beka

Second one, i like that the fainter parts of the galaxies are not lost, and more stars visible.

Tried to reprocess, cropped a lot more, stretched a little more,  increased the saturation and did not sharpen. The stars looked kind of punched out in the earlier version. I think I prefer this one.

Best

Hi Albert,

Something like this, however, like some have suggested and from my own experience with my 11" SCT, you may get limited satisfaction by upgrading to 2". You are unlikeyly to get a sharp view to the edge of the field. 

Best

Hi All,

Here is an attempt at the Eta Carinae Nebula. 100 x 20sec subs 20 flats at ISO 800 with a NexStar 102SLT and unmodified Canon 700D. Being near the equator,  I am lucky to have access to objects in both Northern and Southern skies to some degree. While it is said that this object is brighter and more extensive than the great Orion Nebula, it seems to be more challenging to image. A nearby floodlight pointing up at the sky in it's general direction probably made matters worse. Capture was with KStars/Ekos and processed with Siril and Gimp.  Sky was Bortle 4 to 5 and the Nebula was about 20 degrees above the horizon.

Thanks for looking.

For the information on this site it looks like the back focus should be okay but you will have a slightly longer focal length and correspondingly higher focal ratio (about f11 without the reducer).

Best

18 hours ago, John Beer said:

Hi all

Long time lurker first time post

I have an 8se on a heq5 pro with a celestron .63 focal reducer. I love the scope but not a fan of the focuser. As I have a skywatcher mount the celestron motor focuser isnt an option as I don't always want to bring a laptop/astroberry unit out with me to control it.

So I am thinking of getting a crayford like this one https://www.firstlightoptics.com/skywatcher-focusers/dual-speed-2-crayford-focuser-for-sct-telescopes.html. I just wanted to check that I wouldnt run into any issues. I only have 1.25" eyepieces so that also may be important. I am a visual observer mostly. Is it compatible with my setup with the focal reducer? I am not aware of any problems but always best to check .

 

Thank you all

Hi John Beer,

I have used a similar focuser from GSO on my 11" CPC. This one should work with the 8SE but to use the 0.63 reducer you will need a 2" to SCT converter like this. You may have to check if the 8SE has enough backfocus to use it with your diagonal though.

Best

2 hours ago, Rallemikken said:

2021-10-30-raspios-bullseye-armhf-lite.zip  --  Headless.  On the Astroberry website you find instructions on how to add their repo: https://www.astroberry.io/docs/index.php?title=Astroberry_Server#Configuration

Their repo is based on Buster, and I pulled in some packages from there. Take a look at http://www.agle.no/astro/kommeigang.html

In norwegian, but it should give you a few clues. Maybe simpler to use a buster raspios image......... 

http://www.cs.tohoku-gakuin.ac.jp/pub/Linux/RaspBerryPi/2021-12-02-raspios-buster-armhf-lite.zip

????????  

Thanks , will look into it.

12 hours ago, Rallemikken said:

I installed a minimal RaspberryOS...

Do you mean the Raspberry Pi OS Lite, or the one with the Desktop, and did you need to add the Astroberry repo to operate the 600D?

5 hours ago, Rallemikken said:

I run Kstars on Linux Mint, with Xfce or Mate as desktop environments. Everything works and looks just fine, it's just a matter of installing the proper icon themes. I'm hesitant to run any Ubuntu flavour on mission-critical machines, especially with KDE on the desktop. Mint is buildt on the Long-Term-Support version of Ubuntu, and is refined a bit further, to offer even better stability. Xfce and Mate are much leaner then KDE as desktop environments, and thereby more stable and resource-friendly. Will probably get some whining on this issue, but I stand my ground.

The latest Debian Testing (Bookworm) has the complete set of INDI drivers in their repo. On the next crossroad, I'll most likely switch, as I use Debian everywhere else.

I actually only use KDE only on the laptop I use for doing astrophotography. I also favour leaner and more stable desktops for work. I have been trying MX which is also based on Debian, but my workhorse for the last decade has been XMonad on the latest long term support Ubuntu available at the time. I have tried many other desktops but nothing seems to be as rock solid as XMonad. Probably wrong place to discuss this 😏...

Hi all,

Here is the requisite M42 image. It was taken using my NexStar 102 SLT and Canon 700D - 40X20sec lights at ISO 400 and 20 flats captured with Ekos (Astroberry server), processed with Siril and Gimp. Sky is around Bortle 5. The chromatic abberation though clearly present, seem to be less than I have had in past attempts with this telescope. I think it is due to more careful focusing. My personal taste in astrophotography is a preference towards not losing information that is present in the image, while going for better esthetic results. I thus tried not to lose faint stars and nebulosity in favor of trying to get a dark background. Although I am not displeased with the result, of course I am now thinking about a dedicated astro camera and and APO (or small RC) scope and equatorial mount and filters... it is fortunate that these things are so hard to get where I am!

