Owmuchonomy

Rather than ask the council for shielding you could ask them to set it to automatically go off at a certain time.  The new LED streetlights in our village go off at midnight, back on again at 5am.  It's a compromise but one that is easy for the authorities to implement.

1 hour ago, JonCarleton said:

Excellent!  Lots of good stuff as I expected.  Interesting that the consensus seems to be to target a smaller area of the sky.  I have been doing the exact opposite.  I have tried to encapsulate the entire sky with my star choices with the widest possible distance and angular variance. 

I'm going to check that "enable aux encoder" thing as well.  What *IS* an auxiliary encoder and what does it do?

Weight may be an issue.  I'll have to be careful with that.  It certainly doesn't take much to override the motor clutches.

And yes, the reticule eyepiece seems a good idea as well as defocusing the star.  Very clever stuff.  THANKS!

The encoders register any untoward movement you may inflict by accident e.g., nudging the scope after alignment and can compensate for it. Best GoTo alignment is achieved with that function OFF.

Make sure the item (from memory) 'enable auxiliary encoder' is turned OFF when doing your alignment procedure.  You can turn it back on when aligned.  My 12" Synscan Dob used to be very accurate on GoTo but the levelling as you point out has to be spot on.  Good luck.

High latitude and polarity put it in cycle 25. Excellent find. Thanks for posting.

Excellent post.  With such a high z value your sensor was picking up some very stretched wavelengths there.

There is a little backlash but it can be adjusted out to a point by removing the cover and adjusting the tension on the worm drives.  For a portable mount I find the small amount of backlash acceptable.  I use mine all the time for outreach public events and its very quick and easy to set up especially when using the point and track option.  Which bit of the setup is a faff?

I am really enjoying Picard.  Most of the characters stand out well.  For me the jury is out on the tag along Samurai for the moment but I'll give him another episode or so to come good.

Nice detail Charl!

Not entirely sure but I do know AS! has a de-rotation function which will remove field rotation of your Az-Gti mount.

M31 subtends an angle equivalent to 6 full Moons in the night sky.  Therefore you want to aim for the widest field of view possible with your set up.  Even then it is likely you will predominantly see the core only.  The darker skies you can find the better.

Here is an old one of mine. Canon 600D standard and an Altair Astro ED 102 triplet.  Yours has way more detail I think but then I did pack imaging in because life was too short to spend processing. I never spent more than one hour processing any of my DSO images. I am not really qualified like others to offer sound advice.

Excellent.  Right on the money for the topics of my talks in the two week Dark Skies Festival currently underway here.

Hi and welcome.  For your situation avoid anything on an EQ mount.  I would recommend either of these.

https://www.firstlightoptics.com/beginner-telescopes/skywatcher-heritage-100p-tabletop-dobsonian.html

https://www.firstlightoptics.com/beginner-telescopes/skywatcher-heritage-130p-flextube.html

Check this out too: https://www.firstlightoptics.com/beginner-telescopes.html

18 hours ago, oymd said:

Are you using a vixen or a wide losmandy/CGE dovetail?

Both.

Mine works fine with my 9.25" XLT.  Just a thought, is your spring loading working ok on the saddle?

Welcome to the forum from Ripon way. Lots of friendly advice here.

ImPPG and Autostakkert (2) run on a MAC in WINE. Follow the instructions on the Autostakkert website to install. It works for both.  Results of such solar processing in my link below.

As above, you need certain parameters to come together.  Here is a previous thread I started which contains a few tips.

Excellent captures.  Maybe ease off on the contrast and sharpening a bit.  Over sharpening can create some artefacts that resemble poor focus but I'm just nit picking really.  I find the 290 chip perfect for Lunar imaging.

I found this very useful for getting the most from Photoshop.  http://www.astronomersdoitinthedark.com/dslr_llrgb_tutorial.php

All Powertanks I have come across including one again this week are useless.  They fail with incredible regularity.  I try and recommend other alternatives such as a deep cycle leisure battery or similar to Geoff 's choices above.

The problem with imaging and the LS50 is the poor helical focuser.  Check the Solar part of the forum for mine and several other threads on this topic.  It's not a show stopper but it's not the most forgiving set up for taking images.

I’m not quite sure what you are asking. The orientation of your scope is dictated by the position of the dovetail. In the case of your 127 it is fixed to the OTA. The only way to change this is to use tube rings. Is the position causing a problem?

Good info from Michael above.  I use to use the cling film technique for flats but I find a decent defocus works just as well.

The place to start with this is to work from your camera pixel size (3.75 microns); times that by 4 or 5 and aim for that f/ratio.  So the sweet spot for your camera is around f/ 15 to 19.  Choose a Barlow or Powermate that gets you in that region.  The other way you can increase the level of detail (without changing scope) is to switch to a Mono camera used in conjunction with an IR pass filter.  My best Moon images (see link below) were obtained with either an ASI174 or ASI290 mono camera.  The 290 has particularly good near IR sensitivity.