gorann

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.

Great image with a lot of fuzzies in addition to the major galaxies! What Newtonean is it? Maybe the sky is a bit too bright for my taste. It is around 35 - 40 (PS units), while most seem to prefer it to be around 20 (I think Olly says it should be 23/23/23). There is no apparent structure in it so I do not think it is integrated flux nebulosity (IFN).

A less complicated way is to use the "Increase Star Color" action in PS (It is included in the Astronomy Tools, aka Noel Carboni's actions). You can do several rounds with it and it brings the colour around the blown out core into the core.

Looks very promising indeed and colours are right now - but do not mind what @wimvb says, hurry up to get it into PS to polish and sharpening it up, it has spent enough time in PI 😖

No quality decrease with the 2" TS reducer, a fine piece of optics, and the 3" has the same opics, just a bigger diameter, so I trust it will perform nicely. If you are going to use the ASI1600 the 2" reducer would work fine (cheaper) and you could just put it into the eye-piece holder of the scope so you do not need any adapter to attach it to the scope.

I get a bit confused here - you initially said that you would use an ASI1600 (much smaller chip). As others have said here: in California you probably do much better with a cooled camera (like the ASI) I have an Esprit 100 which is a really great and fast little scope. I just bought a TS 3" 0.79x reducer for it: https://www.teleskop-express.de/shop/product_info.php/info/p6085_TS-Optics-REFRACTOR-0-79x-Reducer-Corrector---full-sized-sensors---M68-connection.html That brings the FL down to 430 mm. The image circle of the Esprit 100 is claimed (by FLO) to be 40 mm, so with the reducer it would be 32 mm which would be plenty for the ASI1600 but not enough for a full frame DSLR. The good thing with the TS reducer is that I only needed two adapters with it to screw it onto the Esprit (costed 75 + 19 Euro). Fitting the Riccardi reducer to the Esprit would mean that I need the following adapters according to an email from Marcus Ludes at APM telescopes (citing it directly): ASI 1600 MM with 17.5 mm back focus at Esprit 100 need follow adapters ( 81 mm – 17.5 mm – 30 mm = 33.5 mm after Riccardi ) - Adapter M74 x 1 ID-Thread to M63 x 1 ID Thread, APM custom made Euro 60 - Riccardi Reducer M63 - Adapter TSO-M63a-M48a , 3 mm thick Euro 44 - Adapter ( 17-23 mm ) TSM48vvar Euro 32 - Adapter TSVF208 , 8 mm Euro 29,00 - Adapter TSM48i-T2a, 4 mm Euro 19 So you would end up with 5 adapters costing 184 Euro, so now you would have to add 50% of the cost of the actual reducer on a pile of metal rings...... And I would expect that the quality of the TS reducer is about the same as the Riccardi. What I do have to admit is that I have not been able to test the 3" TS reducer yet since I have no astrodarkness up here now. However, I have previously used the 2" version of the TS reducer on my Esprit 150 and stars were perfect to the edge with my ASI1600.

When I replaced my Baader 7nm Ha for a Baader 3.5 nm Ha, my impression was that it made a very significant improvement, but that is so far from a single night with the 3.5 nm and seeing could have been unusually good. Maybe someone else have compared them?

Guys, I am looking forward to hear about your experiences with this new flter, so place your orders! I need a 2" one and I see it is not for free at Astroshop.eu (366 Euro) but I am in no hurry since astrodarkenss has left us up here for a few months?.

From reading the article this seems very promising and I really hope it is not just a hype made up by the media and PR people that we all have at the universities these days - unfortunately priorities at universities are now mostly about being seen by media and attracting students. But hopefully that is not the case in this case. Maybe I am just an old grumpy professor.....

But they do not seem to be cheaper than the Esprits which are of proven quality (and if you buy hem from FLO you can get them bench tested) - I would at least let someone else be the guinea pig.

When I look at the Mesu 300 on the Mesu site the philosophy seems to be the same - no latitude adjustment, being purely made for a stationary and very steady obsy. It also makes me wonder about the north-south adjustment, but I assume there are some adjustment for that.

I was just struck with a possible additional problem with the new mount: how to make small polar adjustments. My obsy is built on rather soft clay (old farmland) and the pier moves slightly when the ground freezes and thaws so I need to do small adjustments. I cannot see any possibility for that in the images more than adjusting three large bolts attaching it to the wedge. I assume Lucas has a solution.

Yes, looks really great - I am no big fan of flips. I must have bought one of the final batch of the old version. The only worry I would have for the new ones is that if you want to sell it you have to sell it to someone +/- 500 km up or down from you, or they have to order their own pier, but that is hopefully not too expensive.

Really nice image Alex! Could be taken for a mosaic. You may consider getting a Ha clip on filter for that camera to add HA to your RGB images during moon lit nights.

Here are my contributions from the few days it cleared at my home obsy in Sweden. My new Esprit 100 and 150 scopes and ASI 071 and 1600 cameras played a major role in them. Details to be found on my Astrobin (see below)

I get it now! Magnificent! Always amazed about how much difference a rotation makes in AP images.

That is an excellent mosaik Barry. Impressive! But, I am a bit confused about the breaking wave. Not sure where it is. You say the vesion on Astrobin is rotaded to show it better but it is not rotated.

Thanks boys! Yes, it make sence that a battery should be enough since otherwise most of the portable solutions, which I assume are based on led batteries giving max 12.8 V, would not work.