Cosmic Geoff

Do you mean the Starsense Autoalign camera system?  I have one attached to a Celestron C8SE in a quick-deploy setup.  I just have to carry the rig outdoors, power it up, enter the date and time and let it autoalign while I carry out the accessories.   The Starsense saves me having to do an annoying manual alignment procedure.  

If one has a setup that takes a long time to erect, and has GPS, the time saved by using a Starsense will be a smaller proportion of the whole, and may not seem worthwhile.

So whether you find the convenience of Starsense worth the cost is entirely up to you. You don't need it.

I would not say it is geared toward total newbies.. Newbies might well find it convenient, but they are the same class of people who might have trouble getting it set up in the first place. 🙂 It is one of the few astro devices likely to really benefit from firmware upgrades - not always an easy task.

Check GIMP. It's free and not intended purely for astro use.

I tried installing Photoshop Elements from CD to one of my laptops, and found it was a severe pain, for some reason.

37 minutes ago, DaveGarland said:

I was taking a pic of the Rosette nebula last night. It was looking quite good when suddenly it was 4 hours later... I had fallen asleep. The Rosette nebula was completely gone. No pic on my phone or on the Seestar itself. Has anyone else had this? If the pic becomes terrible for some reason, does it get deleted? 🤷‍♂️ 

I did have one image stored on the Seestar only. That night I was experimenting with taking the Iphone indoors and out of range of the Seestar wifi.  If you don't complete the target setup I would not expect it to store anything.

"Nexstar8" is not a current model designation.  If you mean any Celestron 8" SCT, they have been manufactured and sold for many years and you can't go far wrong if you buy one of these optical-tube-assemblies. 

The mounts are another matter.  The C8 OTA is now offered with various mounts (all GoTo), so you need to pick a mount which is suitable for what you have in mind. Some (like the C8 SE package) are only suitable for visual use, while others are more suitable for imaging.  I have a CPC800 which has a solid (and heavy) fork mount well suited for planetary imaging or imaging small deep sky objects. 

Attaching a camera to any of these is a trivial exercise involving no more than finding the right adaptor (DSLR) or using the adaptors that came with the camera (astro camera).  Getting a good imaging result is not so easy...

Converting webcams into astro cameras was a 'thing' some years ago, but nowadays one can buy dedicated astro cameras (e.g. the ZWO range) which on the whole perform better and come ready to use.  There are also some extremely cheap astro cameras on ebay, but they may not be very good...

To image DSOs you will probably need more sophisticated equipment in the form of a mount that tracks, a suitable telescope and software that (at minimum) performs live-stacking.  All this is potentially very expensive.   Imaging planets or the Moon might be a more achievable goal.

BTW, the first planetary astro camera I bought was a budget one. It was awful, and now I can't even give it away.

Few of us know what the viewfinder of a National Geographic telescope looks like. if you can post some pictures, somebody might be able to tell you how to reassemble it.

The C6 OTA will be good for planetary imaging and maybe live-stacking EAA of bright small objects like planetary nebulae (maybe aided by  F6.3 focal reducer).  The astro-fi system may well prove to be awkward to use for imaging, as this setup is AFAIK primarily intended for visual use, and the tripod may well prove to be wobbly - it seems similar to the SLT tripod which I have found too wobbly for imaging use. 

If you intend to do serious deep sky imaging, you need to get kit dedicated for the purpose, after you have thought hard about what size of object you want to image, as this makes a major difference to the kit, with potential targets ranging from 10 degrees down to a few seconds of arc in size.  Be aware that astro imaging can soon get very expensive.   A small refractor would probably be easier to use than a 6" Newt, and is a popular starting point.  If you want to dip a toe in the water, order a Seestar S50 for around £550.

Many serious deep-sky imagers use an EQ-6 which is heavier than the EQ-5.

Trying to make one outfit serve for visual and imaging rarely works out well.

AFAIK the cold will only affect the actual display panel, not the control electronics.

