Cosmic Geoff

These look good, lots of detail. CPC1100 looks like right tool for the job. 🙂

Jupiter is looking particularly bland lately - with a small telescope one might be able to make out just one cloud belt. I have never acquired the knack of seeing much planetary detail - tried various scopes and eyepieces. Eventually having several scopes and a spirit of 'what's to lose' I tried planetary imaging and pretty soon had an image of Jupiter taken through the 127mm Mak that was far better than anything I had seen visually.  I then had a season imaging with a C8 and ASI 120MC.

I also found that my binoviewer + Skywatcher x2 Barlow lens worked surprisingly well for planetary viewing on Mars- possibly because as well as using two eyes it cut down the glare at each eye by more than half.

For visual use, the C8 SE is the best planetary scope in my collection, seeing permitting.

I had to look up what a GIAZ mount was. This is clearly a visual mount, but the 150PDS and Evostar 80 ED appear to be imaging scopes which would require a totally different mount for imaging.  Can you explain?

If you want a complement to the Mak, a f5 Newtonian would offer widefield views of starclusters and nebulae, but will not be a plus for planets unless it's a lot bigger than the 127mm Mak.  I don't think that a smaller refractor would be an interesting visual alternative to the 127mm Mak.

Why are you using Sharpcap 2.1? I use Sharpcap 3.1 (which I assume is a later version) with this camera and I am not having a problem.

And yes, there probably is a setting to turn on on-screen debayering.

And as a footnote, a setup optimised for planetary imaging would be radically different and just as expensive.  Bought new, my CPC800 (C8 SCT + heavy duty fork mount), ASI224MC planetary video camera, and ADC would cost over £2000.   One doesn't have to use a CPC800, as a SCT on a substantial equatorial mount is usually preferred, but that is no cheaper.

The dew shield.

Before buying a load of non-essential accessories, wait till you have tried using the scope, which if you live in the UK may be in a few weeks'  time. ☹️

I anticipate that you will want a couple of higher powered eyepieces (cue long discussion thread...)   something like a 15mm and a 8mm. How much to spend? depends on how much you like spending money. It's not a demanding scope - I have found that Celestron Omni Plossls work well enough.  I see that it comes with a couple of  eyepieces but I'd not expect them to be very good - the higher powered kit eyepieces I got with my scopes were generally poor.

And some sort of proper external power supply - it doesn't matter what, so long as it reliably delivers the correct voltage for a sensible length of time.  A lot of people use engine starters (from Halfords etc) which do the same as a Celestron power tank, but are cheaper (and start your car, inflate tyres, or whatever).

Don't bother with Barlow lenses - it has a long Fl already.

The message of the video is pretty clear. ☹️

Also, did you notice how much the scope bounces around on its mount when he touches it toward the end of the video? 

Beware of trying to cut corners with mounts - in my experience a lot of them are annoyingly wobbly even with the recommended OTA atop them. 

Wobbly: EQ-2,  Celestron SLT.

Celestron SE 6/8 - not great but okay for visual with a short 5.5 Kg OTA.

Not wobbly: AZ-4, EQ-5,  CPC800 mount & tripod.  

I bought a vintage 70mm refractor for a modest price and then found that owing to its length and weight the minimum mount was an AZ-4 or EQ-5 , either one costing far more than the scope did. 

14 minutes ago, pellgarlic2 said:

So the "Star Discovery" Go-To mount seems to be a bit more capable when it comes to payload weight. Perhaps this could be the answer to my search - a 150 mm Newt on a Star Discovery mount at £375:

https://www.firstlightoptics.com/az-goto/sky-watcher-star-discovery-150i.html

It's an entry level telescope - if you read the small print you will see you can't collimate it. And to work the wifi mount you need to provide the "handset".   If the mount can get GPS from the tablet or phone that might be advantageous.

 It is also quite light and easy to carry,   - a quote from a customer review of the 150mm Skyliner Dobsonian.

1 hour ago, Ricochet said:

Your current telescope and mount combined weigh 16kg and you are finding it difficult to carry.

You need to confirm the actual weight of your scope + base.  Are you perhaps confusing the Kg and lbs weight figures? The weight should equate to about 27 -29 lbs.  If it is 16kg and that is too heavy to carry, then we can try to suggest something lighter.

Actually I can believe that 16 Kg is likely to be too heavy to carry in one lump up several flights of stairs.   Perhaps the solution is to carry it in two sections - tube and base?

The C6 SE at around 13.5Kg total is one of the lightest outfits you will find without going below 6" aperture.

What mount are you currently using? You don't say but 27kg kit weight seems a lot.

If you want GoTo, this is just possible for £400 if you choose one of the smaller & more portable outfits.

Also consider a Celestron C6 SE (used). This is a 6" SCT with GoTo and the tube is a lot smaller and lighter than the equivalent Newtonian.  If you are normally fit, you will be able to pick up the whole thing including mount and tripod, and carry it through a doorway.  It also comes apart fairly easily into 2 or 3 sub-assemblies. You can do planetary astrophotography with this (though the mount is not ideal).

Also consider a 6" Dobsonian (cheap and low-tech and not excessively heavy). This could be carried in 2 parts - tube and mount. 

Observing nebulae (galaxies) from an urban site will not work well.  If you have a lot of light pollution it is best to concentrate on small bright objects (e.g. planets, double stars etc)

Be aware that serious astrophotography requires heavy and expensive kit and lots of cables and accessories - not the kind of thing you will enjoy taking upstairs and assembling on a rooftop. 

Red-dot finders and optical finders do different jobs, and on a bigger scope it is often useful to fit both.  One often feels the need of a red-dot finder to get objects in the FOV of a 9x50 finder on a telescope with no handy open sighting points.  Playing "Where's Jupiter" when you can see it plainly with the naked eye is annoying.

 I have a 9x50 RACI and like it.

On a small scope a 9x50 may be overkill and you might do better to stick with the red-dot, or if you hate the red-dot, a 6x30 optical finder.

Well done. There was part cloud here so I decided to pass.

10 hours ago, pellgarlic2 said:

It looks like my options (without sacrificing too much in any particular area) are either going to be:

1. Get a Go-To mount for my current scope, and maybe upgrade the OTA at some point in the future.
2. Upgrade my OTA just now, and try to patch up my existing tripod, and look into adding a Go-To device at some point in the future.

Good points.

However if your ultimate aim is to own an 8" GoTo outfit, you will have to upgrade both the scope and the mount.  An 8" f5 Newtonian is actually very pleasing for looking at star clusters and other deep-space objects, (the Perseus Double Cluster looks great in one) and as I mentioned can be cheap - the problem is what to mount it on.  My ultimate answer was to go for usability and get a used Celestron C8 SE (8" GoTo SCT), which I obtained for about half the price of a new one.  I could have spent as much or more getting a really good GoTo mount for the 8" Newtonian.  I definitely didn't want to persist with a manual mount having found the manually mounted 8" Newt to be an exercise in utter frustration.  I just couldn't find things with it that did not show up in the finderscope.   

You could also try EEVA. I put a planetary camera on an inexpensive 102mm f5 achromatic refractor atop an inexpensive Nexstar SLT GoTo mount and was gobsmacked by some of the near-live images I obtained.  It imaged galaxies I could barely see with the 8" SCT even at a better site. 

It depends on what kind of observing you want to do.  At the ~£400 price point you are still having to make severe compromises between cost and the size & quality of the scope and mount. 

If you get a Dob, be very clear that you are limiting yourself to a "Dob" style of observing.  My own observing is based around GoTo - to give examples I recently imaged Jupiter (which requires a good driven mount and the CPC800 did very nicely. ) This would be extremely difficult to do with an unpowered Dob.  Then I looked at some double stars, again using the GoTo. I could not see any of them with the naked eye - I could not even see the constellations they were in through the moonlit murk, so I can't imagine how I could have observed them with a Dob. 

Another couple of things I do sometimes is look for planets in daytime -this requires GoTo unless you are very clever. Once a year I go to a dark skies site to look at galaxies. To see as many as possible in the limited time, I use GoTo.

If you just want to look at planets and other bright easy to find stuff you could use a Dob.

For looking at deep sky objects (visual) you mainly want aperture  i.e 8" or more.  The field of view is of secondary importance  as there are tens of thousands of fainter deep-sky objects that will fit into the narrow field of view of a Mak or SCT and a small number of bright well-known galaxies and clusters that won't.  Sometimes the photo image won't fit in the field but the core you can actually see visually will.  Yes a Newtonian might be more suitable and they are cheap so consider getting a small one as an accessory to an established setup.  At the moment I am trying to sell an 8" Newtonian OTA and it seems I can't move it on unless I practically give it away.

A step up from 102 mm to 127 mm Mak ought to be a significant change if all the parts including eyepieces are good. Beware the eyepieces bundled with the kit - some are very poor.

The 127 Mak Synscan is much the same as one of my earlier and well-liked outfits, except that I have the Celestron version.  For some reason the Sky-watcher Synscan is significantly cheaper. On the other hand, the Celestron software is probably easier to use.  I've never had much difficulty with it. (See the 64-post 'can't align my Synscan' thread currently running.) 

On no account buy the 203mm Newtonian on a manual EQ-5 mount - I've tried that combination and it's horrible - not user friendly at all. I could sell you this combo but that would be cruel. 🙂

Given the British weather you won't be plugging and unplugging all that often during the life of the equipment. 😦 I have no figures for you, but the ports should stand a reasonable number of cycles of plugging and unplugging.  I have not had any trouble myself other than with the notoriously unreliable 5.5mm power plugs.

