kalasinman

There seems to be significant differences as to what settings should be. First time I tried AT with settings from the LV tutorial, it failed. It snapped the pic using BYN, but wouldn't solve. Then the long cloudy period started. In the mean time I discovered I pre-maturely deleted some index files which may have caused the failure to solve.

Attached are screen shots of my settings page and those recommended to me by Geof on the AT forum.

As I first tried

As I have currently

As Geof from the forum has for his (not same scope).

My understanding is that having scale refinement at .1 then doing an initial solve, AT will update the entries to the proper settings for the actual capture, and then "save settings" and then ok for the future.

Your thoughts?--Jack

You need the premium version of BYEOS/BYN. Then go to settings and in the "3rd party integration" box tick "enable TCP server" then reboot.

In AT the settings for camera must be BYEOS.

Clouds? Rings a bell. Aren't they a British thing?

lly

4 months with 2 usable nights in Thailand.

Louise, by my figures (always suspect ;-) ) an Orion TOAG and your drawer would put you at 70.5mm with your Canon. Listed backfocus is 70mm. You might have to add a C extension in front of your guide cam to get parfocal.

Yes , this seems to be the solution

Hi

You might be able to get an oag to fit behind a gso F4 coma corrector e.g. from Teleskop Express or from Ian King. I have one of these with a Canon 1100d and filter drawer on an (originally) F5 130pds and it works well. The cc has a backfocus of about 75mm and it increases fl by 10%.

Louise

This CC will screw directly into a TOAG.  As this eliminates a 2mm T-ring, total backfocus now 66mm.  In my case I needed an 8mm spacer to get the Nikon and  QHY5L-II mono parfocal, but this still gives 66mm. BTW my Nikon camera adapter is only 1mm and fits very nicely.

I have no interest in using a filter wheel with a DSLR, but with eliminating the 8mm spacer for the wheel, it could fit?

What about vignetting, Louise?

I have a similar satup If I use my current train and insert the MKII between the front of my parfocl spacer (8mm plus 1mm t-adapter) and the back of the TOAG  I get 55.5mm.

Thanks. I have the mk3 and I also want to use an off axis guider at the same time. The problem is that the OAG fits between the coma corrector and the camera and this makes the coma-camera separation too large for the mk3.

It seems I will need to get a different coma corrector together with an OAG and adaptors and I was looking to see if someone has already done this. Are you saying that if I can find a mk2 it will work with an OAG and Nikon?

Cheers

Mike

Mike, I just re-read the info on the Baader MkIII. I says it extends focal distance by 10mm. The Orion TOAG is 10.5mm so seems like your in the ballpark.  Right?

If you have a Baader MkII that's all you need. I believe it will screw to the nosepiece of the t-ting and then drop right in the eyepiece tube of the focuser. I figured my focal distance using calibration marks on my focuser body.

The flange to focal plane distance of a Nikon is 46.5mm as opposed to a Canon at 44mm, thus it may make the use of a thin OAG more important. I doubt there is a perfect off the shelf solution. The Baader Mark II MPCC has no net effect on FL. If your OTA has a low profile focuser you may be ok. I had to cut 15mm off my OTA and move the mirror up to get focus. Easy enough. Some folks get by running the cell adjustment all the way forward. YMMV

Do you think changing these settings will sort how the cross hairs track the star on calibration ie  returning back to the star before doing north south ?

Don't worry about that. When it is calibrated the lines turn green and center on the star again.

The major long waves on my guide chart above were 100% caused by a mechanical problem that I caused. The guide motors are interchangeable, so stupid me I assumed the worms were as well. Wrong!. Tech support caught is and all that is gone now. Still a rough looking graph , but seeing has been so hazy that by 10 pm the only lights visible in the sky are Jupiter and Sirius. Best SNR I can manage right now is 4-5, so I don't think I'll have useful guiding or imaging until I have decent seeing. When a hole in the haze passes by it seems to guide under 2"rms, but only briefly before seeing closes out again. Obviously no fine tuning possible.

A great article on guiding thank you I have learnt a lot. Please may I ask though, what guide speed should I use? On my neq6 mount there are several options: 1x, .75x, .5x, .25x and .125x. How do I know which to use and should I set it on the synscan handset? I am using the st4 port.

With my mount, 1x is the only choice that gives a useful result. I think the start with .5x and work your way around to your best result strategy is wise for other mounts, however. I'm finding if I adjust the exposure length to the longest which will hold the star, then let it settle. I then make cautious adjustments from there, waiting a few minutes and then evaluating the graph, that this approach works pretty well. I believe only one correction per exposure can be made. If the speed is too low, the trace may run away and back because of under correction, if too fast it may be choppy from excess corrections. I'm just learning.

Email from Tech support may have solved this. A mechanical issue. Post a graph if I ever see the stars again.

Right now getting this:

Thanks Ian. Trying to battle this long oscillation in RA

Right now increasing aggression seems logical

Hello Ian, and thanks for the great tutorial. I have a 150/750 Newtonian with an OAG.Small chip and pixels of my QHY5L-II guider result in being somewhat oversampled . I have 1.8" main and 1.08" guide cam pixel scales. All of the tutorials I have seen seem to be for folks with undersampled rigs and external guide scopes. Would it be possible to add a bit comparing and contrasting settings for external guide scopes with those for OAGs?

A truly peerless accomplishment! Thanks very much gentlemen all.

The software for the camera offers choices of resolution. Have you tried changing the settings? You could try Firecapture. It has a feature that selects an area of interest and limits your image to that, in effect zooming in.

Yes, thanks so much. I just ordered a 27mm BST to match the view of my imaging camera in a GSO 150mm f/5.