To save you the trouble, the internal cells are 

It is probably not user repairable, but these devices are supposed to have a relatively long life.

The 4SE is a reasonable option if you want that sort of thing i.e. a Maksutov GoTo with 4" aperture.  You should ignore the comment about it needing accessories as no telescope kit comes with a full set of accessories.  Typically one has to buy two or three good quality eyepieces and (for Goto or motorized scopes) a power pack.  On the plus side, the 4SE has a built in flip-mirror, potentially useful if your son wants to image various objects.

There are (as you may have discovered already) many other options in your budget of 4SE-price, including Dobsonians of larger aperture.

If your budget is around £500, and you want to take photographs of deep sky objects with the minimum of fuss, order a Seestar S50. To surpass its performance using mount, telescope, camera, filters etc bought separately will cost you a great deal more.

Getting this gear to work together is something of an art.  You can use an eyepiece in focus as a starting point, but  drop in an astro camera with a 1.25" nosepiece and it will typically be wildly out of focus.  The Moon is not the best object for focusing on.  If you use a bright star, or bright planet, you should get a bright disk (or donut, if using a SCT or Newtonian) and you can adjust focus to minimise its size.   

Note there is no guarantee that your telescope (refractor or Newtonian) will come to focus with this camera at all.

Once you have focus you have a reference point for future use, e.g. get focus with the eyepiece pulled out by 6mm and then substitute the camera.  Or with a refractor or Newtonian, mark the focuser tube. That's assuming the exposure time is correct.  Make it too short and the object, even if on screen, will be invisible (especially if it is out of focus as well). 

If you just want wide angle shots of the Milky Way, a DSLR on a suitable mount would be the way to go.  A member of my local club did just that and got some fantastic shots. 

If you aimed a Seestar at the Milky Way area (it is designed to only aim at named objects), it would capture a lot of stars in a 0.7 x 1.3 degree field of view.

I have to declare an interest in that I own a Seestar S50.  I think this is a fantastic device and, among other things, it performs excellently at imaging gaseous nebulae from an urban location, without all the extra expense and setup time and processing skill required to do likewise with a traditional setup.  The hardware and software are very well developed and easy to use.

Dwarf II - apparently has a smaller aperture ☹️ and wider field of view 🙂.  And the software is less well developed.  ☹️

As for the others, you will have to read reviews. I suspect they are getting crushed in terms of sales by the ZWO juggernaut.

You can buy one if you prefer - no need to build your own.

It depends what you want it for.  Much street lighting is now white LED, which emits a continuous spectrum.  Light pollution filters for visual use formerly relied on excluding the narrow bands emitted by sodium or mercury lighting.  So for visual use, no "Light pollution filter" will be much use nowadays for looking at white objects like galaxies.

On the other hand, if you want to observe gaseous nebulae, which emit light in narrow spectral lines, a narrowband pass filter, e.g. OIII, will increase contrast.

And if you want to image nebulae, narrow band or "dual band" filters can work very well.

15 minutes ago, M40 said:

Mine wobbles too, but when I put it on the tripod, I just spin it so that it gets to the end of travel but I don't tighten it. Is there any chance it can be overtightened?

There is a small amount of play in the mechanism.  I actually screw the retracted tripod onto the Seestar 🙂 as that way there seems less risk of cross-threading, or straining the bushing.  I only screw it up to the end of the travel, lightly hand-tight. Clearly a manly heave could cause damage if there is any plastic around the brass bushing.

2 hours ago, Ande said:

Thanks @Giles_B  I’m pretty sure it’s faulty too. After all, the first couple of sessions it performed as it should. Something has definitely gone awry since. Fortunately, I purchased it from FLO, so hopefully they’ll do me proud when I bring it to their attention. 

