Yawning Angel

Just catching up with this build! Nice job Chris! A suggestion if I may- angle the turnbuckles. Vertically they hold down but can still allow the roof to move laterally in gusty weather. If you angle them, they pull against each other and lock it firmly in both axis: Either the red or blue configuration shown (I use the red layout):

Eeek, a scary moment! Have you updated the handset for the change from BST to GMT?

My C8 has been in residence on the mount for the recent Mars fuss, but it's time for some deeper object, so back on went the SWED80 / asi1600 Of course, this meant the first object targeted was the moon 🙄 Dodging rain showers I was only able to get a single L stack of 500 frames, which came out clean but it isn't this setup's forte / however, it did produce an interesting result when exporting the final image from the .tif. Below is the same image, exported from PS as a PNG and a JPG. There is a distinct difference, most notable in the shadows - to my eyes, the PNG is handling the image in a more subtle way, where as the JPG has exaggerated the contrast - most noticeable in the Sea of Serenity JPG v PNG (204k v 335k) <- JPG v PNG -> Feel free to save them out and blink between them.

Nights like last night are all the justification I ever needed for building a ROR observatory - Noticed on my All-sky camera that, despite the forecast, the skies had cleared skies just after 10pm. So I rolled off the sofa first then the roof shortly after to hit the ground running Mars presented here in IR-RGB, Celestron C8, ZWO asi178mm / 2.5x barlow (thank you @astroman001 for the nudge!). Filters :1.25" - the RGB set are ZWO's old style, left over from upgrading my DSO rig and Astronomik ProPlanet 642 bp IR-pass. I can heartily recommend the Celestron Motor focuser for the SCT, without which this would have been a frustrating exercise 50% resample 1 to 1 My all-sky rig captured it beautifully too allsky-2020-10-12To2020-10-13.mp4

Less blue: @astroman001 I did try for the barlow (x2.5), but the image went to mush. Swapping to a 174mm camera helped, as it has bigger pixels so is closer to critical sampling with the barlow. I found the data more usable from the 178mm at the native focal length, which is quite closely match to the tiny pixels

Maybe indeed...off to photoshop!

Just a slim window in the almost perma-cloud up north for Mars to peak out. IR-RBG, 8 x 1 minute per channel, de-rotated. Celestron C8 / ZWO asi178mm

Lovely images, Steve! Well captured For the ROI settings - with the asi178 (mine is the mono version) in Sharpcap, it looks something like this Default: and I captured my Mars images with the ROI set like this, or even 640x480: giving: You should get abouy 100fps at 800 x 600, although this will depend on how fast your storage is. I stick to SER files, as I fell out with AVI a while back, but can't recall why. It's likely some odd bit of software preferred SER 🤷‍♂️

I asked this question elsewhere a while back, and the E-W labels are often replaced with P & F. P for Proceeding and F for Following (This notation is used in WinJUPOS when aligning the axis) Proceeding is the side heading into darkness, Following is the edge moving into the light Earth would be: N F P S

Some nights bear fruit, and sometimes not what you'd planned - in this case, I'd intended to run a few hours on Mars to make an animation of it's spin Technology said no! Various things decided to misbehave - collimation was being a pain and Stellarium refusing to Sync the scope being the main time-sinks. Time for radical action: Take off the imaging train, slap in a diagonal and take a look with the old Mk1's. It's easy to forget, as primarily an imager, how stunning the views can be! Mars was showing plenty of detail to my eyes and shone like a marble on black velvet! Brain and PC rebooted, back on with the camera etc for take 2. Luckily, apart from a smattering of wispy high cloud, the night was still glorious and the issues where put to bed In the end I was able to gather 30 stacks of 500 frames, 1 per minute for 30 minutes (and a detour to the moon, because it was so shiny!). Not quite enough for the animation I had planned, but plenty for my new favourite software WinJUPOS! Celestron C8, asi178mm, Astronomik ProPlanet 642 IR BP filter, ROI capture @640 x 480: Raw SER files stacking in AS!3 Resulting tifs sharpened in Pi with the Restoration Filter Aligned in imPPG De-rotated in WinJUPOS (animation compiled from the tifs with PIPP) 1:1 400 x 400 crop 2:1 resample Sharpened tifs, animated. 30 minutes doesn't show much rotation, but it's there! The detour netted me this too, which makes me happy - the moon has been so low in the sky I've not been able to get the scope on it for ages! Frustrations aside, a clear night is good for the soul!

Outstanding! Well done 👍🏻

I set to learning what WinJoPos can do, and derotated the sub frames - (the post-processing differs slightly, thus the colour differences) but the details stand out a little more in the deroatated version v Derotated left, vanilla stack right This is using the same files out of AS!3, with the same basic sharpening applied before combining into LRGB. LRGB was done in PixInsight for the vanilla version, and WinJoPos for the derotated one Every day is a school day 🙂

Well done!

