dannybgoode

Just my tuppence worth.  I went the guidescope route with this package and it really is excellent.  You don't need extra rails or anything - the scope just replaces your finder scope and it comes with very solid rings etc.

Given with an OAG you still need to buy the actual guide camera the price is pretty much the same and I have had excellent results with it and it will fit any of my scopes right up to my 2500mm 10" SCT

https://www.altairastro.com/altair-60mm-guide-scope--gpcam2-mono-camera-combo-with-polar-alignment-assist-75-p.asp

Don't see the point of extra layers of complexity an OAG will bring to the party.  Fit guidescope into rings, fit guide camera into scope, focus once and lock it down and you can swap between scopes with ease.

Quick update on these - I am really quite fond of them.  Just out with them at the moment doing some very casual lunar obs whilst my main scope is running a darks sequence and they are light, comfortable and give a really nice, if slightly yellow, image.  The colouration is far from offensive though and actually helps a bit with the moon this bright.

Been birding with them too and they work just fine.  Excellent little things

Definite keepers...

That's outstanding.  I really need to get down to a proper attempt at a really nice close up lunar image and if it's a fraction as good as that I'll be delighted...

@wornish - given the price of a Pi 4 it's rude of me to not at least give it a go :).  Just got that comfort of knowing my W10 laptop works perfectly so can always fall back on that if needed.

@Astrofriend - how are you finding Astroberry?  I am thinking of going this route although I would use an AtomicPi.  Uses a full Intel Atom X86 chip so very powerful relatively speaking to even the Pi 4.

Like you I am a Windows man but having a small, low power computer hanging off the mount certainly appeals to me and I can just about muddle my way round Linux.  now we are coming into the true summer months as well I have a bit of time to fiddle with such things.

Quick update on my SX experience and another shout out to them.  The USB socket failed again and Terry suspected the tracks had maybe been too damaged to repair properly.  A quick email back and forth and with RMA number in hand sent it back to them and a week later it has been returned to me with the whole board changed for a new one and no further charges.

Can't say fairer than that.  I know their kit is on the more expensive end of things but they certainly stand behind their products  

They’ve probably got a load of OEM licenses to offload so could be legit. CS6 is 5 years old now and CC has many more features and is more polished still but CS6 is probably still enough for a lot of people. 
 

£30 for a 5 year old package is about right imo. 

On 08/03/2020 at 13:12, Rheemhater said:

the light of the object your looking at , may have started towards us about the time of the Roman Empire .

And if you really want to bend their mind point out that as far as the photon itself is concerned it has existed at the source and at the eye of the beholder simultaneously

On 08/03/2020 at 17:56, Adam J said:

Get a UVC bulb and shine it for a few hours onto the lens, it its fungus it will die if not then nothing lost hey. 

I have thought about doing that but it’s such a valuable lens I think I’d rather just get it properly cleaned and then take steps to ensure it doesn’t happen again. I owe it to the scope to sort it properly  

31 minutes ago, Endolf said:

Took me ages to do my PA last night, I could see polaris with my eye, but could I see it in the alignment scope?, not a chance. Kept shuffling the mount to see if I could find it the edge of the alignment scope, nothing, kept checking if the clouds were over. Nothing.

Eventually it dawned on me that the counter weight bar was still retracted.....

I’m quite a fan of forgetting to rotate the dec axis with similar effect...

Looks to be an SX camera and filter wheel. I have the same combo - works exceptionally well. I have the same mount too. 
 

You should enjoy all of that!

24 minutes ago, Spaced Out said:

Thanks for this.

I think I'd prefer the steeltrack but I don't think they make a fitting kit for the SW 130 PDS ? I don't really want to be drilling holes and bodging things !

Fair. I just drilled holes in my 150P though - it’s easy enough to do and the focuser is very good. 
 

I too got fed up with faffing around with one that had a load of flex and stuff in it and this sorted it right out. 

I have a Moonlite on my Meade SCT but then a Baader SteelTrack on my 150P. Works very well and worth considering. A bit cheaper too. 
 

https://www.firstlightoptics.com/baader-diamond-steeltrack-focusers/baader-steeltrack-diamond-nt-for-newtonians.html

Very nice - I do like that.  M42 is one of those targets - there are so many renditions of it and each one is just a bit different from the other depending on the tastes and skills of the imager.

