matt_baker

I've couldn't decide on which one I liked better and I feel as if the extra green before applying SCNR really lets this target stand out well.

Again, it's a pleasure to process this data, so thanks to FLO and IKO for releasing it and good luck to you all.

I might have another try in a few days to see if there's any more I can squeeze out

Matt

£600-£650 maybe?

Also here's the guiding graph

Just adjusted the float adjuster as it was too tight, now I'm out testing and my RMS value is 0.8"

Just had a look at the bearing and there seems to be a complete lack of grease inside too

Sorry for this too, I've got quite confused. Got a video here and was just wondering how far the bearing should go in or what you mean by pre-loading it?

Should've probably been wearing gloves too 

Apologies again, 

Matt

Actually found something weird, I don't have the outer roller, just the bearing.

Edit: I do, just didn't look like it at first

So is this essentially saying don't tighten up the counterweight collar too much and only nip it? 

1 minute ago, teoria_del_big_bang said:

They do but unless they are damaged or not tightened correctly they are unlikely to have worn.

Was the mount new when you bought it ? If not then like me unless you ask and the mount has not had previous owners befor who you bought it from then you do not know what they did to it.

Steve 

I bought it second hand from tomatobro two years ago, so I'll ask him what he did

6 minutes ago, teoria_del_big_bang said:

If you are not wanting to spend too much I would look at them first and see if they need replacing. I bought my HEQ5 2nd hand and I do not know whether the previous owner had already replaced them but in my opinion when I striped it all down it did not need any replacing, maybe the smaller bearings on the worm gear shafts, but others were fine.

I had already bought them so replaced them anyway. But, I cannot say whether they were the original ones or not as they were already good quality bearings in there.

In general these bearings are not doing any amount of work, they are not moving at 1000's rpm and have very little load on them. I think what matters is they have not been running without some lubrication at any stage and they are not over packed with thick grease. On top of that it is more the adjustments to remove any backlash both in the taper bearings and in the mesh between the worm and the worm gear.

But some gentle adjusting and most of all patience is required to get the best out of your mount.

Whilst a very good mount for the price in my opinion (and I am an engineer although semi-retired now 🙂 )  it is not exactly a piece of precise engineering so unless you are very lucky and have a perfect one I suspect you will not get rid of all backlash. I also suspect they vary from mount to mount and some will be slightly better than others but all should be fine.

The taper bearings need to be tightened just enough to take up any play but no more, from what I remember it is not much more than hand tight. If you start to put any amount of pre-;load on them then the stepper motors can stall during a fast slew to target.

On top of that there is a bit of very fine adjustment required to get the least backlash out of the worm and worm gears. If like mine they will be a bit cyclic and at some point in one rev of the gear it will have a bit more backlash than at 180 degrees different and so you can only fully remove the backlash at the tightest point and there will be minimal backlash 180 degrees away from that but there will be some. If you try to remove backlash from the tight spot then again it will bind when doing any fast slew and may show up in the guide logs.

It took me quite a few attempts to get this nominal and required some very small adjustment moving the adjustment screws just a few degrees, no moving 1/4 turn or even 1/8 turn.  

Steve

 

Just wondering how you go about tightening the tapered bearing?

Do the tapered bearings have much impact on performance?

I think what I might do is order the smaller bearings and regrease everything in the process, then if the 6006 larger bearings are a problem, placing an order for those

What website did you purchase them from?

Sorry about bringing this thread back but I was wondering which bearings are the best to replace. My guess is the small worm gear bearings rather than the large axis ones? Trying not to spend too much. Ordered some WD-40 Degreaser and Superlube from Amazon already with the intent of stripping down and regreasing. I'm thinking of jusst replacing the smaller worm gear bearings and then re greasing the larger ones rather than replacing since they cost too much and don't add much to the performance?

Matt

Here's my modified HOO attempt. Good luck to everyone, there's already so many stunning renditions!

Processing done in Pixinsight.

