tomato

Got it in one👍🏼

Or get into mosaics, not $$$$$$ but tttttttttt.😉

Great result given your conditions. Oiii will be very hard to collect under a full moon.

No, it’s out of warranty so I have to pay shipping both ways and the repair. Shipment to China with FedEx cost £40, hopefully RC’s economies of scale will kick in for the return trip. But… I was £800-£900 ahead of the price of a ZWO or QHY camera, so I still have some headroom.

I don't think this is giving anything away as it was all in the ads, but what made me suspicious (apart from his lack of forum activity) was that he said he was selling the 2600MC because he was moving into mono imaging, and then the next day he posts a 533 for sale because he is quitting AP...🤔 Any astro kit of complexity and high value I buy second hand from someone I don't know either directly or by reputation would be a face to face deal with inspection and testing involved. This has meant a 500 mile round trip in the past but I reckon it's worth the hassle. This policy alone would have protected me from this guy.

I bid "Au Revoir" (hopefully) today to my damaged RC IMX 571 as it starts it's trip back to China. Eddie has said he thinks the repair will be "not much" so we'll see how that pans out. If I deem the repair quote to be uneconomic I'll ask him to keep it and put it in RC's Black Museum and I'll put the funds towards a new replacement. I suspect this will be from a UK based retailer though.

I just want to thank the SGL members who PM’ed to warn me about the recent scam adverts in the classified section when they saw that I had replied to one. The ads have now been removed, and I didn’t part with any cash. I already had my own suspicions but I appreciate it that they took the time to give me a heads up. Like Grant says, if it looks too good to be true, it almost certainly is.

Great result, in the UK waiting for the perfect night to image can be a very long time coming.

Yes, so much to image, so little time...

I was just idly thinking about what is meant by Deep Sky imaging, my conclusion is we apply that term to anything outside of the Solar System. But then there are certainly different orders of magnitude of distance to the objects we image. Most nebulae are relatively local with most named objects being in our own galaxy though there are some named objects in M33 and M31 for example. We all know if you want to go really, really deep with amateur equipment then Quasars are your best bet, but what about a really distant Nebula? A quick Google search came up with Himiko, a Lyman-alpha blob with a redshift of z=6.6. It is in the constellation of Cetus but has an apparent magnitude of around 25. It is in the Stellarium database but I have no data on it's angular apparent size, I'm guessing it is tiny. Does anybody have any other more realistic candidates?

With the cloud/full moon currently hindering my favourite imaging season, I have been looking through my archive to find photogenic galaxies which would benefit from more integration time, and seeing how they come out after applying the RC X suite of processing tools to them. NGC 3718 is one such candidate, this 7.6 hrs of 2021 Esprit150/ASI178 LRGB data was rather spoilt by a huge slug of a dust mote just above the galaxy, which with my better handle on using Affinity Photo I have managed to cosmetically remove to a large extent. Definitely one to image again.

Apologies, I didn’t realise AN paid a fee if they used one of the images submitted. Congratulations on getting yours published, to date I’ve only submitted one image as the standard is very high, but I might submit a few more now, thanks to the X suite of processing tools.☺️

Just looked up your photo in AN, great image. Their policy of reserving the right to use the submitted images at some future point in the magazine must give them a nice stream of free images coming into their library, but they do do at least acknowledge the source if they use it.

Seemingly just a point of light amongst many others, but wow, do we now know different! Great capture👍

Steve, here are the co-ordinates if you need them.

I emailed Eddie at RisingCam on Monday, now CNY is over, saying I’m ready to send it back, just waiting for a reply with the shipping details…

When I put the RASA on the mount, the SY135 goes alongside it, but I need to get my RisingCam IMX571 fixed to use it with the lens.

Thanks, I was really keen to image this (apparent mag 16) but concluded it was not visible from the UK, which you have confirmed. Like you I look forward to seeing an image posted, the stats on this quasar are just mind blowing.

Apparently it was mistaken for a star in our own galaxy on earlier surveys, the numbers are, as you say, unimaginable. Looking forward to seeing an image posted by one of our fellow SGL members based in the Southern hemisphere.

The associated Black Hole is 17 billion solar masses and the Quasar is 500 trillion times more luminous than the sun, it has an apparent magnitude of 16, even though it is 12 billion light years distant. I would love to try and image it but unfortunately it is not visible from the UK. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-68346725

I can’t for the life of me remember how I found SGL some 10 years ago but I’m glad I did, the advice I received on making some serious spend on an initial set up was literally invaluable. I think it says something about SGL that this is the only bit of social media that I engage with. The knowledge, the good natured humour and the respect shown to all users is a refreshing antidote to all that is mad and bad on the internet.

Ah, not so straightforward if you don’t have the original linear stacks.

I must be missing something here, but why can't OSC RGB be combined with LRGB at the linear stage? I'm now using an ASI178 mono for Lum and an ASI678c for RGB, previously I was using another ASI178 mono with filters to capture RGB alongside the Lum on the dual rig. In PI I channel extract the RGB OSC stack to produce R, G, and B files, these are registered and stacked with the R, G and B stacks from the mono and filters camera, they are different imaging resolution scales but APP handles them, no problem. Then the combined RGB stacks are registered and combined with the original lum stack from the mono camera. Here is an example of just such a combination:

What are they going to do to establish if you are suitable to join over the three meetings, trial by combat, or see if you can collimate an RC in under 3 minutes?

Olly Penrice did an article a few years ago comparing the performance of large aperture moderate FL refractors with large aperture long FL reflectors for galaxy imaging, there wasn't a lot in it and the low maintenance advantage of the refractor won the day for me and I settled on an Esprit 150. As @Clarkey has stated, seeing is often the limiting factor, I would have made a different choice if my scope was going on top of a mountain in Atacama.