to go with my camera and they let me walk out with a 7nm Baader Ha filter and said I could just place the order when I got home.....absolute trust and absolutely amazing people. A full credit to retailers and the world of astro. Will definitely be going back there for my filter wheel and remaining filters when funds allow. Cheers guys and very many thanks

Cheers for the speedy info dave.....one being ordered now. Also noticed that the link for the timing belt was giving a 404 error. Did find an MXL025 page on there, and went for an 88 tooth belt. Hopefully that will be long enough for my needs. No great shakes if it isnt...will jet get one that is

Am going to be putting one of these together and going through the part list that is on the sourceforge page and was wondering if one of these boards would be suitable for the project? This would help to make it a whole lot cheaper to build. Cheers

Isnt it typical...I finally get things working and then the clouds roll in. Only managed to get 13 x 180s images of Orion Neb this evening. Noticed a few issues but was aware of them before. My collimation was off as had rotated the primary in its cell earlier today so as to line up the hotspot bits with the primary adjustment knobs (as shown in the Catseye video). Had a case of CBA when it came to collimating tonight as my laser colli was upstairs and I was outside.......poor sho I know. Also focus id slightly off too. Biggest mistake was not having enough charge in my camera battery. Had it set for shorter esposures so as to compensate for blown out core, but it died. Still, was a good chance to get out and grab some images again. Anyway, here is link to JPG of one frame, unstacked

Strange....just put other numbers in and AT resolved fine. Am currently imaging Orion Neb. Will switch over to Bode at 2000 as Orion goes out of site by then. Sent from my SM-N910F using Tapatalk

Cheers for that Louise Looks like is misread the tutorial...I thought you put in 20% of your minimum FOV, not take 20% off and use 80%. Will adjust my setup accordingly and see what difference that makes to it

Another quick on that follows on from the last post.....just going through the setup for AT and the INDEX files, which ones would you install from these options based on the numbers I have put up above Narrowest INDEX 4204, 1.2 Gb, 8 - 11 arcmin or INDEX 4205, 628 Mb, 11-16 arc min Widest INDEX 4211, 7.7 Mb, 1.42 - 2 degrees or INDEX 4212, 4.0 Mb, 2 - 2.83 degrees My thinking is to go with 4204 and 4212 as this covers all my FOVs there and AT will download what is in between too so that will have me covered...right?

Right..... Have done a bit more work this evening to try and get ny install of AT as good as possible. From what I can gather the specs for my D7100 are as follows Full Frame Image size = 6000 x 4000 Pixel Size = 3.9 FOV = 1.68 degrees x 1.12 degrees Crop Mode Image size = 4928 x 3262 Pixel Size = 3.9 FOV = 1.38 degrees x 0.91 degrees This then gives me the following for the config Largest FOV = 1.68 degrees 20% of smallest = 10.92 arcmins (0.182 degrees) My plan is to re-install AT on the laptop and go through and select library files based on these numbers. Also, from what I can gather my custom line will read something like ' --sigma 60 -- no-plots -N none -H 1.68 -L 0.182 -r --objs 100' Will also reduce search radius down to 15 degrees too. Does this all look and seem right? Louise - noticed you have a ' -c 0.02' in your custom line. What is this for? Am I missing something vital not having it in there? Will also be setting exposure time for between 4 and 6 secs, depending on viewing conditions. Like Louise, am in a heavy light polluted area down here in Guzz. This will hopefully be the final step as have my guiding sorted now. Was all down to PHD2 having a very small calibration step. Upped it to 3000 and it calibrates just fine now.

Yeah. Did notice a bit of a performance hit on my very old laptop. Also had some issues of it not wanting to solve. Think this may be down to fov settings. Need to go back over the instructions again and get it nailed down. Will plug my details into fov calculator as the d7100 is not listed on there. Sent from my SM-N910F using Tapatalk

Louise, Yeah, you can set BYN to take RAW+JPG. May do that for initial aligns and then change back (if I remember) to RAW only for imaging. Not sure it is the conversion though. Watching the progress bar at the bottom it went through the caputuring image and had green bar while it went through the time for the image capture but it took and age for the actual camera to activate and grab the image. Must have been a good 20 - 30 secs after it had said it had finished exposing that the shutter activated. When I was out previos had camera connected straight to USB port, not using the active cable and shutter went while the exposure bar was progressing, which was what made me think the cable was causing some serious delays. Have powered USB hub on order from Amazon so will be using that and single cable back from now on. All my peripherals will be coming off the hub. Only three items at present (guidecam, USB>Serial Convertor and D7100) Paul