I had another crack at the red planet, this time without a barlow, but smaller pixels (Zwo asi178 instead of the 174). Celestron C8 It was a bit of a fight get anything approaching focus this time, with the best still seeming a little blurred. I would usually have doubted a bit of kit (or user error, of course) but collimation was checked earlier and everything was dew free, so perhaps I should have sacrificed a chicken to the northern sky god?! The RGB was mushy, and as expected, blue the worst, green was so-so and red passable. The saving grace was the ProPlanet IR bandpass (642), which sharpened up nicely to reinforce the details - it a close call between that or the Celestron Focus Motor for 'most useful purchase' I'm not sure how much further the C8 can be pushed on this target?

Thank you! Neptune was a fluke, but I took just 20 frames each LRG and B @500ms 5000 gain (as high as it goes!). Stacked 50% then laid them together manually in PS. RGB added as channels, with L on top and blended. Denoise and a colour balance to finish

Love it!

The evening was supposed to be a shakedown ready for some Mars attempts in the coming weeks, however after sorting collimation and focus on the C8 and fiddling with FireCapture (I've been meaning to try it, instead of SharpCap) I got distracted by Neptune. I'd post the picture, but its basically a few blue-greenish pixels. The Neptunian distraction meant that Mars had cleared the nearby houses and was valiantly batting with the haze to put on a show, so why not! Celestron C8 and 2.5x barlow Altair Hypercam 174m @ 20% gain Filters: Baader RGB and Astronomik ProPlanet 642 Each channel was 30 seconds at 15ms yielding around 2000 frames each. Stabilized in FireCapture, so straight to AS!3. Very mixed sky with some sneaky clouds, so 10% stacks The 4 resultant frames where then dropped into PixInsight for 'Restoration Filter', 'FFTRegistration' and LRGB combine (IR for L) Slight nudge of the colours to balance it up and voila! Oh, go on then, here's the Neptune blob:

Hiya, yes of course: You can open multiple files in AS!3's Open dialogue....just mass select them (CTRL+A). If you then hit Analyse it'll run the first one, and you can set AP's. You seem to need to use the auto place option, so tweak the settings to get a good spread. Pick your output options and stacking % as normal then hit stack. Have a brew while it churns through all of the files automatically You loose some control, but I wouldn't be placing AP's by hand on 120 stacks anyway! After that, all the other processes can be batched too. Chuck has a great video which clued me in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXijbjkclMc

Well, it has to happen - The Last hurrah for the loaned solar scope, as it’s been returned😞 Very grateful to be trusted with it for nearly 6 months Of course, seeing was dreadful, but I don’t think we can be too fussy when the sky is clear - so, this is 4 hours on Monday morning 8-12 condensed into 6 seconds Interestingly, this final data was when I discovered AS!3 can do batches of stacks, rather than doing each one manually for 120 frames! Could have used that nugget a few months back! Process for this was: Open all .ser file in AS!3, analyse, place grid and stack (25%) Crop and sharpen in PixInsight Alignment in imPPG Black mask (needs tweaking, but good enough), False colour and denoise in PixInsight Gif generated using PPIP CEM60 / Tal100 PST mod, 2.5x powermate and Altair Hypercam 174mm. Captured with Sharpcap Right, back to night-time adventures I go (till I can stump up for a Quark, of course 😇)

Summer 2020 refresh: Changed to a light grey to fend off some of the thermal load. I used methylated spirit to prep the old coating and then 3 coats over the top to cover it well Added an AllSky camera, which has been fantastically handy enclosure from http://www.allskyoptics.com/ a spare zwo120mc-s. Uploads every 30seconds day and night and records a time lapse over night: http://allsky.alextronomy.com/ I can say it's worked really well for the past year, and has been well worth the time and effort (and cost)

A year on from this, I can add: Citronella does deter buzzing things from inside Mason bees love T&G! Changing the colour is a pain in the neck, choose wisely, choose a light colour! Sunlight will melt your flats panel if you let it...you know, if doing solar imaging or something Shelves! You will always need another, no matter how many you build It is THE best upgrade!

A bit of an odd question, but here goes - Has anyone tried fitting a Celestron Focus Motor to a Skywatcher Skymax 180? The 'logic' for the question goes like this: The Celestron Focus Motor is listed as fitting the Celeston 7” Maksutov-Cassegrain (not available as an OTA) The 7” Maksutov-Cassegrain is basically the same scope as the Skymax 180 Visually, the mountings on the focusers look the same. Rubber knob & 3 screws in a circular ring v 🤔

I built mine on 6 concrete curb stones corners, which look similar. They are the 90 degree blocks for inside corners

Thank you everyone for all the supportive comments!

Great advice, thank you! I hadn’t reckoned on the motion being so rapid.