Sure there are some much better renditions of M51 but I'll take this. Still working off too little data and this was captured Thursday night so the moon didn't help things.  Focus is much better than my previous attempts and I have developed a bit more of my PI workflow so reasonably happy.

I hope to add to the data when the clouds clear and hopefully this will coincide with a new moon.

34 minutes ago, Ships and Stars said:

Perhaps this was your 'crux' moment, and from now on, the gear hiccups will diminish? All part of the curve and as others say, you're not alone.

PS did you really delete 20k photos? Don't think I've managed to top that. Impressive!

Oh I’m pretty convinced I’ll manage more mistakes. I too am a reasonably proficient terrestrial photographer but even shooting things like weddings there is just so much less to go wrong. Weddings are hard for the reason you mention, you get one chance - you can’t really shout out ‘right - bride back outside, groom get ready to look surprised when you see your bride ‘for the first time’ and guests, hankies away - I need to do that bit again’. 
 

Galaxies and nebulae aren’t going anywhere so soon and AP reminds me a bit like a description of a helicopter once being 1000 moving parts flying in close formation. AP has so many variables each of which are critical to the whole thing working. 
 

Its good fun though and when you get an image it’s a feeling of real achievement. After all there’s so many versions of most targets floating around it’s not like to *need* to do it to capture that single moment in time line you do with Morgan photography. 
 

And yes, I did format the wrong drive and delete at my photos and other documents. Luckily I got nearly all of them  back but I now have a better back up routine as well  

3 minutes ago, Spaced Out said:

Yep, rest assured you are not alone ! I think we’ve all had similar experiences at one point or another. As you say, it’s part of the learning curve, frustrating at the time but it’s often useful in the long run.

My own biggest problem is tiredness late at night, when I’m tired my brain doesn’t work so well and I just make mistakes !

I’ve never worked on a project passed the point of tiredness and deleted 20000 photos by formatting the wrong hard drive in an attempt to get a pc rebuild done. Never...

Can’t blame tiredness this time - just inexperience I think. 

It’s quite easy when browsing all the wonderful images people post with integration times into the days that there’ll be nights of shear frustration; sometimes user error and sometimes factors beyond your control. Tuesday night was the former but as always there was plenty of learning and Thursday night went much more smoothly as a result.

As a result I don’t ever see a night as wasted even if I only got one lousy, unusable sub from 3 1/2 hours work.

So what’s the best thing to do on a rare clear night?  How about [removed word] just about everything up that you can. 

Moved tripod for better positioning and then for some reason made a total hash of PA - check. 

Couldn’t plate solve simply the camera wasn’t in focus and what I thought were stars were in fact hot pixels - check. 

Nail focus only to see really egged shaped stars to the left of the frame because some numpty hadn’t pushed the nose mount of the camera in properly - check

Spend far too long trying to refocus after sorting the camera - check

Forget to press ok on the ‘uncover scope’ message on APT after hitting go and just walking off for 30 mins - check

Go back out after an 1 1/2 of subs only to see I hadn’t pressed go on guiding - check. 

Then the clouds came in but I was determined till get a sub regardless of how useable it was!

22 hours ago, Cozzy said:

Hiya,

try this link or give Yoddha a shout on that forum or on Here, sure he still has input through SGL.

https://aptforum.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?t=1958

Nice one - thank you. I’ll give that a read. 

15 minutes ago, merlin100 said:

At what point would I need to start upgrading to 2 inch EP's? Would that usually be from 150mm upwards, depending on the make and model?

I find a 150mm a nice compromise between a 114/130 and a 200. Very manageable but capable of some decent views. Many of my firsts have been through my short tube SW150P (750mm focal length). 
 

You never *need* to upgrade to 2” eyepieces and to be honest in the short focal lengths 1.25” ones are excellent. Where 2” comes in is low power wide views - so 24mm and above depending on the focal length of the scope. 

