RichLD

Nice one Gina - I love my Polemaster. It's the best bit of add on kit I've ever bought, well worth the money if only for saving my poor knees! Pity about the clouds and mist though - I'm sure they'll be plenty of clear nights coming up. Oh dear, I hope I haven't jinxed the weather by saying that... Rich

Ooooh, that looks lush! Fast enough and a really nice focal length. I love old (or is that vintage?) MF lenses - I had a proper purchase binge on glass about 4 years ago and realised that I had become a hopeless collectaholic. Most of them got used a couple of times then sat in a drawer until I eventually caved in and put them back on fleabay, although I have to say I more or less broke even. One of my favourites at the moment is an old Tamron 90 macro, lovely piece of engineering and sharp as a tack.

Hi Gina, I can see from your signature that you already have lots of camera glass but how about looking for some cheap(ish) s/h medium format lenses, such as the Pentax 67's. They have a healthy 84.95mm register distance and are apparently really good for NB. Apologies in advance if you had already considered this and would rather not swell your lens collection any further All the best Rich

Weird isn't it? Last night I was getting quite excited about grabbing some OIII for a Cygnus mosaic I'm working on. Everything has been tickety-boo for months now, no problems whatsoever. I set up last night and: CDC crashed 3 times when attempting to connect to Ascom Astrotortilla wouldn't solve and then crashed forcing yet another reboot My focuser wouldn't connect despite multiple reboots Then, you've guessed it, the clouds rolled in Feeling very disgruntled I tore the rig down and went to bed. My main imaging machine is a Dell netbook running XP (which is normally rock solid) that I RDP into. I have upgraded to an SSD to cut down on power consumption when on battery in the field, however one caveat of running XP with a SSD is that there is no TRIM support, so I run the Intel SSD Toolbox app every so often to keep the drive healthy. I have done this for months without issue until last night. I reckon that running the ISSDT app somehow messed up some system files or drivers - this morning I ran a system restore and Bob's yer uncle, everything is sweet again . I have no explanation as to why this hasn't happened before - another great example of the logical world of computing exhibiting moody, almost human like characteristics! The machines are taking over, I tell you - Skynet ahoy! Now where's my tin-foil helmet...

Hi and welcome back - how are the skies where you are?

Amazing stuff for the length of the subs through such a narrow filter! Lovely tight stars as well given that you are running the lens at a wide aperture. I would imagine pushing the exposure length to around 300s per sub would catch most of the faint stuff - I have to go to a minimum of 1200s with my QHY9 and that's with a 7nm filter! Can't believe how sensitive that chip is!

Following with interest and very much looking forward to seeing the results

I also have the 105mm f2.8 variant and it really is a super lens for both astrophotography and daytime photography. I love using camera lenses for astro (mainly NB) and find I have a lot more fun with this format. The ZWO camera looks lovely too, I reckon you'll get some awesome fields with that setup and no doubt make some amazing mosaics, nice one!