tomato

I don't know if this is useful but a couple of years ago I briefly imaged with an Esprit 150 on a standard SW EQ6-R and tripod at 2.08" per pixel. I had no problems with stability or guiding, but it was important to get the set up balanced.

I think you create a calibrated and stacked image from each set up then combine these. If you throw them all in at once your PC will need to work very hard to process them all and you would be in for quite a long wait.

It’s very tempting to try and fit extended objects like M31 in the minimum of panels but the downside is you sometimes have to orientate the object to some odd angles which can detract from the finished image. Here are two examples, using the same telescope and camera, a 6 panel mosaic which gave a ‘widescreen’ M31, and a 12 panel version which put the galaxy in the more traditional diagonal orientation. The big advantage was the 6 panel version was captured as 6x1 hr panels in a single clear night in October, the 12 panel version took close on 3 months to complete. Astro Pixel Processor will do a decent job of combining the panels, especially if they are taken under similar conditions, this was used on the 6 panel version. However, removing joins and gradients taken over many sessions can be a real challenge, by far the best results I have obtained have been with the Photometric Mosaic script available in Pixinsight. Best of luck with your M31 project, I will be attempting another mosaic on this iconic target shortly (or when the weather actually permits).

Just when the science vs art debate on processing this data was starting to go quiet… ☺️

Looks like a pretty unanimous response, if you have an reasonable chance of clear skies I would go for it. It’s bad enough to miss a clear night in the UK, never mind an opportunity to be under a darker sky. Just one caveat, will the moon still take the edge off your darker sky?

It’s not free software, but Astro Pixel Processor will combine data from different scopes/cameras, no problem. I’m sure other image processing packages will do this as well, but APP is the one I use.

In your second photo, if you unscrew the Baader ring, and turn the adapter you are holding around, will this not then screw onto the focuser ring, and then the flattener will screw onto the male thread of that? That then looks like the setup I have on an Esprit 150.

I guess you could, but a couple of points to be aware of: The Celestron dovetail has a curved inner profile to match the curvature of your telescope tube. You would therefore need cradle rings with a similar radius of curvature on the outside so they make good contact with the dovetail when bolted up. Is the existing dovetail pre-drilled to take cradle rings at either end? If not that’s another job you will need to do. I would recommend you buy a suitable dovetail and tube ring assembly to take the diameter of your telescope tube, then you can buy a longer one which will give you the adjustment you are looking for.

Yes, cradle rings would enable you to fit a longer dovetail. Alternatively there may be a longer screw in dovetail available, but it depends how much longer you need it to be, since the stability will be affected by the spacing of the fixing points to the telescope tube.

It would be helpful if you could post what telescope you have. Most refractors and reflectors have tube rings of some description which are attached to a dovetail plate. To achieve balance on the mount you can slide the assembly on the dovetail through the mount clamp, and/or you can alter the position of the telescope tube in the tube rings. However, some scopes have the dovetail bolted directly to the scope, as per the example shown in the photo, so this one has to be balanced by sliding the dovetail through the mount clamp.

So Trident mounts do come to those who wait…? Let’s hope so.

Some folks think I’m daft to have so much kit tied up on a dual rig in the cloudy UK, but when we do get a clear night I always get a good feeling that my 4-5 hr session will give 8-10 hrs data and a complete data set. Even with a small dual rig I would get an adjustable saddle for one of the scopes. Yes, you can get there with shims but it is so much easier to align the FOVs with an adjustable saddle. Putting the scopes in adjustable tube rings is in my view not good practice, it is not advised for guidescopes, let alone your imaging scopes. I have run both scopes with one PC by running two instances of NINA, this will also allow synchronised dithering thereby avoiding wasted subs on the slave scope.

Thanks for the links, certainly worth a try.

I like the idea of the flexible joints which can be tightened when the scopes are aligned, the only concern I have is if the two tie bars would be rigid enough to prevent flexing on heavy set ups. The plate is inherently more rigid, at least in one axis, I have threaded collars and oversized holes to allow for scope alignment, the fun starts when these are tightened down. You could say it’s an iterative process, adjust, tighten, inspect, loosen slightly, adjust, tighten, inspect… It usually consumes half a clear night’s session.

Glad you have had some positive responses from suppliers after an incident that is all too easy to replicate. Just an observation on the supplier front, I discovered a broken roof tile on our new build house which is now 4 weeks outside of the builder's 2 year warranty. Even though the development is still under construction, and the roofers are still on site about 200 metres from our house, the builder's response was, "it's out of warranty, fix it yourself". Well yes, that's true, but they could learn a thing a two about building a good customer service reputation from your astro kit suppliers...

Like most good Astro kit they are currently out of stock.😉

To see Com Ports in Device Manager in Windows 10 you should select “Show hidden devices” in the View menu. They are there, why Windows 10 hides them by default beats me.

I would have expected the latest version of ASCOM to be backwards compatible with older ASCOM drivers. I needed to reinstall ASCOM recently and went with the latest version, but all of my historic drivers worked with it.

I definitely needed a bracing plate across the top of my scopes, but RASA8s are much lighter and shorter than Esprit 150s.

Looks like another impressive season coming up for the Hole Observatory, and there will be some RASA output from Les Granges to look forward to also. I must dust off my RASA8 at some point. Too much kit, not enough clear nights.😄

FWIW I always get nice, smooth symmetrical autofocus curves with the Celestron RASA focuser drive running through NINA. However, that was a while ago, it's not been out of the box since last Autumn.

If you have the same camera and filters on both scopes, finish your first panel in half the time then move on to the next one. That’s what I try and do with my dual Esprit 150 rig. However, I guess the saddle has enough adjustment to create a 10 or 20% overlapping FOV?

Great image, and beautifully framed with your set up. It’s so easy to crop bits off with a mosaic in an effort to keep the number of panels to a minimum, but you have it all.

So much detail in both the Bat and the Squid on such a challenging target. First class.

Far out, it just needs some zoomie headers…😎