Stub Mandrel

Nige - that's very nice, it has a very natural look to it, where most of my pictures look over-processed. A dark flat frame is a dark but with the exposure length matched to your flats, not your subs. Neil

58 2-minute subs of NGC2903 and just 28 2-minute subs of M51, but I manually selected the best ones from 100 on each target. I was pushing my luck with the 150Pl especially as M<51 is near the zenith and that is where the EQ3 does struggle. I have lots more subs of M51 from last year with the same setup, but at iso1600 and only 30s and they don't seem to improve the image. Neil

Here's NGC2903 and M50 from the session on the 25th - I have posted these elsewhere on the forum, but I feel I should report back. The M50 is just this year's data, a combination version using last year's as well didn't have such good colour, possibly because there was a lot more LP around a year ago (street lights have been switched off and I got a skyglow filter).

If he has to do it again it will be a tertiary holder

Just use auto exposure mode, it's the one time in AP when the camera can get it right on its own!

That means you have the very bottom Luminance slider too far to the right, it causes the curve to droop and causes hollow stars. Just for references, I have no problems using DSS with W10.

Well on the plus side you have some lovely colour in the galaxy.

Busy proving that bumblebees can fly again tonight - 2 minute subs with a 150PL on an EQ3. NGC2903 look really promising and benefiting from all that extra FL.

Mine was 59 subs at 2 minutes, so about half as much again. I suspect the difference is my merciless over-processing, I reckon you can squeeze a bit more from your data :-)

Nicer colour than I got last night, Ian - and a not-particularly colourful target.

The Leo Triplet from last night. Still a bit noisy.

Rules? Rules? I thought Stu governed this topic by diktat! Surely we don't need rules to make it complicated?

Oh dear! I must start paying more attention....

Nice looking mill... what is it?

You shouldn't need to cut through the threads, if you can get close enough there shouldn't be enough strength left to stop you collapsing/bursting it. If cutting the outer one, make the slot wide enough to take a big screwdriver, using two bits of wood to protect the inner part, hold it in a hefty vice, then use teh screwdriver to twist/lever the outer part open and split the remaining thread.

Find out which of the two adapters is cheapest/easiest to source, then saw through it with a junior hacksaw until only a bit of metal is left, then bend it away from the other adaptor.

From teh Dark Sky Discovery website: " “Orion” sites. At these sites, the seven main stars in the winter constellation Orion are visible to the naked eye. Typically, this means away from, or shielded from, bright lights such as street lights, security lights or approaching car lights." I the last month I saw all seven main stars in orion + 1 or 2 others from the car park in front of the railway station in the middle of Burton upon Trent and in a suburb of Nottingham just a mile and a half from the city centre, both with not particularly dark adapted eyes, so the criterion for an orion site is not very demanding. I think most 'orion' sites will be significantly better than this, but don't expect them to be in the same league as Exmoor or Kielder Forest.

This is all getting far too professional. Here's my stupod entry, using my Nokia phone with my Bresser 70mm x 700mm frac. It had to be something bright, so I chose Sirius as my target.

I bought one of those secondhand in the early 1980s. I never used it much as their was a 'bloom' on one of the internal lenses. Getting into AP I set to with some toothpaste - kill or cure, and lo! It cured it and I've got some half-decent results with it.

Hi Wim, I'm finding some ways to get the best out of DSS, I'm a bit wary of doing a tutorial yet as I'm still discovering things. One trick I use is to manually align the histogram peaks before doing some things to stretch the histogram before saving while the data is still 32 bit. I use this as the starting point for my 'LUM' channel. I've started going to the 'saturation' tab and increasing it by a modest amount (say 20) and saving a second copy of the data. This second copy responds well to tricks like the 'soft light' approach to increase the saturation more gently.

Right, that explains what the tube with an m48 internal thread that accepts a 2" EP is for. I have been using a 'top hat' shaped adaptor about 2" high that fits into the end of the focuser where I would normally put the CC.

This is without the CC, I can't fit an ep into the CC I''m confused.com here.

I've only ever used it with the coma corrector. Perhaps the mirror is too far down the tube? Still It focuses in the middle of its range with the camera so I'm not complaining.

Well its damn weird if you ask me. Holding a 10mm EP in place, I could get the moon into wobbly focus if it was held well into the tube. edit - I don't have a 2" EP.