Stub Mandrel

Crikey, I've come down to 200C for PLA. No loss of layer adhesion and less ooze.

Let me correct that for you 🙂

Yeek! For PETG I presume?

The most satisfying thing about 3D printing is the 'crack' when the print self-releases from the borosilicate glass half an hour after the bed stops heating. Sadly I'm often too impatient to wait...

Hi Marc, I'm afraid it's a home-made scope that uses the Skywatcher lens cell. I just made it with a 2" eyepiece fitting and the tube length to suit the OVO field flattener which adds about 55mm (from memory) and doesn't change the focal length. The T-canon adaptor screws straight on to the Ovo flattener. I also made a low-profile 2" to 1.25" adaptor to allow me to use my eyepieces with either a diagonal or a straight 2" extension tube. It was a bit of a nightmare working out what overall tube length, focus tube length and focuser travel would allow me to use all my kit without vignetting! These photos may help: Visual setup without 2" extension - focuses on terrestrial targets but not stars! Imaging setup, I do need to add a finder !

Not very astro, but at least they are black... to help me play Ace of Spades at full speed!

Yes Chris, but you'd print your own breakfast cereal if you could! 🙂

Peel off sticker, apply one tiny drop of mineral oil (e.g. sewing machine oil) to bushed bearing, replace sticker. Usually a permanent and long-term solution.

I need three washers 1/8" thick for spacing switches in a guitar A/B box. Has taken just minutes to design them and get them printing. 3D printers are great for simple things not just complex ones!

This is good. I've often seen detail in a locally equalised image that I haven't been able to 'layer' in without spoiling the overall image. I've got a problem though - I can't past into the layer mask for some reason? Even with the mask selected pasting creates a new layer. How do I do this?

I ran off five prototypes of the shell for the cooled mono cam I printed. Impractical to do by post, let alone the cost!

That's 'dark' reading. 'Making Every Photon Count' is 'light' reading...

On Wednesday evening I had a first try of my Optolong L-enhance filter with my ED66 and modified, cooled Canon 450D. This is one of the relatively 'new' tri-band filters that actually has two pass bands that encompass Hb & OIII at the overlap of blue and green and Ha in the red. Broader than narrowband filters, they still exclude most of the visible spectrum including all the main light pollution lines. Unfortunately I was shooting almost straight up and a large dust bunny or two fell onto the sensor, moving between some frames making elimination with flats impossible. There was also a tilt in the imaging train giving poor stars AND PHD2 stopped talking to my guide scope a few times which also impacted the star shapes with long subs. Add some poor framing and relatively few subs and the resulting images are not really the fairest test of the filter but I have learned a few things. I used super pixel mode so there was no bleed through of data between colours. I did little more than stretch in FITS liberator, to PS for a background balance and another stretch then denoise in PS or Astra. 1 - the images are easy to process using 'super pixel mode', balancing the background generally gives white stars. This gives a very pure, deep red Ha signal. 2 - The filter is very powerful at removing light pollution, normally my 300s subs would be washed out with skyglow. I could easily go to 10 minutes, except brightest stars would blow out. 3 - Blue and Green were, as expected, very similar with slight bleed through of the brightest patches of Ha. 4 - In targets with a lot of OIII, this comes out very well in a blue-green colour (Veil). 5 - It accentuates Ha very nicely on the red channel. 6 - It reduces stars, but not as much as a narrowband Ha filter. 7 - where there is a blue reflection nebula, this didin't really come out at all, just a fainter Ha signal, nothing in blue or green (NGC7822). 8 - where there is are secondary OIII signal I expected to get, nothing strong appeared although the Ha was very good (Heart nebula). 9 - I am guessing this will work very well for planetary nebulas and targets like the Rosette where elements of the ordinary OIII signal are clear even in an OSC image. 10 You could use this as a powerful anti-pollution filter for things like clusters, but don't expect to get lovely star colours. Here are the example pics, blame my impatient settup and lack of monitoring rather than the filter for the poor results. You can see a few patches where I have tried to clone stamp the dust bunnies out and a few spots where I didn't bother... Veil, 30x300s: NGC7288, 14 x 300s Heart, 16 x 300s :

Congratulations 🙂

Wow, I've just set my camera on this, will be pleased to get anywhere near this!

Expensive mug-warmer... 🙂

Please report back in detail , 🙂 would be nice to have a guidescope without USB.

... Mrs Tooth Dr. decides she wants the kitchen back...

Yes, but not many of us image with pinhole cameras 🙂

I've only been doing imaging since 2015, but I've picked up that most people feel recent years have been cloudier with fewer opportunities for imaging. Plus, you've only got back into imaging actively quite recently - Iooking at my own images the results are all over the place and better gear doesn't always mean better pictures. Better skies always help! Now the nights are drawing in I suspect you just need a few runs of clear evenings to get you hand in?

Hi, I've been exiled to England for too long! Did you see the match?

I've done nylon, PETG and ABS and now I prefer PLA, except when I want flexible prints.

PETG is not a miracle material, it is much harder to print well than PLA, and the benefits it can bring do not always outweigh the extra cost.

Probably custom made, do you have a picture of the original connections? Seems a bit odd - is it cooled? If so the big lump of aluminium heatsink is going to be counter-productive.

I'm gobsmacked! I've spent the last four hours working through sorting some of the past three year's images so that instead of being arranged by date, they are sorted by target. I've just found some runs on Saturn which I put through WinJuPos. I looked at this polar map and was gobsmacked to see, clear as a fuzzy thing in a snowstorm, the North Polar Hexagon! It may not be brilliant, but I'm sure the dark area at the pole extends out further at roughly 120, 180 and 240 degrees. Not bad with a 6" scope with Saturn around 15 degrees! This was on 16 August 2018, 21:43 id anyone has a higher res image to compare it to. This are ordinary images compiled from the same data: