pipnina

My HEQ5 Pro is going on 6 years old now and is starting to show a lot of rust in places like the counterweights, nyloc nuts etc, so that is worth bearing in mind although purely aesthetic unless the nuts rust through, which is likely quite a few more years away. Should be cheap to repair however.

I haven't noticed any changes in mount performance though. It performs exactly as it did 6 years ago (I did do a rowan belt upgrade last year, internals seemed untouched but are mostly brass, which would explain why).

I think a truly bad example of a use HEQ5 would be one with electrical issues or that has been hit/dropped with the clutches engaged, as that could damage the 705:1 gearing system.

I don't know if bearing damage is likely since they are rather large and most bearings are rated for very high speed, and the bearings in this are unlikely to exceed single digit RPM.

If the main board is dead you can replace it however, although at a cost of £150 (much less than the mount however) and if the motors are not working properly they can be found for likely £20-40 a pop as they are totally normal stepper motors.

I hope this helps.

On 13/11/2023 at 10:26, Dark Raven said:

It can be...

ZWO SeeStar S50 All-in-One Smart APO Telescope & Tripod | First Light Optics

 

That is a fair shout. I would prefer to have a more modular / higher end system though.

Maybe since systems like this are still new, there'll be a more expensive one in the future that features say an APS-C mono cam (that lets you add your own 36mm filters) and 70mm flattened f4.5 triplet/petzval or something.

If it's truly effective, expect to see it in professional camera lenses and telescopes for glare protection haha.

Vantablack was never going to be good for telescopes because it required (IIRC) a ridiculous process to actually apply to materials. Black (2/3/4 versions) is supposedly a much nicer paint but I'm yet to see people flocking with it yet!

On 10/11/2023 at 21:44, Dark Raven said:

ZWO is far from perfect and I am not a fan of closed platforms. Not to repeat myself, I stated my experience here: 

It is great if you have time, fairly permanent setup and weather that permits tinkering often. But I have quite little time that I can devote to this hobby, I am mobile imager and need to drive to dark(er) location and although I work in Tech, out of principle, I draw a line at recompiling kernel to add camera driver. Used it with Pi4 8GB and Plenty of current, even build custom setup around INDI/EKOS/Stellarmate...

 

It has failed me so many times... I`m sure it works just fine for many. Perhaps in my case it was inpatient user. To be clear, when same hardware is loaded with different software (retro gaming emulators, SkyAware Anywhere or AllSky Camera) it runs smooth under load. Went all in on ZWO, never lost a single night or exposure, never looked back...

I have to be honest my experience with computerising my setup has also been a nasty one.

I used my laptop, which was ok but meant leaving it out there to get damp and it of course used a lot of power.

I used a raspberry pi, which had all sorts of issues with networking, USB bandwidth I think, and even the remote access features being often too slow to be usable

I used a mini PC from ebay, which has worked ok but in the end I found myself using that just to host PHD2 and the indi server, with Kstars on my PC inside meaning I now need two PCs active!

And something goes wrong invariably. Be it the camera not resuming capture (getting stuck) after autofocuses, indi randomly changing the driver for my cam (Risingcam571mono) and now it won't bias above 31ADU (used to use 256 to get the noise all above 0) random UI changes that made the software unusable for a while etc.

Also some odd ritual I have to go through where after booting my setup, I need to unplug the mount, replug. Unplug my ASI120mm mini, blow into the USBC port on the cam, replug, make sure the pegasus astro box advance 12v power hasn't fallen out (it's very loose for some reason). If I don't do all that I get software errors for reason's I couldn't begin to postulate.

I get 1000x better images than when I used a DSLR and synscan controller but it's so much more challenging to get everything going... All for the sake of goto, guiding, auto focus and capture/filter control. How is this not simpler???

12 hours ago, Seelive said:

Really? There seems to be many places with hills in my part of the UK.

I have often been told by Scottish family that "england is flat" and to be fair I think a lot of it is compared to scotland. But devon/cornwall certainly seems hillier than most places I've been to. Certainly the Scottish family were surprised when they came down and this part of england was not flat haha.

I live in one of the few places in England with hills (Plymouth) and have been spared outright flooding but my heart goes out to all who have had property damaged and lives disrupted.

I wish you and your villages and towns a quick recovery from this island's miserable weather

Maybe once the storm is fully past us we'll be rewarded with some crystal-like skies (now that's wishful thinking!)

