pipnina

That looks sharp! I'd be pleased for sure!

That's one long extender! 😜 I found on my frac that they have a lot of backfocus, I presume because most are designed with reducers and diagonals in mind. I think a good test to see if you are going to see vignetting is to look down the scope, and if you can see the whole camera sensor from the corner of the objective lens, you're not going to see any vignetting! I think you can find camera rotators (Maybe like this one, but this is bigger than M42 thread https://www.firstlightoptics.com/williams-optics-focusers/william-optics-camera-angle-rotator-for-25-m63-focuser.html) so that could be an option here. I think for the modest size of the IMX585 31mm filters should be perfectly fine, so something like a filter drawer should work fine here: https://www.firstlightoptics.com/zwo-accessories/zwo-2-filter-drawer-m42-m48.html. This is, again, a bit big but you get the idea! Adding items like these to fit your current extension might bring you into focus, depending on how much further out you need to be? Hope this helps a bit.

That's pretty good! I wasn't aware full frame sensors could work on these newts- my APS-C sensor already had 33% vignette on the TS-GPU corrector and 25% on the MPCC MKIII What does a flat here look like, out of interest?

I sent them an email last week and they never responded, so I presumed they either didn't speak english or were disgusted at my german haha. Good luck with the service if you go that route! Let us know how it goes!

Update: Spoken to the guys at work, seems like cutting the male M117x1 thread into the existing flange and parting off the end is going to be possible! We're going to take a closer look at it tomorrow and possibly have our go at machining it. Failing that, they've said I might be able to bring in some 5" aluminium bar to machine a flange new. Looking at prices that could run me £80 if it came to it, but I'm still hopeful the original will fit! Fingers crossed!

I used my star adventurer, ball-head mount, and a little phone-holding clip I found in Lidl for £14 haha. I nudged the phone left-right-up-down between bursts of exposures to try and move the hot pixels around, and it mostly worked but there is still some left over. In a previous edit I caught some of the heart and soul, but they haven't made an appearance this time : (

Got about 2 hours worth of 17 second exposures last week, but it took a long time for me to process them into something even remotely good due to issues with flats and the pixel6's... unusual camera quirks. Yet, I still have something to show!: Sadly the Pixel6 has a pair of unusual lens problems: First is that it has atroceous off-axis internal reflections, which I think are the cause of the ring around the images. The second is a super-high density of hot pixels. I did my best to ensure the stacking process would be able to remove them, but many remain and the dark noise in the background is still very strong.

Update: seems like someone at work can help me machine the flange. I have an M117x1 focuser tilt adapter now to use to help us form the thread on the scope side to fit. Now I just need to cut the scope flange off. Regarding re-gluing: What glue would you recommend? Should I find a proper tube of epoxy and hardener mix or are other glues appropriate here? Cheers all!

As I recall that rod unthreads completely and can be removed? Can you show us what the threads look like on the end currently inside the mount? Hope you manage to get it sorted soon!

Nice to see the hobby is popular enough to support such a large venture! I have often been amazed at how much selection is available in-stock on your store at any given time, especially the larger bits like OTAs and mounts. I got curious about where all the stuff in my shed was distributed from only recently and looked you guys up on streetview, only to have a "How do they fit all of that stock in there!" moment haha. Are both houses in the same business park in Exeter?

I know that the TS 3" R&P has an accessory you can buy separately to adjust focuser squareness, looks like a tilt adapter for cameras that sits between the scope and focuser. I'd probably buy that with the TS if I go for that option to make things simpler.

The best ID I can give is "SET Optics 130mm f6.6 APO triplet". Apparently the company went bust according to the previous owner, and even they had it second hand so I am the third owner!

I'm looking to use the APM riccardi flattener/reducer with it, which means I need at least 2.5" clear barrel, and I figure getting a 3" focuser will prevent any vignetting. At the moment there is a fair bit of vignetting on my APS-C sensor, and I'd like it to be as camera-upgradable as possible. Since the focuser must be changed anyway due to being defective, I may as well do a full-blown upgrade in size while I'm at it! I was looking at either the feathertouch R&P 3" (M109 x 1mm thread), or the TS 3" R&P (M117 x 1mm thread). I am going to go into work on monday and see if they'll let me machine it in there (they are often quite relaxed about these things so it may be possible). If that is the case, I just need to decide definitively on which of those focusers I want, cut the flange off (sawing seems to be the most popular method in this thread so far) and hopefully by that point it just becomes a matter of machining and fitting that focuser, and gluing the flange back on... If it works, hurrah! If it goes wrong, I will have to reconcile a lot of emotions regarding a lost £2000 haha.😬

This is true, and while it produces OK results by itself, you could in theory go deeper with DeepSkyCamera on the S22 Ultra When using the inbuilt 4 minute stacked shots on my Pixel, I notice a fair few artifacts around stars. It's there in RAW mode too so presumably it's a fault of the stacking process. I don't know about the S22U, but the Pixel6 also can't edit its own RAW files, yet the JPEGs it makes are AI enhanced and that produces some odd artifacts...

Based on what I've seen, the Saumsung S22 ultra might be a better astro phone than the pixel6! My own experience with my P6 shows internal reflections in the lenses, making flat calibration impossible and it is limited to 17 second exposures vs the S22U's 30 This is the rejection map from a stack I did of raw Pixel 6 17s shots recently, unstretched! Sooo many hot pixels

Sadly not if I want to increase the focuser barrel size, the opening of the current flange is only 66mm which is too tight even for a 2.5" focuser : / Seems so:

Rats This focuser has to be changed for the scope to be useful to me, so one way or another it's either got to come off, or somehow be machined while still attached to the scope! The latter would be extremely challenging and risk damaging the telescope even more than other options! Sadly my options here basically boil down to: Able to remove flange to machine and re-fit: Ideal Unable to remove flange and: Has to be machined in place (not possible most likely, or expensive if it is!) Has to be scrapped and I buy a new scope for the third time this year (Dear god no) I use a reciprocating saw and simply cut it off, then blowtorch the flange to remove the carbon fiber, making it machinable... I don't like this idea either but if it comes down to it, it's cheaper than buying a new telescope...

Sadly this rear flange is *probably* not threaded, as it attaches to both the inside and outside of the carbon tube snugly and it probably isn't held in by any fasteners as it feels completely smooth on the outside and everywhere on the inside too... If it's held in by adhesive, is there a way to break it down without damaging the tube? This flange *has* to come out so I can machine it to have a relevant thread for a focuser replacement & upgrade, as the 2" crayford installed paired with the odd mounting mechanism for it are nothing but trouble, and ruin what seems otherwise a very nice quality scope... Any help appreciated!

Maybe if things get bad enough I'll end up powering my rig with an exercise bike and lose some weight this winter haha. Nice that you got to see the sky with less pollution though! I wish we had "lights off" hours in my city... My grandad has told me of when the gas lights were relit after the war as a key memory, that period between VE day and the lights coming on must have been great for amateur astronomers- if they still had their kit.

Oh yeah, I forgot to add in the california nebula shot I got as well:

Having bought a 130mm f6.6 triplet from @Daniel Karl recently, and finally having the chance to take a few shots I feel worthy of sharing (albeit limited by technical or cloud issues) I visited the soul nebula in HOO first. At this time I was simply trying to get to grips with the scope so I was running it without flattener and it shows at the corners. Even so, this was only 25 minutes of exposure each for OIII and Ha as this image led me to discover the focuser slipping problem- switching between OIII and Ha filter offsets through the night made the focuser slip ever so slightly, and by only a few subs in the images became unusable. Still, the result from what I could keep was nice enough! More recently I put the corrector in and narrowed the backspacing down a bit. I still need to add some more space, but for now I have run out of shims so the current spacing will have to do, and is better than without corrector at present anyway! Sadly no bi colour for this one as it was also a rush job. This time due to clouds- even some of the final picture has clouds in it and that was after rejecting 60% of the subs! I'm quite impressed by the sharpness this scope is giving me though. In the center the stars that aren't saturated are sharper than those produced by my f4 newtonian! The saturated ones are another matter but, we can't expect the best of both worlds! \ I tried to make up for the lack of OIII by using image processing magicks in RawTherapee. Not sure which one I prefer. Hopefully once I have a replacement focuser (If possible, research still ongoing!) I will be able to get the full potential out of this scope, as so far it has shown a lot of promise even with the headaches I've endured this last week or so! Clear skies

I'm not sure I can recommend the TS-PHOTON scopes personally. Even after buying a dew shield, putting flocking around the focuser, flocking behind the secondary, blackening the secondary edges etc, it still didn't calibrate my images correctly with flat frames (over-correction) or had off-frame problems like gradients introduced by the flats. I also noticed some background colour mottling at larger scale but I largely had that controlled at the end. Collimation is much harder IMO on these photons. Not just because they are F4, but because the mirror cell design is worse than that of the PDS lineup. My 130P-DS held collimation like a champ once set, and was super easy to set to begin with. The photon moved as I swung the scope on DEC and while I fixed it on the primary, it needed modifications to do so. Eventually I worry the mirror simply got distorted from stress or some other issue, as my stars became very bloated and also started to elongate slightly. I recently got a refractor triplet to replace it and was WOW'd by the shaprness of stars in the center- which is something newts are *supposed* to do well! For all those faults though, the focuser was pretty solid. I'd agree it was sturdier than the one on the P-DS, however it had no male or female thread on the camera side so you couldn't screw any correctors into it. By what I've googled, if we want quality and no-stress newtonians, we either have to limit ourselves to the small ones like the 130P-DS and only do some tweaks to them, or we need to splash out the big ££££ for something like the Teleskop Service ONTC newtonians or the orion high tier newtonians... It's a bit sad, but the "it's too good to be true" factor of cheap large newts is... Too good to be true by my own experience. I also noticed that because the GPU CC is very long (about 10-11cm) it causes vignetting of even APS-C sensors. And maybe un-parfocalises the scope, as I used that CC and my filters had offsets like this: Red: 34 Green: 3 Blue: -22 But on my refractor, with the same filters, the gap is pretty much nonexistant and I can swap between LRGB filters without having to move the focuser at all! Very suspect. I know this doesn't make things any easier but I personally would avoid this scope change : (

Looks like the central white pip is off center to the left in all of the images. That could possibly be a sign of miscollimation but I'm sadly not experienced enough with refractors to say for sure 😕

I use Linux to control my setup over wifi. Connectivity is OK but you ideally need a quality dongle for the PC outside as it's going to be sending mega-sized RAW files back plus a video stream. I remote desktop into my outdoor machine using VNC All I need to do on my PC inside is: "ssh pipnina@192.168.0.33" then type in my password in the terminal. This gives this terminal window control over the machine outside. Then I type "x11vnc" which gets the laptop to start a VNC server Then i open a VNC viewing program pre-installed with my system (KRDC) and hit connect on the bookmarked connection for my laptop. I am then remoted into the outdoor PC : D In some ways setting it up was easier than alternatives on windows. It does have a somewhat low framerate though.