Did anyone observe this conjuction?

I'm fairly sure that I found Mercury as a telescopic object on the evening of the 17th with a 102mm f5 achro refractor, at about 6 deg altitude, after searching by altitude and azimuth. I did not see Mars, which should have been somewhere at the edge of the telescopic field.  I checked in Stellarium what the paired view should look like, but by that time the planets were too low and in cloud.

Here are some things to try:

Crop the frame when shooting (I use 320x240) to reduce storage used and increase the frame rate.

Use a longer video - I use 5000 frames and have tried 7500.  Try different limit settings _ I usually try around 20% (i.e. best 1000 frames stacked) 

Focus on a star higher in the sky - easier than focusing on a moon, especially if seeing is poor.

Use an ADC - you can correct the dispersion in software but an ADC does it better.  Image within an hour or two of meridian transit, when the planet is highest.

Use a bigger telescope. 😕  I did a side-by side imaging trial once and found that my C8 performed markedly better than the 127mm Mak.

Keep trying till you hit a night with decent seeing.  At my site the seeing rarely if ever supports imaging at f20 rather than native f10.

2 hours ago, Arran townsend said:

Hi peter, I'm wondering if a light pollution filter will still allow me to photograph celestrial objects like clusters and galaxies, I've heard that they are great for nebulae, but I can't find anything about galaxies and clusters. Could you help me out?

You will want to image clusters and galaxies in white light, which means you can try filtering out light pollution from narrow-band sources like sodium lighting using a band-stop filter, but not continuous spectrum light pollution from white LED lights.

Nebulae emit much of their light in narrow bands, so band-pass filters will help in viewing or imaging them against a background of continuous spectrum light pollution.

The short answer to your question is probably "No".

I would suggest that instead of choosing a telescope because you "like" it, you decide what you want to observe (or image) and buy equipment suitable for that function.  Being prepared to spend the price of a new 8" GoTo Dob gives you some leeway.

Some tips: Look at what serious deep-space or planetary imagers actually use.

What kind of visual telescope would you really like, taking cost out of the equation? Perhaps one half the length and weight of the equivalent Newtonian, with a more convenient eyepiece position that stays near one position, and a large focal range to accommodate accessories that add length to the light path?

Not having GoTo gives you a huge bias to only observing objects that are easy to find and track.

What kind of mount? These days you only really need an equatorial for long exposure astrophotography.   Mounts bundled with 8" telescopes vary

hugely  in ease of setup, portability, weight, stiffness and embedded cost.

A 8" Newtonian atop a EQ5 or similar mount is a pig to use, whether for visual or for astrophotography.

It probably does not matter hugely which of the three you buy - it will have limitations and not support high magnifications.

If you are shopping for scope + mount, you might get more aperture and performance for your money if you buy a mini-Dob mounted Newtonian telescope, for around the same price and carry weight.

I don't know the answer, but it does not sound like a motor/gearbox problem. There is no mechanical reason why the gearboxes should run at some (software-controlled) speeds and not others.

At motor rate 1 to 5 the movement will be too slow to see unless you are looking in the eyepiece. I have never, ever, selected rates 1 and 2.  There may be backlash in the gearboxes which means that if you change direction nothing will move at the output till the cogs all catch up with the motor. The slower the rate, the more pronounced the effect of backlash will be.

The motor/gearbox assemblies for Alt and Az are identical so you could swap them over if you think it is going to tell you anything. (it probably won't).

If the above notes don't help, I suggest you check that you have an adequate power supply and that the power plug is making proper contact.   Then check the motor control firmware. Celestron offer a program that allows you to flash the handset and motor control firmwares, and there is another one that is just for the motor control and allows you to verify the motor control firmware chips and also flash them with new firmware.

The exact procedures are too involved for me to detail here.

Sorry I don't recall the exact names of these things (I can look on another PC if nobody replies), but the 'Nextarsite' should point you in the right direction.

This is a known issue for the EQ-5 (same tripod), reference posts in SGL.

If it is under warranty, send it back and claim a replacement. 

I have a 70 year old vintage Ross 70mm refractor that still works perfectly.

I assume the finder in question is the straight-through 9x50 finder on the cast aluminum low profile bracket - the same one I got with my CPC800.

TBH I cannot see anything wrong with this finder at all except that it is straight-thru. I don't like straight thru finders as they give me (all too literally) a severe pain. I have taken the straight thru finder off the CPC800 and fitted in an alternate position a finder shoe and 9x50 RACI Skywatcher finder.   Ideally I would like a red-dot finder as well to act as a finder for the finder as it can be difficult to aim the assembly and get objects into the finder FOV.

My C8 SE has Starsense and a red-dot finder. This is sufficient for visual use. For imaging I can slip on the aforementioned Skywatcher RACI finder to get objects onto the camera chip.