Jonk

Don’t forget to set the correct lcd address in the code. You may need to find an lcd detect code example online in order to find out what it is.

What’s a guinea? Some kind of pig?! I only know what ‘looks’ correct, as I was only going for lens cell alignment to the tube.

So “seeing” as you lot know more than me (haha), is there anything obviously wrong with my star test vid? It was outside of focus if that helps.

Fair enough, I’ll keep an eye out.

Hmmm...I'm interested, but may have to wait until the New Year - can we talk then?

It looks like you've autostretched both images - were they shot as OSC? I would split each into 3 channels, then try and register the mono channels as a mosaic (an option in imageintegration if I remember), then register the 3 mono mosaics into a colour image and go from there.

This is an old 5 1/4” doublet that I refurbished and needed to test the cell collimation to the tube. Firstly I put a laser into the focuser end and rotated the tube, seeing if the laser point drew a circle on a far wall, adjusted it as best I could before I pointed it at the stars.

Ok, I ask as I may do the same with my az-eq6 at slew speed, and then at sidereal rate using a data logger of some sort.

This was with a zwo camera (not sure which one I used) at high gain and a fairly high fps.

Interesting, was it repeatable? Did you try at the tight spots at sidereal rate? Obviously this would take a lot longer to monitor.

Here’s an example of a combination of thermal instability (scope not cooled down at all) and probably poor seeing. DB03F913-5951-4DCD-B7C8-7F9FD4CF947C.mp4

Eyelashes are something else you might not notice falling into the job too!

Yep that would be very effective! Tyvek suits are perfect for this, they have fitted hoods.

The laser wouldn’t be a dot, in fact it wouldn’t be seen at all, the diameter would be huge.

Filling a bathroom full of steam, then taking your optics in to clean / assemble is a great way of keeping dust out, just be sure all of the moisture in the air has cleared first. It’s probably the closest you’ll get to a cleanroom at home.

I tend to test things on a laptop first anyway, so did that in the end.

Hmmm...firstly, 3500W laser?! No chance. He'd be arrested. Secondly, by the time it reaches Mars, the beam diameter would be huge, and the amount of radiation hitting Mars (even if he was aligned perfectly) would be lost in the sun's radiation. Also, blue wavelength would not do anything to generate CO2. My source? I work with laser experts!

Nope not an issue, as it’s only a 2 sided board, soldering both sides of a component leg through the drilled hole is fine as long as there’s enough pad on either side otherwise you’ll need to scrape away the tracks and solder to those. I’ve been asked to confirm the diodes I used but can’t check until Monday. As long as a diode is capable of the current required and the reverse bias voltage is the same you can use what you want.

If you rotate the entire assembly, no it shouldn't matter as long as nothing moves or the dust inside doesn’t move. If you rotate anything within the assembly, i.e just the camera, then flats absolutely should be taken for each scenario. The same applies if a camera is taken off and then put back (following session for example) even if it’s in the same place.

As a qualified electrical tester (PAT) I have to say the same. Please do not use that power supply or those sockets in an outside environment. Also, that white grill - is it metal? You should earth this and have the whole installation tested by a qualified person. If you don't, you are at risk of electrocution and there may be a fire risk. I cannot be clearer than this!

This is the reason for 'needing' a rotator when doing mosaics... The camera position didn't change here, so when aligning adjacent images, they must be rotated in software in order to correctly overlap. One problem of not having a rotator, is if you don't have enough overlap, you could end up with gaps. I've wondered about it, but for this images scale on a small refractor (3.2"pp on a Star 71) I couldn't fit a rotator in anyway. Just make sure you have enough overlap to avoid gaps bwtween, and also when you do a final crop, to avoid losing some of the target. Note this is a test mosaic using 4 x 30m ha subs, just to see how the final mosaic would look. This was taken using SGP's mosaic feature, which only shows a flat grid, so not a final representation of how the frames go together. Actually, I'm not sure if adding a PA (pointing angle) to the settings will show the rotation in the wizard, (I'll try this next time).

Interesting..... give me a shout if it is 👍🏻

If you've never had a dream, then you've never had a dream come true. I didn't think I would be able to buy something like this, but it happened.

Well, I've been playing with my Mars video clips and here's a first light result. I'm not a planetary imager by any means but thought I'd have a go. It's not the best, but I got to video 4 and thought I'll be here for days trying to get the best, they're probably all very similar! I used a ZWO 178MC, Televue 2.5x powermate and firecapture to capture the frames, followed by autostakkert, PI and a bit of lightroom. The conditions weren't great - put it this way, I wouldn't have bothered trying to do some DSO work, it wasn't that kind of night. Anyway, pleased I suppose with the Mars image - it certainly looked good visually, if a little wobbly. I'm sure given the right conditions I could get a better result. Edit - I had to use a diagonal as I didn't have another way to couple the powermate to the collet on the focuser.

Somehow I don’t believe you!