pipnina

Hi guys, took this image last night of M101 but it is in dire need of some flats as you can see.

What method do you guys use to take flats with the 130-PDS that minimises adding more tray light than you started with? last time I tried I got a gradient from one side of the image to the other...

Something like this might provide a good surface to shoot at for flats? https://www.amazon.co.uk/32-Inch-Portable-Translucent-Collapsible-Reflector/dp/B002ZIVKAE/ref=sr_1_1_sspa?ie=UTF8&qid=1546970257&sr=8-1-spons&keywords=photographic+reflector&psc=1

Also, flats don't need a perfectly reflective surface because your lens should be focused at infinity while the target is considerably closer.

When it comes to dew shields, what are you guys using? Off-the-shelf solutions or something more DIY?

Finding this thread just makes me more excited for the coming darkness! I got to do a few tests with my 130-PDS (hopefully I've got the hang of it all now!) during and just before summer twilight. Not sure what I'm going to photograph first though. My camera has pitiful Ha response (One day I'll complete the build with OAG and a cooled CMOS...) and the central milky way nebulae (M8, M16 etc) are too low down for me to image (without exposing the precious to the road and pavement... and street lamp glare!)

On a side note, has anyone else found the 130-PDS prone to stray light? In an image I took recently I noticed a gradient in the image that seemed too "sharp" to be vignetting or sky gradients. (The glowing pale lobe to the left hand side)

Are there measures that can be taken to prevent this?

Being held down by gravity alone, I would be mortified at the thought of mine tipping over since we're at 51-56 degrees north in the uk!

You seem to have done a splendid job of it though. You'd think it was off-the-shelf by Meade, made specifically for that scope!

Does only pixel scale matter for guidescopes, or is a guidescope of certain size relative to main telescope aperture also required?

Pipnina

A Dob needs to cool and be columated. So, yes, no screwing stuff together. But a little Frac on a simple manual mount already assembled is the fastest. I've got an ED80 on a AZ3 which stays up for most of the time.

If I has to assemble from scratch, the dob would win hands down.

Paul

So from my setup, something like a 10/12" dob would be an improvement on setup time/portability? How heavy is your 10"? Easily liftable by 1 person? Hopefully upgrading in the new year.

That's a heck of a scope but I still love my little 10" to bits. Going by this month's weather though even a 280" would be a complete waste of time in sunny (hmmmm) Cornwall.

I have several scopes but I keep a SW ST 102 refractor on an EQ1 mount (legs extended) so that if I see a gap in the clouds it is the ultimate grab and go. I literally plonk it down facing north and remove the dust caps and start observing, takes about 20 seconds from deciding to go looking to actually be peering down the ep. My minute count for November so far is a whopping 20 minutes.

Think I might move to Australia if the YouTube clip is anything to go by

Is a 10" not easier to move around? My 5" on an EQ2 is a pain (literally, carrying the mount can dig) and is extremely heavy and from deciding to go out to looking through the EP is possibly 2/3 minutes. (i have to detach the scope from the mount, rest the scope on my bed, fold the EQ2, carry the EQ2 out front, unfold it, point it north, bring the scope out and put it on the EQ2, bring the tray with my EPs+ filter+ red torch out. I would much prefer a dob I could pick up by handles.

It seems kinda weird to me that LRGB is just colour pasted on top of a detailed greyscale image... But I guess that's how it is.

Thanks for the info guys!

In my mind, RGB *should* be enough. But then I don't know exactly what a luminance layer does for an image or how it / the RGB laters are used in a processed image.

Hoping for someone to enlighten me

    ~pip

This is my Orion Optics 12" F/5.3. Moonshane made the mount and it's excellent

What sort of diffraction pattern does that produce? It looks like it could be either weird or invisible.