12 hours ago, Adreneline said:

I don't rotate my camera, in fact I never change the alignment of the camera - it is always aligned with the sockets on the back parallel to the vixen bar.

All I can say is taking flats at the outset of an arrangement hasn't been a problem for me. As long as I don't open up the imaging train I've never noticed any new dust bunnies appearing in my images. Maybe I've just been lucky!

I envy you. I have to rotate my camera to frame certain targets so flats are part of my workflow. As mentioned previously though, luckily the APT sequence generator makes it a trivial 5 minute task so it’s not too bad. 

6 minutes ago, Adreneline said:

It's what I do but I use a refractor and have no experience of using a reflector.

I don't have a permanent obsy or even a permanent pier. I pick up the mount and tripod and position it on little reference marks on the patio and then I attach the scope, filter wheel, camera and focusser complete. I connect two cables between the mount/scope and power supply, plug into the mains and I'm good to start.

Some advocate only using the Luminance flat for all filters. I use Baader 1.25" filters (broad & narrow, in an eight position wheel) and when I examine the flats in PI for each individual filter there are noticable differences.  Because it is sealed I make the assumption nothing will get in, or out, and I stick with the same flats until I make a fundamental change. I always use the same gain, same offset, same temperature and a small range of exposures, generally 120s or 180s.

I used to be always making changes but I found I was spending more time messing around that imaging!

Good luck.

Adrian

Do you never rotate the camera.  If you do then the dust spots and other blemishes will be offset from the position they were in when the flats were taken.  Assuming you have a flat box then taking flats every imaging session is a trivial task and I see no reason not to do so each time.  Dark and bias frames don't matter as much.

Further, dust has a habit of getting into 'sealed' units and a filter wheel and camera combo is hardly IPX rated!

I am fairly new to imaging but have been honing a workflow over time.  Mine is as follows:

1/ First night I always try to take an equal number of subs for each LRGB.  I also take a flats sequence - using APT's flat sequence generator and then running it takes a matter of minutes to complete so no real reason not to.  At least that way you can have an initial play with some data to see where you are heading with the overall image

2/ If I know I am going to try to take more data over the coming nights I try to bring my scope in fully 'assembled' so I can just take it back out with no need to re-do the flats.  It seems to be quite often that at least one of the channels was interrupted by cloud or whatever so I concentrate on imaging the 'missing' data first before adding to the data overall.

3/ I am building up a calibration library so if I get chance I take some darks of varying exposures but don't take dark and bias frames per session - just building up the library over time.  Can be a good use of cloudy nights if you have a cooled camera - just run a sequence every now and then  

Note you don't need Astro Tortilla, just download Plate Solve 2 and the accompanying UCAC3 library and set up PointCraft in APT.  Once you've acquired an target using Goto++ you'll never look back

1 hour ago, Nikodemuzz said:

My OS+programs and the processed files live on different hard drives, both of which are SSD's. The CPU is Intel i3 8100 which is a bit slower than the Ryzen 5 2600 that Danny mentioned above, but not by miles. In that light it seems that the biggest difference between our systems would be RAM, I have only 16 GB. Yet our benchmark numbers are quite far apart. It seems plausible to me that most of that would be accounted for by the RAM increase, but what other optimizations can one make? I'm referring to Danny's comment about how he has optimized his machine for PI.

The performance difference is true to an extent as a headline benchmark figure however the multi-core performance difference is huge bearing in mind the Ryzen 5 is 6 core / 12T and PI makes full use of all available threads so I am running 12T against the i3's 4T. :

https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i3-8100-vs-AMD-Ryzen-5-2600/3942vs3955

My CPU score  in 1.8.8.5 is 10485 and the swap score is around 15200.

I also overclock my CPU and have spent time optimising the swap files and slimming down non-essential background tasks etc.  I did play with RamDisks for the swap files and when I was spinning metal storage drives with a SATA SSD boot drive this made a huge difference.  However now I have an NVMe SSD the difference in swap performance between that and RAM is negligible.

Apologies to the OP - I assumed the mount was goto as well as motorised.  @david_taurus83 has the right answer in how to use APT and plate solve in this scenario.  Still works very well and means no more missed targets.