Thanks for looking!

I just recently started using Astroberry,  KStars and Ekos  with my NexStar 102SLT and Canon 700D. I run the INDI servers on the RBPi (Model 3B), and run KStars/Ekos on a Kubuntu 20.04 laptop (i3 with 4MB RAM). While I haven't tried platesolving yet, the rest seems to work very smoothly.  As Kstars is a KDE application, I think it might work better on Kubuntu (vs RBPi Windows Manager or regular Ubuntu - this latter on which I have had some issues with UI elements not displaying properly). I am thinking of trying to run the INDI server on a headless RBPi as I don't intend to run the other software that comes with Astroberry on it.

Best!

I also prefer the one with  full stars.

Best

hi bluesilver.

I have used the GSO SCT focuser  on my 11" CPC for imaging. It does not have an M42 thread so you would need a 2" to M42 adapter. It seems okay.

Best

Hi All,

Being mostly a visual observer, I am now beginning to venture more and more into astrophotography (mainly because of increasing light pollution). After some tinkering I managed to set up a learning rig consisting of my NexStar 102SLT, Canon 700D and Astroberry INDI server. I can set this up on my balcony, and once I have aligned and focused the telescope, I can  control it remotely over WiFi from KStars on my laptop (and from the comfort of my bed).

This way I took some subs of M36 to see what I can achieve with this modest setup, and while processing with Siril, detected what I first thought was an artifact - a tiny red dot next to the cluster. I had attempted to take some darks but did not intend to use them as I had overlooked setting the ISO on the camera. Now I checked these and could not see any hot spots. Kind of intrigued I checked the region on Stellarium (I had not downloaded catalogs on KStars for fainter stars) and had difficulty matching up the star fields. It looked like Stellarium was missing one of the stars near this object, and the red dot was also absent.

I then did some Internet digging and found the red dot to be the carbon star A* OW Aur. I had read about carbon stars before but had never seen anything this red on my previous images, so this started me off on a quest to see if this was the reddest star known 🙂. This was easier said than done but after a while I managed to figure out that it has a color index of 5.5, and as it turns out it seems the crown for the title of the reddest star known might belong to V* DY Cru with an index of 5.8 . This list of the reddest stars in the sky does not include A* OW Aur,  but it would have ranked 4th or 5th reddest if it did.

The image is from 18 10 second subs at ISO 800, and Bortle 5 site - A* OW Aur in red circle.

Thanks for reading!

On 07/11/2016 at 17:32, 1CM69 said:

Hi all,

I was out with my scope on Saturday night and it was the first time I had setup using my Celestron Pro HD Wedge.

I followed very detailed guidance to Polar align my scope and was really blown away at how straight forward the whole procedure was and the accuracy that I had achieved straight away. The longest & most taxing part of the alignment process was initially locating and making sure that is was indeed Polaris in my finder and not another nearby star.

The scope was set to track mode EQ North & slewing from star to star was very accurate.

I attached my f6.3FR to gain a slightly wider field in order to image Pleiades in all it's glory.

I took a number of images and all except one had star trailing, even on relatively short exposures, shorter even than when I use my scope without the wedge in AltAz configuration.

Here are two images, the first is taken at ISO1600 for 5 seconds and you can see the stars are round except at the extremities which show slight trailing. The second image is again at ISO1600 but one second shorter exposure than the first, at 4 seconds and the trailing is visible, albeit slight across the whole of the image.

 

 

 

This was extremely frustrating, how can the second image show the starting of trailing when the exposure time is 1 second less than the first image?

I tried many other exposure/ISO settings but all showed trailing, I never got better than the result in the first image here.

I decided to start over, switching the scope off and restarting the whole Polar alignment procedure once again but this didn't help, I was getting disappointing results for very, very short exposure times.

I thought that maybe it was to do with my counterweights on my scope, it was far more trickier balancing the scope when mounted on the wedge than it is when just in AltAz configuration. Right from the get go I was concerned how the scope could possible be balanced correctly when normally in AltAz setup the counterweights are along a vertical plane but wedge mounted they could end up near to a horizontal plane.

Surely this could add to strain of the Az motor trying to rotate the scope in this format.

I assumed that maybe this was causing the trailing as the Az motor was trying to keep up with field rotation but having to lift the counterweight up on one side whilst maintaining a braking action to stop the downward action of the other counterweight directly opposite, (hard to describe, hope you get the gist).

I removed the counterweights altogether but to my embarrassment I didn't capture any images at this stage because something else crossed my mind, namely the GPS time.

I had noticed when setting up that the GPS time was off by one hour, it was still showing British Summertime & not GMT. No matter how long I left the handset hoping it would resync to the correct time it didn't & stayed this one hour ahead.

