Stub Mandrel

Very sharp, do you use a flattener with the WO71?

That bit of sky, high up in NW is good for me too, but rarely seems to have anything in it! It would make an ideal target to try out the C90.

... and it's all your fault!

No ... that didn't sate my 'new scope' lust ... I've accidentally acquired a new C90 :-)

I love the Iris Neb one!

Always nice to see the red bits at the ends!

FWIW I go through my subs, take out any ones with clearly bad stars, then stack 80-90%. If you use DSS with sigma-kappa stacking it does a good job of rounding up you stars as long as the errors aren't all in the same direction (i.e. caused by wind or vibration, rather than a consistent blurring caused by bad PA.)

Thanks for finding that Wim.

When tracking the mount always goes from east to west, if you balance it then unbalance it a little so the eastern side is a bit heavier than the western side it makes sure there is always a small amount of force keeping the gears in mesh giving a smoother drive.

Try replacing the stock grease with white teflon grease, also adjust the backlash carefully and make sure the mount is set up a bit east-heavy.

Been a bit grimmer here in the Midlands.

Excellent! Now find an image/chart with all the globular clusters in Andromeda marked on it, and you can have a fun time seeing how many you have caught.

Not here, afraid I hit the bottle of laphroaig, which is starting to get a bit empty :-( Astrophotography drove me to drink...

I tried out the Micro Mak on the moon and distant leaves yesterday. Sharp enough when you get it in focus (tricky) but poor contrast. No signs of CA, as expected.

Help! I find the RGB align in AS!2 doesn't work if I drizzle or resample my images, so I do it in Registax. Then last time I went into Registax, the RGB align dialogue box was reduced to its bar across the top and unusable, I couldn't stretch it. Editing and even deleting the Registax window positions ini file made no difference. I reinstalled Registax and that cured the problem. But then the next time I opened Registax, the same problem :-( I can't cope with re-installing Regi every time I want to use it!

I read (past and present tense) that as meaning it's better to stack them all in one go with groups rather than stack separately and combine the resulting images. Damnation, I can't predict tonight's weather at all, despite staring at the IR/Cloud satellite images until my eyes are popping out...

Looks good Nige, I find the crescent a really frustrating target here - perhaps because of the big light dome in the NE here.

I think the problem is (and this is a guess) that say you have subs at two lengths. The shorter subs will show fewer stars so aside from losing any with badly deformed stars, DSS will throw out mostly short subs (which will have less noise but less detail) rather than choosing the best of each. One thing I have done is register without stacking and checking (for the record this means putting an x in the box, not inspecting them all manually) just the high scoring subs in both (or all three!) groups then 'register checked images' which stacks 100% of checked frames. Don't forget to check flats, darks and bias!

Is this the world's cutest Mak? Centon 500mm + Vivitar 'telescope lens adaptor' from the 1980s (not a teleconverter, this is a correcting roof prism and fixed eyepiece of good quality) with a 3D printed tripod bracket. 76mm x 500mm F8, ep FL unknown. About the size of a chubby coke can. The depth of field is tiny and focus is very critical, which probably explains why few people got good results with these as a terrestrial lens.

I'm hoping for a clear night tonight. I can't wait to see what a coolde, guided DSLR can achieve after seeing Nige's photos.

Wish you hadn't said that, makes me even keener to try the WO61. Thick cloud at 11:30 and 1:00 when letting dog 'L' out. Dog 'R' wanted out at 3, Cygnus gloorious with loads of tiny stars (I was fully dark adapted having been asleep!) Must have been stars down to mag 6, even a hint of Milky Way. But there must have been a lot of haze near the ground as low down was yellow soup with no stars at all, like having two completely different skies in one place.

Looks like some clear sky heading my way, followed by a thick band of rain. I'm wimping out :-( As usual I'll just take inspiration from Nige and revisit my bubble ;-)

Well I let a dog out at 2:11 and it was clear but hazy... Looks better for tonight, but the ground will be wet. A test for the anti-condensation heater.

There once was a planet covered by eternal cloud. Its inhabitants had a forum where they speculated on what existed above the cloud. They invested in advanced optical and imaging equipment and advanced software to allow them to probe the distance reaches of whatever lay above. Sadly, the cloud never did part, but at least they had something to spend their money on and talk about on Stargazers Lounge...

I've seen worse!