Stub Mandrel

Congratulations 🙂

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

37 minutes ago, Mognet said:

My giving up smoking present to myself, a Creality CR-10S. Just trying to get a successful first print out of it now

 

Expensive mug-warmer... 🙂

6 hours ago, Philip R said:

Anyone tried one of these?

I have no idea how this is going to perform... good or bad, (review to follow), but at under £35.00GBP inc. P&P from China 🇨🇳, I thought it is worth a punt.

I am just reading the instructions leaflet and setting up on a smartphone/tablet... says it is 2.0 megapixel CMOS.

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

3 hours ago, tooth_dr said:

Today the ‘postman’ delivered this 💫💫

I need to dig out a base and get the concrete in before

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

2 hours ago, Davey-T said:

Me too, 30 minutes unguided

Dave

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

22 minutes ago, Gina said:

I would appreciate your thoughts on this.  TIA.

 

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?

@FLO must have read one thread or the other because I see they have suddenly started stocking them, just after i bought one elsewhere!

https://www.firstlightoptics.com/light-pollution-reduction-imaging/optolong-l-enhance-dual-narrowband-deep-sky-imaging-filter.html

The main thing for me is... my photos from 2015 - 16 aren't a patch on my ones from 2019 so in one way it could be a never endiong project of continual improvement. My M78, for example, is awful!

12 hours ago, Fraunhoffer said:

What did you use for the grid?

A 20 year old copy of Corel Draw!

3 hours ago, alan potts said:

Nice idea, M6 and M7 are going to be difficult,

You can see where my gaps are (I haven't done this 'analysis' before yesterday). Clearly there's an evening or two knocking off globular clusters in Ophiuchus!

Most of these are just a case of being aware of the gaps and hunting them down as their constellations move across my view.

All of those in Sagittarius and Scorpio will be a challenge from here due to LP and limited horizon. Those in the north are tricky due to tree dodging, but doable.

I've just found a few M95s:

I hadn't seen the second page when I posted that or I might have kept schtumm.

I zoomed in trying to see the 'filaments' and it struck me immediately, I'm still not entirely sure what the filaments were....

I'm afraid there's still something really wrong with that image (I hesitate as I have never produced anything in this league).

This is a crop from centre bottom, the fault should be self-evident:

Basically - two panes haven't been properly aligned.

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

Well three years later and I'm only up to 60!

47 minutes ago, RolandKol said:

I am almost sure, if he would start investigating materials for his future projects, - he will most likely end up with community advise towards PETG or ABS.... most likely PETG...

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.

6 hours ago, nikivan said:

There is a company offering this mod. In order to move the sensor so far away from the processing board, a long connecting cable is required. Do you know where one can buy such cable? 

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.

9 hours ago, Adam J said:

Astrobackyard is more of an advertisement than a review.

I take all these 'reviews' with a pinch of salt, but the l-enhance does seem to have lot of good ones and plenty of examples of good photos. I'll soon know for myself!

9 hours ago, don4l said:

The whole area is full of fantastic stuff.

It's an area I've avoided before this year, because of low altitude and LP, but on rare evenings when the transparency is good it's worth a visit.

I must have clicked on M24 instead of M25 back on the 17th, because I thought I was imaging an open cluster so this had me confused for a while. I tried  t yping M24 into Stellarium and it appeared to match but I couldn't see a 'cluster'. Astrometry.net found it under the name IC4715 but it wasn't until I read it up that I discovered this is not really a cluster, but a bright , crowded part of the Milky Way with some dark nebulae. Colour isn't great thanks to the LP and low altitude. So although not  brilliant image, quite exciting to discover what it is!

But I have to  try more targets in Sagittarius next summer, especially if I can get to a dark site in early September.

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:

I was/am equally confused  -see some thoughts in this thread:

In the end I went for the Optolong L-enhance, but it brought clouds with it 😞

29 minutes ago, upahill said:

6 x Timing Belts & Pulley for a 1990 Astra to automate the dome (hopefully)

Wouldn't an electric motor be a little more compact?

Awesome print

From 2015 years ago, so when I was still starting out... bottom half of Orion with my Zeiss sonnar 135mm:

And a very poor whole Orion, a jpg too, but I swear there's some sign of Barnard's loop.