You do seem to be having a lot of trouble with your Seestar. Mine performs without fuss.  I have not used the autofocus often but it worked okay.   When it failed to plate-solve or find an object, it was generally because it was pointing at a building, tree etc.  (it is not necessarily obvious where a small black square thing is pointing in the dark 🙂) Dropped frames seemed mostly down to drifting cloud.  There is a 3 degree tolerance on levelling, and mostly when I put it down it just works.

I have noticed some star trailing, mostly on its first night (caused by backlash?) and ovalled stars, but one can re-start the run or leave it to see if it is sorting itself out.

Here is an image of IC 5068, about 40 mins, from 24 Nov, stacked FITS file processed in SIRIL.  This image did not get transferred to my smartphone because I moved out of range of the Seestar wifi more than once, so I had to access the FITS.  This is a lesser known nebula, total size about three degrees.  It is remarkable that the Seestar can pull this sort of image out of a slightly hazy and moonlit semi-urban sky. The lo-res unprocessed jpg is included for comparison.

19 minutes ago, malc-c said:

£70 seems a fair price, about double a Lynx Astro EQDIR cable . 

Check the price of a Celestron wifi dongle as IIRC they cost even more.  

The Celestron 127mm Mak and the Skywatcher 127mm Mak are essentially the same. You won't see so many reviews of the Celestron, as in most packages the Celestron is priced significantly higher so not to many are sold.  I have the Celestron 127mm Mak and it is a fine instrument, a 'keeper'.   

I would not recommend the EQ-2 mount though, except as a stop-gap, as I formerly had an EQ-2 clone and found it wobbly even with a 700x70mm refractor mounted on it.

23 hours ago, Giles_B said:

I'm stacking in sirilic which gives easy control over the stacking parameters. The master dark is the wrong orientation and needs to be rotated 90 degrees or it won't stack. I didn't find the master dark made a difference anyway.

Since the Seestar makes both the pre-stacked FITS and the separate FITS files available, has anyone made a direct comparison to see if stacking the files oneself confers any advantage? I am aware that one is supposed to supply a dark, maybe a flat, and preview all the images to weed out any duds caused by clouds, satellites or whatever, but it is commented above that the master dark didn't work anyway, and the Seestar lights are typically so dark with their 10 sec exposure that one can't see anything in them, which would make screening 200 or so of them extremely tedious.

So far, despite having had the Seestar for two months, I have not mastered the post-processing to the point where I can improve on the instantly delivered Iphone image. ☹️

There's not much point in generating a FITS collection of several hundred MB and moving it around, if the 10Mb stacked FITS is equally useful.

1 hour ago, Bugdozer said:

Why is that? Is it because they tend to get more problems, being a complex design? 

It is said that people buy them expecting to be able to capture fantastic deep-sky images, and then find it is harder than they thought.  Or some think new SCTs are over-priced.

There have been discussions here about making up GoTo controllers for the Sky-watcher EQ-5 mount (the Sky-watcher Synscan upgrade kit being rather expensive) and kits are available that might be adaptable for the Meade mount. 

All sorts of old mounts have been upgraded to GoTo, and there are one or two companies that specialise in this, but expect a $1000+ bill.

On 17/11/2023 at 01:35, Kilohertz said:

I have a Sky-Watcher Synscan NEQ-3 on the way as  well and would like to use the hand held control from it.

I don't think so, unless you are a real electronics genius. I have never heard of these handsets working with any other system. The builders of DIY EQ-5 kits settle for having it controlled from a laptop.

2 hours ago, DanaS said:

The ZWO Seestar looks pretty great!! Could I beg you to tell me what might be the next level up, in your experience and opinion?

If you want to have a rig that clearly outperforms the Seestar, be prepared to spend a lot more money.  Like several times more.

2 hours ago, DanaS said:

One more question, with the ZWO Seestar, do you feel the apertura portable telescope battery - 155wh lithium ion battery - for $199 extra is worth it?  

No. The Seestar battery lasts for several hours.  I have found that my iphone needs a recharge before the Serestar does.