The last few months I've been worried my telescope might rust out and turn to dust before I next see clear skies haha.

Using my visual kit is annoying as I have to pack the car and it's usually cold or very late, and I often get presented with muggy views. My imaging kit is annoying because it keeps bugging out on me (Kstars keeps failing at one thing or another, most recently after things like meridian flips or auto focus routines I have to manually take a snap with the camera or kstars gets stuck in a loop of failed captures...)

It'll be worth it for when the skies clear again and I get to snap the pleiades, or M78, or one of the many other winter objects (I HOPE) but for now I see it sat there while the rain hammers down and the wind blows and wonder why I got into this hobby at all... Let alone spent so much money on it 🙃

I think the biggest impact for me besides light pollution is atmosphere quality.

I have observed from my back garden and seen M51 easily, I've observed another time and it's been gone. The city lights hadn't changed but the atmosphere sure did!

I've been to my dark site too, last year and I almost couldn't HELP but see M31! I was just stood there and it seemed to jump at my eyeballs from my peripheral vision, and in my dob I could see texture and a hard gap left by the innermost dust bank! I've seen on a year before that at the dark site, the outer winter milky way going through orion where the whole thing was like looking through glass. It had incredible texture and was so bright! I spied the flame quite easily in my dob that night. I also got lucky once with the sky quality and flew around the leo area of the sky. I felt like I could point my dob anywhere and see clusters of galaxies!

Then, in contrast to that there's my most recent session. Murky and opaque. There weren't any clouds but andromeda wasn't visible to my eye alone. The milky way core was visible but seemed dull. I could spy a few friends like the veil but they were less pronounced than I've seen before. Andromeda was a faint blob.

For reference my home is bortle 5 and my dark site is bortle 4, so both are far and away from either extreme end of darkness and city flood lamp. However I am on the coast so haze might not be as big an issue for people further inland?

This country has the potential to give us great views but I feel we need to win a small lottery to get them! I often dream of moving to a spanish mountain so I can get dark and transparent skies AND almost no cloud cover! Sadly I am not sure how I would afford such a lifestyle and astronomy equipment at the same time haha.

My clear outside has stayed red for so long, my last imaging session before last saturday was in mid august!

Even then, clearoutside can't tell you if the sky clarity is going to be any good, only that the sky will be visible. My trek to a bortle 4 area revealed that saturday was in fact very muggy and hazy despite the absence of clouds. 😕

The effect seems exceptionally minimal- but weirdly I have seen something similar in a reflector image (no corrector lens, no filters!)

It could be anything from the atmosphere, to light scattering in the dichroic anti-reflective coating (???) maybe even light being bent as it moves through the camera's AR glass window. I have no idea!

To my mind this looks totally acceptable, and I thought I was a fussy one! I think you have a spectacular piece of kit!

Sorry if that sounds aggressive, it's not meant to be. I'm just dismayed at how these tiny tiny little problems appear in sometimes the least likely places. And also amazed at how well this hobby turns us into pixel-peepers haha

2 minutes ago, ScouseSpaceCadet said:

Clouds; The reason why I've decided to cut down to one do-it-all quality refractor and binoculars. Not being a collector of things (or very well off) a house cluttered with astro gear worth a few quid when the stuff is hardly used doesn't make sense.

If the sky looks OK then I'm out but I give up obsessing over forecasts unless I'm planning on going away to a dark site.

I too have considered gutting my setup for a smaller, more travel friendly one so I could go on holiday to places with good astro weather, and potentially move country entirely without leaving my kit behind, plus improving my setup and teardown time.

I also am unlikely to be able to drive soon so if I could get a kit that would fit into motorbike-sized storage that would also be brilliant.

29 minutes ago, Mr Spock said:

Sunny and warm here at the moment. However...

 

That's the view straight up, sun to the bottom. This is typical of the 'clear sky' I'm getting.

Despite some people really wanting one, images like this make me glad that plymouth doesn't have an airport and is out of the line of fire for most national and international flights!

I just got back from my first visual session in a year (!) tonight.

Sadly the visibility was poor despite there being no clouds. I choke it up to a mixture of bad luck and the weather still being warm and holding lots of water (plus I am at the southern coast)

But at a bortle 4 site the milky way was still visible from Aquila to Cassiopeia. Spied the ring, the veil, andromeda and both jupiter and saturn which seemed quite crisp but still a little wobbly due to being so low down.