Here are my brief steps that I took for Ha and OIII:

• Deconvolution StarMask
• Extract Lum, stretch and create range mask for highest areas of signal
• Get PSF using PSFImage script
• Applied 20 iterations of deconvolution
• Stretched Lum out to 75% along the histogram for an MLT mask
• Applied a subtle amount of MLT to both filters

Non Linear Stage:

• Stretched using HistogramTransformation
• Used Jon Rista's masks method for TGV for both filters
• Applied small amount of TGV to Ha and a little more to OIII
• PixelMath combination of R = Ha, G = OIII*0.5+Ha*0.5, B = OIII
• Starnet++ to get rid of stars
• Curves transformation for saturation and overall brightness
• ColourMask for the blues
• RangeMask and CloneStamp to get rid of residual background and only exposing the crescent itself
• Curves just for the blue outer shell
• ExponentialTransform to brighten nebula
• LocalHistogramEqualization for constrast
• UnsharpMask for more crispiness
• DarkStructureEnchance
• StarMask and MorphologicalTransformation for smaller stars

Cheers Mark

Added 3.5 hours of OIII

Just received my new EAF for my TS Optics 90mm CF that has the 2.5 inch R&P focuser.

Issue is that there's no direct holes for the focuser bracket to go into, so I've had to take the grub screws out and replace them with longer ones so the bracket will go on securely.

The other issue is that because the focus lock is in the way, I've had to take that out but now since it blocks the bracket going on, the focuser wobbles

Here's a picture of before I installed the bracket

The only idea I have is to drill out a hole in the bracket big enough for the focus lock screw to go in.

Any help would be appreciated

Matt

Always had some kind of trouble with guiding and I'm wondering how can I further improve it?

I have a HEQ5 Pro and my payload is around 7kg with everything attached.

I ran the guiding assistant in PHD2 and the backlash came back at an insane value of 9000ms, so my best guess is to only guide it in one direction. Just how do you know which direction to guide in?

I have the rowan belt mod and I've adjusted the worm on both RA and DEC and did tension the DEC a bit more as it did seem a bit loose.

This guide log is only after the worm adjustment and not the tensioning.

I'm going out tonight to see but I want to try and get the total RMS to be stable below 1 arc second if possible and was wondering if anyone could help?

The log isn't very long as it was a test run before things got cloudy the other night but should give a good idea

Matt

PHD2_GuideLog_2020-09-15_004500.txt

2 hours ago, andrew s said:

I find B&W images soothing and rather nostalgic. Regards Andrew 

Me too, gives a different feeling to the image

Matt

NGC 7000 North America Nebula

Imaging telescope: TS Optics TS Photoline 90mm f6,6 Triplet FPL53 Apo CF

Imaging camera: ZWO ASI 1600MM Pro

Mount: Skywatcher HEQ5 Pro (belt mod.)

ZWO Ha 31mm 7nm: 30x300" (gain: 139.00) -15C bin 1x1

Integration: 2.5 hours

Managed to fix a few issues with tilt but it's not totally gone, rather it's acceptable. Would like it gone, but there has to be some compromises and I also can't seem to undo the 2 inch compression ring adapter and put a threaded connection in place because the threads are extremely tight and can't undo them at all.

Well done everyone!

I have a 1600mm linked up with my fw and guide camera and I'm using kstars with ekos on the latest stable astroberry version on an RPi 4

I went out the other night and the some of the images started popping up only being half downloaded it looked like.

I've set the highspeed to 1 and checked auto bandwidth but nothing would fix it.

I've attached an image of what it looks like.

I had one last go at this data and wasn't able to get a better result than my previous, especially in the core which is what I wanted to focus on. 

This challenge has really pushed me and this was the first time processing in SHO too. Thank you FLO and IKO for making this possible and working with such good data.

One thing I would've loved was to get a drizzled integration so you can push the resolution and limits in the core to make it nice and crispy and defined.

Here's a rotated version since I like it more and a cropped, zoomed in one

Good luck everyone!

Had another go with more time on it. Tried hard not to go overboard on the sharpening this time and focus more on the core

If you zoom in on the core, you can tell a noticeable difference, although it's less apparent zoomed out 

First try at the data. Might have another go before the 4th to see if I can get more from the pillars but happy with the result nonetheless.