Now I hadn't experienced this before because I only got my scope in August when BST was in full swing.

Thinking that perhaps this time discrepancy could cause the trailing I was seeing I manually altered the time, once again by switching the scope off then on again to reset it & causing the need to realign.

With the scope realigned, time running out and clouds rolling in I decided to target some other stars for quick images and I seemed to get some pleasing results with much longer exposure times, although still hit and miss.

 

I am just trying to get to the bottom of what was going wrong here, could it really have been the hour difference in GPS time or the counterweights causing premature trailing?

 

I took two images of M42 at 15sec exposure, one shows the stars completely round while the other shows them as elongated and this is after manually altering the GPS time etc...

 

I would have thought that I could achieve exposures in the minutes at least.

 

What is going wrong?

As an aside I did notice that when attempting to centre an object for imaging using the right arrow button on the handset resulted in the object slowly continuing to move in that direct even after releasing the button, I had to put a couple of blips on the left arrow button to counteract this and keep the target still. Is this normal?

 

Any help would be great.

 

Kirk

 

 

Hi 1CM69,

I am considering purchasing the Celestron HD Wedge and saw your post when doing a search. I would like to know if you solved your problem and if you are happy with your wedge. I am also thinking - had you considered backlash as a cause for your issues, as your last statement about the view drifting seems to suggest this. I image sometimes with my CPC 1100 in altaz mode and I have found that I have to wait a while after slewing for it to settle before starting to image. There are settings for backlash compensation which I have not tried so far.

Best

For citizen science I can see the value of these electronic scopes - like the exoplanet detection by Unistellar.  But for outreach, I feel that to get a "connection" to the science of astronomy the experience of a regular telescope is necessary. Everyone has seen pictures of Saturn in a book or on their screens. But that does not create the kind of reaction they experience when first seeing it through a telescope (on one occasion when I was showing Saturn to some people, a lady said that this was the first time she realized that these things [planets]  were actually real). While this would not be the case for DSOs, for just  a "wow" factor, say a slideshow of Hubble images on a large screen might be even more effective that looking at a picture generated slowly from an electronic scope, and they can even do this without having to go outdoors! 

Cheers!

Hi Moriniboy,

I got a 2" diagonal for my 10" Celestron CPC 1100 to try to get wider fields of view, and found that the field was not sharp to the edge even with a FR/FF, using a 2" 36mm Baader Hyperion - so was a little disappointed. It may be different for the 12" and other eyepieces though.

Best

23 hours ago, Voyager 3 said:

This is a calculator recommended by @Don Pensack , though it still is variable depending on few other factors .

https://www.cruxis.com/scope/limitingmagnitude.htm

 

Thanks, seems to be exactly what I am looking for. 

12 hours ago, Mr Spock said:

This calculator looks useful http://www.nature1st.net/bogan/astro/optics/ccdlimit.html

Looks a bit complicated for my tiny brain though 😜

This seems to be for astrophotography - I am interested in visual observations.

11 hours ago, Deadlake said:

This is quite a complex subject for instance take Barnard loop, this requires a dark site (at least +21 SQM) and H-Alpha filter to really see. Aperture will not help you, all about contrast. So what type of objects do you want to apply this calculation too, are you including or excluding extended objects like those found in the sharpless catalog?

I am interested in stars rather than extended objects.

Hi All,

It seems I can't find information on the limiting visual magnitude in relation to sky brightness and aperture. For example if the naked eye limiting magnitude is 4.5 then what can I expect it would be with different aperture instruments - eg 10 x 50 binos or 11 inch SCT. There are calculations that can be performed for astrophotography which consider various factors like sky brightness, aperture and integration times need to get a particular signal to noise ratio but I wanted information for visual observation.

Cheers

This has of course been discussed a lot before but I would like to ask if anyone has used one of these Unistellar of Vaonis scopes for outreach, and if the reaction to them is comparable to more conventional scopes. I am questioning their value towards promoting science through astronomy. I keep thinkng of the Celestron Skyprodigy range which I believe are now discontinued. In one of their ads they claimed that to use these scopes "no knowledge of the night sky is required" and somebody quipped  "and also no interest in the night sky is required". I think this says quite a lot which probably is even more applicable to these products.

Happy New Year!

Hi Loki1978,

If you are looking for a serious diploma the University of Central Lancashire's distance learning course is good (I am currently enrolled). You can go for various levels of qualification from Certificate to full Bachelors.

Cheers!

5 minutes ago, DaveS said:

"Gone" in the sense of having put his back out.

I was thinking it could also be like when you put a heavy load on a pack animal... then sometimes it has to go!

On 18/11/2021 at 02:10, DaveS said:

 

Oh, it is grab 'n' go. He's grabbed it and now his back's gone!

... and in what sense is the go?😖