Maybe they could have been sharper, but my laser showed my 250mm dob's secondary was out of kilter again, and I didn't pack my allen keys! Doh!

Unfortunately none of the sights were as spectacular as this time last year, all seemed muddier and fainter despite the veil (both major halves) being slightly salvaged by my UHC. Andromeda was a dull grey smudge whereas last year it poured into my eyes and gave me a crisp view of the dust band near the core.

I am hoping for some good opportunities and weather in winter as I want to try my OIII and UHC filters out on orion subjects!

I also took my new medium format film cam (Bronica ETRS) with me and took some snaps with it sat on my star adventurer. I'll develop the roll soonish to find out if there's anything much there. One shot I think got totally blown out by people with ultra-bright torches (You can see perfectly fine without them here! grrrrr!) and half way through a 17 minute  landscape shot of the beach and coastline it got photobombed by a ferry with 2000 lights on board!

Either way it was worth going as these opportunities are seemingly increasingly rare.

Here's a little snap I took with my Pixel6 resting on the car's windscreen.

On the menu for tomorrow: Back to our usual scheduled water vapor blanket

And the rest of the week? torrential rain...

2 minutes ago, Mandy D said:

Yes! Thanks for that!

I also noticed that someone is doing / has done a Kickstarter for a digital back for medium format cameras with a price tag of $400. That just makes it worse! Although, I do love B&W film in medium format!

There is also a 3d printed medium format camera system if you wanted to only buy lenses and a film back haha.

But then, the lenses for MF cameras typically use leaf shutters which in some cases can require repair if not buying them refurbished.

1 minute ago, Mandy D said:

@pipnina Nice! You can watch that depth of field disappear, now! I loved shooting medium format many years ago, but it can be very challenging. I'm off to look up prices on your piece of gear now. Hopefully, that will put me off buying one.

Depending on how much you spent on a MF camera back then, you might be disappointed at how cheap they are today if your aim is to avoid spending money haha.

If the page I saw was correct, that suggested a mamiya RB67 cost $2-3000 new in 1970, then its value has certainly plummeted as you can buy one today with a lens for about £500, less if you gamble on an ebay purchase, which might require repairs.

I'd been eyeing up a medium format film camera for a while, and yesterday I pulled the trigger at a local store!

Had carrying weight/size not been a concern I would have gotten a mamiya RB67 instead, but that thing weighs over 2KG with one of the shorter lenses and is about 2x the size of this tiny Bronica ETRS-i

As soon as the clouds clear this is going straight onto my star adventurer! In the mean time I'm going to try and enjoy shooting 55x43mm negatives of more normal subjects and learning some light metering techniques.

Seeing a clear sky two weeks ago, I rushed out with my kit to see some very thin cloud. Because of this I decided to try an arty shot on the film camera instead of anything serious.

I used the Fomapan 400 already most of the way through in my Canon AE1-Program and a 24mm tokina lens wide open at f2.8, hoya 25 red filter in front of the lens

I chose an exposure length of 17 minutes and developed the film at box speed. Sadly it was quite underexposed and a FAT cloud drifted into view about 12-13 minutes in, which thankfully hasn't detracted from the shot *too* much.

Awaiting my next chance to try this eagerly

Also, Mr Winston the cat sat very patiently to the right of the apple tree and as such is visible as a grey blob haha! My fluffy photography assistant.

Edit: Felt I might include a pic of the negative itself and not just a scan. Taken on phone and inverted. The little assitant can be seen having a well deserved nap post-photography session haha.

2 hours ago, wookie1965 said:

I had the Google pixel 7 pro I was in town with the wife stood at the car wife wanted something out the boot phone was on the roof. 

The wife got a phone call saying our son had been taken to hospital after having a seizure so we jumped in the car and drove off. 

I had the phone 3 weeks not got it back and car and house insurance won't cover it so I'm paying £900  for nothing. 

Before I was looking forward to using the excellent camera. 

Paul 

That's rough. I hope your son is ok!

