melsky

It wasn’t brought by the postman but it’s a new addition from Astrofest last Friday, a shiny new ZWOASI183mc camera, lens mount and mini guider ?

I’ve heard the first production units will start to become available Dec / Jan but there should be an update with photo's of it in use appearing very soon.

Richard certainly knows how to produce beautiful products and the new Astrotrac 360 looks very tasty but a bit pricey, hopefully they will be offering the single arm unit for sale as an option as well, the polarscope arrangement looks a lot more robust than the TT320X-AG.

Mel

https://www.astrotrac.com/

Jupiter and 23 Geostationary Satellites

Here's my entry for the satellite challenge, it was taken on the 21st March (equinox) which is when geostationary satellites tend to reflect most light back to us. I noticed that Jupiter was very close in alignment to their orbit so thought I'd see if I could get some in the same field of view. I was using a 200mm Canon lens on my Sony A7s body and took a series of 5 second exposures @6400iso, the kit was all mounted on my Astrotrac, I used startrails program to combine 15 consecutive frames to make this image. If you zoom in on Jupiter you can also make out a couple of its moons.

Mel

The wife made one up for me a couple of years ago from a camera right angle viewer and turned an acetal nylon adapter to fit on my IEQ45, works a treat no more bad backs [emoji4]

Mel

Truly amazing, I would love to see this as a massive print.

Congratulations Tom & Olly

Excellent job FLO it was nice to meet you all at the IAS, will this be available as an App as well?

Mel

Beautiful image worth every second you spent

Mel

What are peoples thoughts on this camera? Its a monochrome Canon 15mp sensor that could be a dream come true, JTW Astronomy are hoping they can offer a cooled version.

http://stargazerslounge.com/topic/212124-canon-announces-m15p-cl-industrial-camera-with-monochrome-sensor/

Mel

"At F3 it would surely be the fastest production apochromat in history, no?"

Hmmmm 300mm and fast, it's a nice looking scope but how much better would it be than a secondhand Canon 300mm F2.8?

Mel

Sad day he will be missed by everyone.

I just want to make it clear I saw this at night the Venus bit was a reference to the brightness there was no movementt best way to describe it was not a flash but that it lit instantly then faded out after 1-2 seconds

This sounds to me like a tumbling / out of control satellite, more often than not when I'm out observing I see an odd flash out of the corner of my eye, if you stare at where the flash was sometimes (but not that often) you see another flash close by as the satellite again spins around and reflects the sun again. These can be very bright and very brief (less than half a second) depending on how fast the satellite is tumbling.

Here's a link to the Tumbling Iridium page of CalSky which I find far more informative than heaven above.

http://www.calsky.com/cs.cgi/Satellites/9?

Mel

Thanks for comments on my http://stargazerslounge.com/imaging-...sky-makes.html image QM.

I've only just picked up this thread and I know it's long past now but I have the original LVI autoguider which i used with varying degrees of success on a CG5-GT mount, I would occasionally get the "MOTORS NOT MOVING" message apparently randomly. I've just upgraded my mount (at Astrofest) to an Ioptron IEQ45 and asked the guys at Altair Astro whether the LVI would work with it and was told they doubted it and thought a firmware upgrade might be required. Well the first time I tried the guider with new mount "MOTORS NOT MOVING" duly appeared so I contacted Baader and they suggested either raising or lowering the tracking rate, it was originally set at 100% (x1) so I dropped it down to 40% "MOTORS NOT MOVING" appeared again so I dropped it to 25% and guess what...... it calibrated first time and has tracked faultlessly even since. So if you have the ability to drop the tracking rate don't write off the LVI to quickly, it's a good quick portable set-up, like the Astrotrac, for those of us who don't want to set computers in cold damp fields in the middle of nowhere.

Anyway QM it looks like you're successfully solved your tracking problems and I look forward to seeing more of your fabulous images on the forum.

Thanks Mel

Coming from a photographic background I always think of each full F stop being x 1.4142 (square root of 2) apart, therefore 5.3 x 1.4142 = 7.495, your MN190 is a stop faster than your refractor.

I've been thinking about Brian’s point that this only applies to extended objects and that for point light sources it's all about aperture, am I right in believing then that if you had two telescopes, say a 100mm F5 and a 200mm F5 they would both produce the same brightness for an extended object, say M42. If you view the 2 images side by side on a monitor the nebula will look the same in both cases (bigger image from the 200 of course) but the stars in the image from the 200mm F5 will be twice as bright from those on the 100mm F5 ?

Mel

OX28