Cosmic Geoff

Your mount appears to be of the GoTo type, so you should not be trying to move it by hand at all. All mounts of this type have some backlash in the gearing - it's normal and you cannot adjust it out, but you can compensate for it in the handset settings (see the handbook). If you are not satisfied with the degree of wobble, you need to get a better class of mount, which could be disagreeably expensive.

It's not smart to tell the whole Internet your exact location in a public forum.

Some nice images above. Last night I imaged Jupiter through a gap in the clouds. I mainly wanted to see how the device performed. I found Jupiter in the night's best objects list and it slewed straight to the approximate position and started doing its thing to centre the object. One can adjust the image brightness but I couldn't bring up the moons. I then selected Uranus but could not see anything. I wonder if it is capable of finding Venus in daylight? I suspect it would just over-expose. And there is a danger of encountering the Sun. I still don't see what the Planetary icon is for as it just brings up a mostly black page with 'No Object' on it.

You can, but... that scope and mount is only fit for taking pictures of the Moon and planets, with a dedicated planetary camera. if you want to take good looking photographs of deep space objects like gaseous nebulae, you should either buy a tracker mount for your camera and take wide field shots. Or order a Seestar S50. If you want better results than the Seestar produces, be prepared to spend large amounts of money on kit, and many hours figuring out how to make it work, and many hours processing the results.

Lx200 or LX90 8 inch?

Why a refractor? You will not get a refractor and mount that are much good for that price. If your funds are limited, you should look at small Dobsonian telescopes which will give you more aperture for your money, and avoid a cheap wobbly tripod.

Who has mastered the planetary mode on the Seestar? I have updated to the latest app and firmware, and have a Planetary Mode icon on the screen, but it just brings up a mostly black screen with 'No Object' at the top. I found this Youtube video which claims to demonstrate it. It shows a list of all the planets, visible or otherwise, which I was unable to bring up. I did get a list of 'Tonight's best' with Uranus and Jupiter at the top, and deep sky objects below. The Seestar actually 'found' Jupiter even though it was indoors, but when I tried to repeat the exercise I couldn't get that 'Tonight's Best' list up again. Most frustrating.

I've never had any trouble with that. You just have to move your fingertip outside the circle (further = faster) and mind you're not driving it into park position.

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.

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 Battery pack (Lithium nickel cobalt manganese, Li(NiCoMn)O2) 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.

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.