Cosmic Geoff

I'm not sure exactly what bit you are trying to unscrew, but if it's made of aluminium etc then heating it with a hot air gun should expand the ring and enable it to be unscrewed. Don't heat up the focuser knob.

Anyone considering remote planetary imaging should first do some planetary imaging at the scope and then think about how they will perform the various operations remotely. Getting the planet on the camera chip, in focus, and reducing the region-of-interest (ROI) can be tricky enough at the scope without trying to do it remotely. I have yet to see a remotely-adjustable ADC. 😁 If you are going to do these setup operations at the scope it hardly seems worth the bother of going indoors to do the actual capture.

Nic - I have no experience of these equatorial platforms, but it occurs to me that getting one might solve a lot of your problems. For planetary imaging it only needs to work with the scope pointed S/SE/SW at the ecliptic. And it might prove useful for visual observing too.

I seriously doubt that a 114mm Newtonian can weigh that much. Perhaps the figure you have seen is the overall package weight. For reference, my much bigger 203mm Newtonian was about 10 Kg.

I'm not sure. You could buy a cheap, nasty astro camera on ebay and see if it comes into focus. If it doesn't, you will have only wasted £10 or so.

These topics have mostly been extensively aired on this forum. Just read the previous posts. The choice of alternative and less wobbly mounts for your scope is huge. The choice at £200 is rather more limited... The Baader Skysurfer III is a good red-dot finder which IIRC comes with a collection of alternative mounting parts for fixing it to a scope.

You need an ADC for good results, but you may find difficulty in getting it to work with a Newtonian. You might also have trouble getting the camera to focus with a Newtonian not built for imaging, but a barlow might help here. 80GB sounds a lot. If that's correct, how long do you think it will take your equipment to move this amount of data around, and to process it? A gentle reminder that getting the right astro kit for the job, (e.g. a GoTo SCT) will enable you to: 1) let the hardware take care of tracking 2) let you hang any kit on the scope without worrying whether you will run out of focus travel 3) Allow you to get the planet on chip without too much trouble, potentially reducing chip size and camera cost. 4) Reduce data storage requirements and hence laptop cost. 5) Reduce size of video files to be processed 6) If you can't crop the videos after recording, recording with a small ROI will make it practical to archive your videos and re-process them months or years later. 7) Reduce time and labour required.

That should work, but try to find out what amount of data 5000 full-size frames represents with this camera, and what the maximum frame rate would be., before you invest £400 in it. (With an ASI 224 or ASI462, 5000 frames of 320x240 px = about 350MB, and frame rate is about 250 frames/sec with short exposures of a few ms on bright planets).

Hard to advise. As you note, a Dob is not ideal for the purpose. I am currently using an ASI462MC, which is an improvement on the ASI224MC in that the former has smaller pixels, tending to capture more planetary detail. The ASI462 has a small rectangular sensor, and in use I crop the region-of-interest down to 320x240 pixels, which with my SCT means that Jupiter fills most of the cropped frame(!). This minimises the amount of data and storage wasted capturing a lot of black sky. I imagine this would be impossible without a good, powered mount, and you will at least need to use a much larger ROI. With the focal length of your scope you will need to use either a small-pixel camera (e.g. 2.9um) or a Barlow lens to get adequate image scale. Getting the planet image on the (full) chip, centering, switching to desired ROI and fine focusing will all be more difficult without a driven mount. There is an imager who has posted some fine images in 'Planetary Imaging' using a Dob. Your 14" will be (even) more affected by bad seeing than my 8".

I am getting around 250fps on brighter planets with a USB3 equipped laptop. Check the online spec for details. The rate achieved depends on the exposure time and other factors.

It's not bad, but a C9.25 should be capable of more under the right conditions. If you tell us what capture program you were using (Sharpcap?) and copy the camera setting file here we might have some tips. The image looks like the focus could be better. With Jupiter you can use the moons as focusing aids.

Got Jupiter and Saturn in late evening, and Mars after midnight. Some of my best images so far with this new camera. ASI462MC, CPC800, typically 5000 frames, best 30%, processed in Autostakkert (for Jupiter), Registax 6. Seeing seemed good after midnight and I could easily see detail on laptop screen. The moon in Jupiter image is Io. Mars image shows Syrtis Major and Hellas (brighter region).

Sounds like my CPC800 before I tweaked the collimation. My C8 SE did not produce 'hairy' stars.

I have often seen reports that SCT views are 'mushy' with the implication that these instruments are inferior to other designs. Following a recent experience I now suspect that the issue could be poor collimation. I have two SCTs - a C8 SE (quick deploy) and a CPC800 (for serious business). I had a feeling that the C8 SE imaged better, yet the CPC800 resolved double stars OK. The views through the C8 SE always looked perfectly fine, with suitably positioned stars showing an Airy disc and rings. But was the view of doubles through the CPC800 always a little untidy? Eventually, I carried out a side-by-side trial, swapping over the diagonals and eyepieces to eliminate these as a possible cause of trouble. Result: the C8 SE was definitely performing better. The only possible conclusion: either the CPC800 was a 'Friday Afternoon' job or the collimation was slightly out. So I aimed it at Polaris and slackened one of the secondary aligning screws by a fraction of a turn. Ugh, worse. I slackened an opposing screw slightly and that definitely improved matters. So left it like that, and tried some planetary imaging with it within hours. Result - significantly better than before, and pretty much like the kind of result I sometimes got from the C8 on the less stable SE mount. So, a very slight mis-collimation of a SCT significantly affects the performance.

I have never tried saving and re-using a Registax scheme, (though I have used it hundreds of times) so don't worry about it.

It would help if you told us which capture program you are using. I have dug up some of my results for 2018. Here is the actual log for one of the images: (below) Nowadays I would expect to find some more colour. Getting a sharp but realistic-looking image is something of an art. You will note that the exposure is only 3 ms. The capture area is 480x480 pixels. Nowadays with a better mount I usually use 320x240px. The gain is set at 100. Whether I was happy with 100 or there was no way of altering it, I don't recall. The size of the .ser file was 228MB (probably 3000 frames). The .ser file was processed in Registax 6. (Lately I have begun using Autostakkert + Registax). [ZWO ASI120MC] Debayer Preview=On Pan=400 Tilt=240 Output Format=SER file (*.ser) Binning=1 Capture Area=480x480 Colour Space=RAW8 Temperature=17.7 Discard Split Frames=Off High Speed Mode=Off Turbo USB=80(Auto) Flip=None Frame Rate Limit=Maximum Gain=100 Exposure=0.003079 Timestamp Frames=Off White Bal (B)=100 White Bal (R)=56 Brightness=8 Auto Exp Max Gain=50 Auto Exp Max Exp M S=30000 Auto Exp Target Brightness=100 Mono Bin=Off Apply Flat=None Subtract Dark=None #Black Point Display Black Point=0 #MidTone Point Display MidTone Point=0.5 #White Point Display White Point=1 TimeStamp=2018-06-24T23:11:01.0156882Z SharpCapVersion=3.1.5049.0 And here is the corresponding image:

What capture program are you using? In Sharpcap 4 there is no problem in turning up the gain from 100 to 350 or so. I did exactly that when I was using my ASI120MC with Sharpcap 3.

I have a C8 SE (same mount as the OP). Getting it to align should be straightforward provided you enter all the settings correctly. Check the location and time/date and time zone and ensure they are all correct and in the correct format. If once 'set up' it offers you a planet that you know is below the horizon (or vice versa), that is a clue that the settings are wrong. Yes, I know this can be frustrating if you have never done it before. If you can't make it behave with the handset, plugging in wifi gadgets will not help, unless you strike lucky and plug in something that automatically finds and enters the position, time, etc. One thing to watch out for is bad connection of the power plug, exacerbated as the mount swings around while the power source stays put.

Beware the extra path length of several cm. added by the ADC, which may prevent you reaching focus. The difficulty of getting a camera to focus in a Newtonian designed for visual use is well known. One reason for using a SCT or Mak for planetary imaging is that the focal range is large, making it much easier to accommodate all sorts of imaging accessories. Something that owners of the ZWO ADC may not have realised is that both the top and bottom sections unscrew, leaving the centre body with a standard thread at each end!

A plate-solve in ASTAP confirms that the object was out of field - the GoTo being about 10' off target - not much, but enough to put it out of camera field.

Coincidentally I was trying to image the PK64+5.1 last night, and four nights ago, with a C8, and to my frustration failed to see anything like it on screen or in the saved images. Nor could I establish whether I had been aiming at the correct field.

Sounds very like the Starsense smartphone app, currently only available bundled with various manually mounted Starsense telescopes. (Not to be confused with the Starsense camera/handset system). VX=AVX?

The Startravel 102mm would be a bit over-mounted on an EQ-5 Synscan, except for imaging. A F10 Evostar would be a reasonable choice, or a 127mm Maksutov, or a 6" Newtonian. For family use, the EQ-5 Synscan will require you to operate it. And as I have found, its GoTo does not perform well for narrow field all-sky viewing. A manual alt-azimuth mount and a classic refractor would allow all family members to have a go at handling the scope and mount.

Depends on what your definition of 'overly heavy' is. I looked up the UK Health & Safety recommendations for weight handling, which gave an interesting table. According to this, a man should not try lifting a 20Kg weight from ankle height or at arm's length, and a woman should not try lifting a 20 Kg weight at all. In the past I have suffered back strains from lifting heavy CRT monitors and other kit at work and it was not amusing.

The CPC mount series is the direct descendant of Unkabin's mount. I have no idea whether the old C8 OTA would drop straight in. I did not mention it earlier lest it doesn't, wheras the old OTA would attach to any single-arm mount with little bother. I have a CPC800 - it's a great mount but rather heavy, to the point where I would not want to own one of the larger models in the series.