gorann

Yes I unhook the wire. It would not only cause diffraction spikes, it would also restrict the movement of the scope. But unhooking it takes 10 seconds and with a flat roof like this I need to park the scope in horizontal position. The advantage with the flat roof is that I do not have the sky view obstructed by the gables.

Finally, painting the outside and bringing in the EQ8 and the 14" Madame

Some details of the sliding roof, the pier (with 12 V and 240 V outlets), and the interior.

Insulating the obsy

Then the wood work started. In each of the two beams holding up the rood I put four rook bearings.

Then the digging and concrete work (old obsy in the background)

First the Madame herself on the steps of the old obsy

In mid April I found an advertisement for a 14" Meade LX200R at the major Norwegian net site for used stuff (finn.no). For those that may not know, the LX200R is the same scope as the LX200ACF but since Meade initially argued that this was a Ritchey-Cretien type scope, they were sued and lost, so they had to change the name from R to ACF (Advanced Coma Free). I was just too tempted as the price was ok, 25000 NOK so about 2500 GBP, and I could not resist. Also, I had just bought a Mesu200 mount for my obsy and had my EQ8 left over. So, I decided to buy this big Madame and to build a second obsy for her, next to my old one, and put her on the EQ8. In any case, she would not have fit under the roof of the old one and I have a countryside property with plenty of space and a dark sky (60°N in Sweden and some nights SQM=21.6 so Bortle 2). So in late April, I started building a second obsy and now two months later it is done. This time I built a fully insulated structure so that the big Madame would not have to freeze except on clear nights. Here are some images of the building process. I started with the pier, attaching it to 600 kg of concrete. For the pier I used the kind of plastic tube used for moving water under roads (a culvert) and filled it with steel reinforced concrete. The roof is at a 7° angle and is moved down by gravitation and up with a 12 V winsch (the type used on quad bilkes). The low end of the obsy is facing south. The floor and roof are insulated with styrofoam blocks and the walls with glass-wool. Inside it is 2.5 x 2.3 meters and the hight of the walls falls from about 2.0 meters to 1.5 meters.

I assume that this may be true for very big "points" like whole gaxies moving apart, but within a galaxy gravitation may bring "every point" closer over time. And galaxies may even move closer to each other due to gravitational pull. I even read somewhere that we may crash with M31 one day......

The second one if I have to chose. Vlaiv has already shown this for the fine details and as also said the core does not look right in the first one where it has a darkish area around it and appears to be of the wrong colour, alomost like it was put in there afterwards. However, on my screen the outer areas of the galaxy has a nicer bluish tint in the first image that is missing in the second. So, like Olly said a selected mix of the two. I often find that strong Ha regions can look a bit unnatural in galaxy images and they are of course unnatural since the Ha signal is boosted by adding it once more from pure Ha data. There is Ha also in RGB data but then at its proper strength. So I would tune it back a bit or make it more fluffy as Vlaiv suggested but I am not sure how to do it. It looks like the outer areas of the Ha spots have become blackish, possibly because that Ha signal is not included in the lum layer and therefore not lit up. Maybe add an extra Ha lum layer selectively only where there is Ha could work (not sure how it would be done in PI).

Do you mean that someone like Daniel should not upload the images he has processed to his Astrobin so that they would never leave his hard drive and never be seen by others that clearly appears to appreciate them a lot? And should he do so to satisfy those that finds it terrible that such an image may become an IOTD? Apparently a lot of those looking at Astrobin images could not care less how they were acquired, they just appreciate the beauty of them, and I find nothing wrong with that and I do not think that Astrobin should be a site solely for those that swear that they have done it all them self except for manufacturing the equipment. Maybe the puritans should form their own Elite-Astrobin with their own PIOTD (Puritan Image of the Day) 😎

There you go Andrew, you found the right answer! Could not have said it better.

Yes, but the only thing Daniel has done is to post the images he processes on his Astrobin page. He has no saying in what the IOTD people are doing.

