Stub Mandrel

Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! On the day you get TWO packages!!!! You cannot be serious.....

I buy bog-standard AMZ3D PLA off amazon for about £11-£14 a reel. Find it works much better than Rigid Ink on my printer. I suspect that every printer has its favourite filament.

I've found that observing the moon with 100% NOT dark adapted eyes is the best way to see subtle colour in it. I imagine a similar effect applies with planets near the moon - forces your eyes to use colour sensitive cones instead of rods.

Of late I've had severe problems with my ASI120MC - don't know if it was changes to Windows or Sharpacp, the solution was to reduce the 'turbo USB' setting from 2 to 4, it didn't slow the camera down but made it more stable.

A park in Moseley, under clouds.

A bag of rocks hanging from the tripod may help.

There are designs for highly directional wifi aerials on the web using pringles tubes... https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/how-to-make-a-wifi-antenna-out-of-a-pringles-can-nb/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantenna

Can you imaging me not doing that 🙂

It amazes me how stacking can sort out all that distortion!

Hmm... -it's surprisingly well designed, lots of ways to do this

Good point, I can make sure there's good thermal contact between the chip and its housing. Plus I could fit a plastic nose to stop heat being conducted in from the scope. There goes my weekend...

I want to try LRGB with it, so I'm going to see if I can make an aluminium clamp to put a peltier cooler on it. Then I can go for 5-minute exposures instead of 16 seconds!

The ideal solution for astrophotography after the Zombie Apocalypse.

Beginners are often confused by the difference between 'transparency' and 'seeing'. Hopefully this short video of the area around the Apollo 11 landing site will help. The 'transparency' is good, with a decent level of detail and contrast. The 'seeing' is poor with the classic effect of looking through running water.

Not a spectacular image - this little camera has a webcam sized chip, the same as in the ASI120MC, but the mono version. This is the best of 125 16-second frames stacked in DSS without flats darks or bias. The little companion galaxy is visible but my skies hide the outer envelope.

My dual battery hand grip is good for about 3-4 hours. A 16GB card is good for 3 or four sessions with the 450D.

I don't think an ADC is essential for observing as I think the eye accomodates to the dispersion after a bit. That said, I set up my ADC for photography by using an eyepiece in place of the camera. The setting isn't super critical compared to focusing but I find the improvement easy to observe, and it's also possible to see when you have 'gone too far'. (At the moment dispersion is very marked through a camera, but adjusting is difficult as the planet moves across the sensor when you change the setting so you end up having to make a small changes, re-centre the planet and repeat - an optical setting is just much quicker).

Here's my spreadsheet that I used to analyse last year's data from SpectrumLab. I just counted the hourly totals manually. My view is that false detections will be of two kinds: Totally random, that just lift the baseline, and missed or double detections which will be random but proportional to the amount of meteors. Neither of these has a significant impact on the proportionality of the readings, so take the absolute numbers with a pinch of salt, although inspecting screen captures suggests there are few false detections. As no detection setup will get more than a percentage of meteors and it's impossible to be sure exactly what your area of search is, I think the only scientifically valid result for is comparing readings at different times with the same location and setup (and possibly weather). That said it's interesting to compare detections of really big meteors and to note things like ISS and plane passes. Perseids 2018.xlsx

Don;'t make the exposures too long - faint meteors disappear into the skyglow.

Consider the Rvelation Astro ED Barlows for plenty of quality for rather less than £100.

On the night of the recent eclipse I could see two bands on Jupiter in my 2" Tasco scope 🙂 My C90 Mak easily revealed the Red Spot and Io's shadow recently as well at 40x.

Maybe a planet 🙂

It's a big help at the moment. My mars images were useless until I got one.

Do you have more PNGs? If so you can throw them all in PIPP. If you use 'quick capture' you can set it to grab 5,000 frames.