15 minutes ago, Stuart1971 said:

The issue is the Wi-Fi, I use a little tiny TP link USB Wi-Fi aerial (£13) instead of the internal one, I use to use it on the raspberry PI too, and it was far better than the built in wifi with is pretty dire on the RPI…

the VNC on the pi is also really slowwwwww, and so is any VNC you use on it, the cursor drags when moving around the screen, that’s not the connection it’s just the RPI

Remote desktop is far superior and just works, but it means you need windows, I have never looked back after swapping out the RPI for the Mele 3 and windows 11, with NINA, and was a real supporter of Stellarmate and the RPI too…

5 minutes ago, Elp said:

Does your controlling PC have an internal (on board) or a PCI card (so WiFi antenna sticking out the back)? If it's the latter, you might be able to try the SMA cable trick, just source one long enough, unscrew the existing antenna and reconnect at the end of the extension cable. If you try this just make sure it's the correct pin type both ends. If you're using a laptop, you can't do this.

It has no on-board wifi. I have an AC wifi dongle plugged in, but it's a very small one and I had to put a lot of effort to get it to play nice with Ubuntu (as is usually the case with wifi dongles sadly, they are almost all realtek chips!)

4 minutes ago, vlaiv said:

If you are running indy / indigo, why not have only server on remote machine and other software on your work computer instead of using VNC?

 

Last night this is what I did! I started indi on the remote machine via VNC in a terminal. Then My desktop indoors ran Kstars and connected to that indi server. This is where the 240s download time for a single sub came from. Even binned 4x4 I was looking at 10-20s download times which is possibly too aggressive a downsample to autofocus with 😕

It has worked previously with everything in the same spot. Last night was just horrendous. Even signalling the AF motor to move position had a delay of several seconds due to the network lag.

I'm very perplexed as to what's happened really

15 minutes ago, alacant said:

Hi

Give yourself a chance. No need to learn new software.

Get one of the new generation  mini-pcs with say 16Gb RAM and a nice SSD. Install Ubuntu, kstars and whatever else you like. Stable wifi and vnc, cheaper than a Pi and will run all night every night. In real time.

Cheers and HTH

11 minutes ago, Stuart1971 said:

Mini PC such as the Mele quieter 3C or 3Q on the mount and NINA to control everything, then remote into that from PC indoors, never let me down, and I have come from the Raspberry PI and Stellarmate which was ok ish, but compared to the mini PC….well it just works all the time….👍🏻

This is basically my current system, the PC is velcro'd to my mount and I just press the power button and it comes to life, boots Ubuntu MATE, connects to the wifi, starts X11VNC all by itself and I just go inside, and connect to the VNC server to control it from my desktop inside.

Problem here is mostly the signal strength and clunkiness of controlling kstars over VNC server. For some reason it really doesn't like it! Plus the wifi speed to the PC outside seems very poor and the dongle I bought, while I managed to eventually get it to work on Ubuntu, seems to not manage any reasonable speed at that distance/location... At least recently, it was usable before but last night was impossibly slow connection.

Maybe with a better internet connection it will simply make it all work better, have kstars and all running directly on that outside PC and controlled from indoors over VNC, but for now it's proving a challenge!

My dad has suggested maybe a directional Wifi Access Point could work, simply run a cable from the router to this WAP and have the WAP at the window looking at my scope when I am going to use it. This would be the cleanest and easiest solution probably but the powerrline adapter is still in high standing to me right now.

31 minutes ago, ONIKKINEN said:

Why not use a USB stick? Why do you have to have the subs on your main PC the instant they are taken? Seems like an extra complication with no real benefit to me. At least personally i would try to simplify the process a bit. The connection between the scopeside pc and the control device needs to be only so good that an image can be displayed, which doesnt need to be high speed.

I would suggest that you simply collect them with a USB stick and transfer them to your processing PC after the imaging run has completed.

Sadly sometimes I struggle to even get remote control of the outside computer to work reliably enough for all the software to run at said outside computer.

The VNC protocol is only good at transfering information about windows and actual rendering is handled client side, so if a window has a drawing it has to be sent over as a PNG basically which is super slow. I tried to control the PC remotely and have it use Kstars and PHD and it ran so slowly that it just stopped at times. Totally unusable.

Naturally when I used my laptop, it had a built in screen, keyboard, mouse etc. I could set things up and go indoors, and only go outside to check on it if I wanted to. This doesn't provide any way for me to see something has gone wrong without going outside but at least it was responsive and fast when I braved the cold and the flimsy cardboard box it sat on (and my leg muscles from squatting in front of it, ow!). I'd then transfer images indoors the next day.

45 minutes ago, vlaiv said:

Do you have external power outlet on your house?