I do not think there is anything wrong with what Daniel is doing when he during cloudy nights in Sao Paulo, Brazil, processes publicly available data. That is his choice and obviously it is improving his processing skills, and he cannot be blamed for someone else rewarding this image with an IOTD. Daniel also posts images that he has acquired with his rather modest DSLR based rig back in Brazil. I expect that Daniel could not wish for anything higher than having the means to buy a top quality rig and being able to move to a place with predominantly clear skies. As long as people are open about what they are doing, like Daniel, I have hard to see why they should be looked down on. I actually find it quite amusing that Daniel is clearly a much better processer than many of those well-off people (often from North rather than South America) with super expensive equipment that posts mediocre images on Astrobin. Another discussion is how the IOTD should be awarded. Maybe a quotient system could be introduced? I had the feeling that most IOTD images were based on data from peoples own rigs (backard or remote), but maybe not?

Yes, two meters compared to half-a-metre, and the data was free! But this one was about two days of processing, including finding the subs in the data base, manually downloading them one by one, sorting out the bad ones (even this mount produces a surprising amount of eggy stars - but then it has to hold 24 tonnes of scope), stacking and aligning them (this was a 4 panel mosaic) and fixing stars (a lot of artifacts on the bright ones as the camera has no anti-blooming gates). So in many aspects much more to deal with than in my own stacks.

Actually, when I compare the pictures of MK2 with Mk1, it seems that the new version is really stripped and if anything should be a budget model:

Actually I later uploaded those LT images to Wikimedia and took away the copyright (after LT agreed) - so they are freely available and the only thing Wim and I will ever earn from them were processing practise during the summer of 2017. By the way, here is my version of the Eagle nebula from the free LT data - I do not feel bad about it at all but I have to admit that I feel more satisfaction from processing my own data - but too often I run out of that.

Since this thread has now rewoken, I take the opportunity to wonder if anyone has seen or even used the Mk2 yet. I just do not understand from the pictures of it how you do the azimuth adjustment if you put it on a pier with the wedge shown on these pictures. I also wonder about the altitude adjustment - I see no adjustment screws except three M12 (or M10) bolts - but that would be a very cumbersome and primitive way of doing polar alignment. I am a happy owner of a Mesu 200 from the very last Mk1 batch so I am mainly qurious, although one day I may want a second Mesu 200 for the second obsy I have just built.

Up here at 60° North there will be about 4 months each summer when the sky is too bright and I still need to keep my processing skills up (and my processing fingers soon start itching badly). But so far I found that there is enough free data out there, everything from the Liverpool Telescope to data given out on Astrobin and SGL, that I have not yet started with remote imaging. However, I cannot see any moral issues about it. This summer I have so far been totally occupied with building a second obsy so I can double my data collecting during those few clear nights I get when astro darkness is here. Here is the new one next to the old obsy - I will make a thread about the building process soon on the DIY Obsy pages.

Thanks Emil! Only 3.2 hours. It is from my obsy on the Swedish country side (60 degrees North) in March when it is still quite dark up here (SQM was 20.9 that night but it can get to 21.6 some nights) . Now the sky is much too bright, you can read a newspaper outside at midnight, so no AP here until late August🙄

Great image! In support of your colours: I had a shorter attempt (3 hours) at it in March this year with my Esprit 150 and ASI071 (OSC). I think my colours match yours quite well:

With Polemaster the same unit can be used on different mounts - I just need to buy the mount specific bracket. Is this also the case with iPolar? In other words, if I buy it and later get another mount, do I only need to buy a new bracket?

Nice inage in many ways! I think it was too much yellow centrally in the galaxies and too much red in the stars of the original version, but your reduced colour in later version made it a bit too tame. The blue was great so do not tune that down at all and you could bring a bit back of the original red/yellow. In my humble oppinion.

You will never regret it! If you are worried about QC you can order it from FLO and get it checked before shipment (for 75 GBP I think). I did that with both my Esprits.

Yes, we cannot really trust what we see on the screen and the light level in your room also plays a big role so it is a good idea to keep an eye on the values in the histogram. In your case it is easily fixed with a tweak of the curves - much worse if one ends up with a too dark sky and clipped dark data in the image. I usually keep the sky as bright as yours until the very end to make sure I do not clip it during processing.