geordie85

25 minutes ago, teoria_del_big_bang said:

Yes sounds feasible, mounts tend to complain even around 11.5V so hopefully that was the issue 🙂 

Steve

I hope so. I can't afford to throw more money at this hobby for it to not work 

21 minutes ago, teoria_del_big_bang said:

It sounds like the stepper motor is stalling. 
Once stalled it will not move at all until stopped and started again as it needs to smoothly ramp up the frequency of the pulses to it when going at full speed. and it is very noisy when it stalls.

When you say you can move it with the handset or EQMOD are you sure it is at maximum speed ?
If not try again with the buttons at maximum speed.

If it stalls then I would say something is stalling the motor, either mechanical or low 12V.

Whatever program you are using to give the goto command can you slow the slew speed down and try it ?

Just a thought, if slowing it down works then it is a workaround but indication is that something in the mount needs attention - assuming the power supply is a good steady 12 to 13 V, the clutches are set correctly and the rig is balanced.

That.s all I can think of for now but difficult to say when I cannot actually see the issue - if no joy maybe post a video ???

Steve
 

Thanks for your reply. I usually power my mount with a tracer 22ah battery but it was running low last night as I'd forgot to charge it.

I've just tried using mains power and it worked fine and seems to have fixed my problem.

Will have to wait until Saturday night to give it a try at night as I'm working late tonight.

Once again thank you 

So as fortune would have it the next few nights are clear and I cannot take advantage of it. 

I set up last night and had a Madrid of problems that I was battling with for over 4 hours. In the end I just gave up but I still have a massive problem, my mount won't goto in declination. 

I can move the mount north and south by pressing the buttons, both with eqmod and the handset, but when I tell it to goto it starts, I hear a chunk like metal hitting against eachother, then stops. I've tried again this morning and the same thing happens.

Does anyone have any ideas what's going on?

Fingers crossed it's an easy fix.

On 22/02/2021 at 08:29, Newforestgimp said:

So tempted by the colour version of this camera, cant decide between the ZWO and the ALTAIR version which is considerably cheaper, thoughts between them ? would be used on a WO ZS61 with guiding.

What about the qhy version? It's cheaper than both the Altair and zwo.

https://www.modernastronomy.com/shop/cameras/cooled-ccd/qhy-cooled-ccd-cameras/qhy183c/

After you've stacked your images open your image, go to channels, select just the red layer. Now copy and paste that into a new, grey scale clipboard.

Now you'll have only the ha data and none of the noise from the green and blue channels.

Are you sure you're not trying to debayer your images? Even though they are mono, if you have debayer selected you'll get a tartan like image.

I can't see your images as I'm on my phone. Maybe you could upload them as jpegs?

You've got some beautiful star colour. What's your process? I'm struggling to get any blue in my m106 image

The thing that annoys me most about this is people are now trying to sell their used gear, that's years old, for more than the new price when they bought it.

I also recently saw a used neq6 for £1000 and another, on the same website, with upgrades alt az bolts for £1100. So that's a £100 increase for some used £30 bolts.

Since your aperture isn't changing size, the light grasp remains the same. You will have a slightly larger fov though.

Try doing them in the dark so you can be sure of no light leakage. Add some paper between the light panel and dew shield and have your scope pointing up so the panel rests on top.

There's already alot of sound advice on here and alot of people advise for astrophotography the mount is probably most important.

One thing I have learned is to decide my target first before even setting up and stick with it. Data is what were after and when I first started I'd bouce around taking about half an hour's worth of data on several different targets and just have rubbish images. 

Data is key, spend a whole night or two on the same target.

And I'm at work all night, sods law at its finest 

50 minutes ago, emyliano2000 said:

Thanks. I could've probably done with a bit more data on it, being under bortle 7 skies, to be honest but I was so excited to see how it looks so far that I decided to stack and edit 😁

Emil

I get that. I almost always have a stack and process of a night's data to see how things have turned out. 

But I've ended up with loads of unfinished images and multiple stacks of data on the same object

Very nice, this is one of my favourite targets to image, yet I've never managed an image that I'm satisfied with.

I hope that having a dual rig now will help eliminate that once I get some clear skies.

Here is my 2 attempts. The first is SHO and the second is HSO. Both processed in Photoshop with no noise reduction.

That's absolutely stunning

11 minutes ago, paul mc c said:

Yes £ 600 would be more realistic i would think but used astro stuff at the minute seems to be a bit over priced i think.

Glad I'm not the only one who thinks so

24 minutes ago, faulksy said:

wow. free knife 🤣

That's just there for size comparison

You need to debayer your images in DSS 

A jtd dual rig saddle thanks to FLO. I already feel like it's alot more sturdy than the skywatcher guide scope mount I've been using, with limited success.

It's actually alot bigger than I thought.

Last night I was trying to get some narrowband data on the cone nebula. I don't think the moon is gonna make things easy. Scopes are aligned using the skywatcher guide scope mount. It is struggling as I'm getting slight drift with the flt98.

Ha on the esprit, o111 and s11 on the flt98.

1 hour ago, Hertford Stargazer said:

Hope the builds go smoothly. We're still waiting for a missing part to the space station which lego say they dispatched on Dec 29th and are blaming Brexit for the delay

I highly doubt it'll go smoothly as I have a 5 year old who's obsessed with Lego too.

Hopefully your missing piece will arrive soon

2 minutes ago, nephilim said:

@geeklee That makes sense. Ive just bought the Astro Essentials M48 adapter to make life easier although its on back order. Thanks again mate, this is my first foray into AP with a dedicated camera so i'd like to get everything right as best I can although i'm sure i'll have a fair few questions for this thread at a later date.

I'd like to add that when attaching the adapter make sure the screws are tight. When I first attached mine 1 screw was slightly looser than the rest (still tight, but not as tight) and this caused tilt. I had to dismantle whilst the camera was connected to my laptop and cooled and tighten it. 

All was well after this.

11 minutes ago, gorann said:

Thanks a lot Geordie and Happy Better Year!

PS. I will soon have a double RASA rig

Same to you.

That'll be insane. Will you double your exposure times on targets or image twice as many targets?

Another great image. You've really got that rasa working well for you