Wired connection will most definitively help. Wifi can really be poor quality, especially if there are multiple networks around.

If you have external power outlet (and I'm guessing you do since you power your rig somehow) - there are ethernet over power line devices that don't cost much that you can use for up to gigabit link speeds.

This is actually a very good idea, as I use a plug inside the basement that runs an extension lead out of the basement door. If I can get an ethernet cable onto a plug adapter on the same ring as that basement plug I could have a wired connection all the way to the scope without the need of wireless or without having actual house windows open to let a super-length ethernet cable outside in winter!

I will definitely look into this!

39 minutes ago, Budgie1 said:

I know nothing about KStars or RPi's, but before I built the obsy I was setting up each night and running the kit like you do.

My setup consisted of HEQ5, ZWO ASI294MC Pro, ZWO ASI120mm Mini guider on either Skywatcher Evostar 100ED DS Pro or the 80ED DS Pro. 

The mount & 2 cameras were connected via the Pegasus Power Box Advance (which also powered the main & guide scope dew heaters) to a 15m Active USB3 extension cable which connected into my Windows laptop inside the house.

On the laptop, I ran APT for platesolving, focusing (after I got the auto focus motors) and image acquisition. APT will also now to Polar Alignment. For guiding, I used PHD2, as you do now. 

The only issues I ever had was down to the poor quality USB cables I initially used.

I had not heard of APT before, sadly it is a windows only app but worth me bearing in mind for the future in case I do concede to use that OS again.

Active USB sounds interesting and i might look into that if Vlaiv's ethernet power plug idea falls through!

Many thanks to all!

At least back when my setup consisted of a DSLR on a newt that I focused manually, and framed manually with the HEQ5 handset and then didn't even guide, I could get mediocre results *consistently*!

Controlling my setup has been a perpetual pain ever since computerising it early last year. Either requiring a laptop to sit out there with it, a raspberry pi running astroberry, or now a headless mini PC that I remote into. Each system has its own problems (some of which center around Kstars, but that is behaving itself at present). The laptop would get condensate all over the screen and require a box for it to sit on, and often kstars would have issues, plus my laptop is needed sometimes for work so I would have to remember to collect it in the morning.

The raspberry PI worked reasonably well, however I was only able to source a 2GB version which was NOT enough memory for kstars and PHD to run at the same time, it crashed often due to running out of memory. It also required a very good USB wifi dongle to reach my router even though it was only on the other side of a bit of glass 15 meters away!

This mini PC worked ok to a certain extent, but controlling it remotely is infernal somehow even compared to the RPI which also shared its screen via the same VNC protocol. And what's worse I am struggling to get a fast enough internet connection to it for it to even work properly! The virgin media hub estimates it is getting between 5 and 15mbits connection speed, but the 240 second download time for a single 50mb sub to my pc inside suggests it's closer to 200KB/s or 1.6Mb/s! It was fine last time I used it and no amount of reboots or reconnections fixed it. First clear night in a month and I couldn't get far enough to even focus!

There has to be a better way that allows me to get the telescope up and going computer wise quickly and without me needing to stand next to it for the whole session. I'd think about the ASI Air but I don't think it supports my pegasus power box advance or my risingcam 571 camera. Am I supposed to cast magic spells on it or something? 😭

Every time I solve one problem I come face to face with another and it makes this 50KG lump that has cost me more than £5000 feel more like I paid extortionate sums for a piece of garden furniture than a photographic system.

My Canon AE1-Program on my Star Adventurer took its half hour of images admirably even if the battery for the electric shutter was near death afterwards.

What can I even do here besides run an ethernet cable out the window or find some totally different system of control? Help!

Indeed sigma are among the best these days. I looked at the 50 and 85mm f1.4 art lenses myself when I still had my DSLR. I was shocked to learn that sigma used to be a budget brand in the film days!

I like your composition here. Great contrast and colour going on!

49 minutes ago, DirkSteele said:

However, I already know I will be looking up for the rest of my life, even it means becoming this….

I am exactly the same.

Even if in 30 years skies below bortle 6 are impossible to find and you can see more star-links than stars, I will still find myself looking up at our local pocket of the universe when the opportunity arises. I have found sometimes it is the sessions where I am moving from one place to another (usually in winter) and I have no optics, just looking at the sky as it presents itself that can invoke emotion and the sense of scale of our place in the universe.