gorann

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.

Now you got me worried Tom. I am waiting for my Mesu mount and in my obsy I have 240 V and 12 V outlets, and I use two big ca 100 Ah led batteries (continuously hocked up to smart chargers) to supply the 12 V for things like the mount and heaters. The batteries, when fully charges (which they usually are) gives ca 12.8 V. That has been perfectly fine for my EQ8. Will the Mesu need 13.8V? And if that is the case what do I need to buy to get that? I thought "12V" things like most mounts would be happy with 12.0 V. Also, what do you mean by Eagle "s/w"? A google search gives 11 different meanings to s/w (from software to sea worthy): https://acronyms.thefreedictionary.com/S%2FW

Just saw you superb image. Congratulations! Your processing is spot on and at f/3.3 your 6.5 hours would probably correspond to 20+ hours with a refractor, so more data would probably not contribute much to what is already an exceptionally nice image.

But would not Televue tell you if you asked? I have got used to be informed by the manufacturers about what I was buying, patricularly when it came to telescopes. I always found that they were very open about things like glass composition. Best case scenario is that SW found a superior glass mix and will not tell the competitors. Worst case is that there are known weaknesses with the glass.

Fortunately my Esprit 150 was checked by Es, so I feel relaxed. By the way Wim, what you say may only be half true?. I just read this on Cloudy Nights: "Esprit 120 and 150 have f/7 optics designed by Hugo Ruland of Lichtenknecker Belgium, while the faster Esprit 100 and 80 have been designed by Gyulai Pal in Hungary. So these are different optical designs." (https://www.cloudynights.com/topic/535789-sky-watcher-esprit-150ed-fpl-53-triplet/) By the way, does anyone know who designed the 150ED, and why is the glass composition a secret?

Interesting review. He says "According to Skywatcher there are several adjustable screws on the side of the cell." I had the impression from John's review here that it could not be collimated. Are the Americans getting a different version?

Thanks for a very excitings report /thread! Does anyone know what ED glass is used in this scope? On the FLO site it only says that "The Evostar-150ED Apo has a different objective lens glass combination to the Evostar-80ED/100ED/120ED models. "

I fully agre Olly! Most importantly is that Nigel's last versions here showed enormous improvement (although no thanks to me as I could not give any PI advice). Obviously, great data made this exercise particularly fulfilling. Having a 6" refractor of a well known Japanese company in front of the camera cannot hurt.

Tried some deconvolution in PI using Wim's settings @wimvb to sharpen a bit more and added this selectively as lum in PS. Also brought out a bit more dust around the galaxy. Sorry for posting a third version but you got really nice data Nigel that is difficult to stop playing with.

Here is my current version. Sharper than the previous one due to a sharpened layer of luminosity put on the galaxy (this time the real thing and not derived from the RGB data).

Looks great with a lot of fine detail Wim. What settings did you use in HDRMT to get that sharpness? I had a try but there are just so many settings to play with.

Thanks Lis! I think what I will do is essentially what you describe. It is just the order of the layers that may differ but the end resullt will be the same - just like in Olly's way of doing it. I will take the Lum data and process it with special empahsis on sharpness and then put it in as a lum layer (blend mode luminosity) and only use it for the galaxy by using the brush tool. The atrificial lum I now used was just a grayscale version of the RGB image but it allowed me to suppress colour noise in the sky. I am quite pleased with the sky and the stars so I don't want to mess that up. Actually, your sky and my sky looks very similar and if I get your method description right, you removed the Lum layer from the sky. I can see that you have a bit less noise when I zoom in on the skies. Did you use Gaussian blurr on it? At least I thought of doing that but decided to leave some noise in there. Obviously a trip to Olly would be great in many ways and it is on my things to do! (if he will have me) Need to do some handyman work in the garden now and then BBQ, so I may not do any more processing until tomorrow.

So, here is what I came up with today. I used artificial Lum from the RGB data as suggested by Wim (to avoid the dust bunnies). Now when I see Mrs Gnomus new magnificent version I may have another go a sharpening (deconvolution) so it is possible that I come back with a new version. Maybe I should look into what the Lum data looks like and possibly use it selectively on the galaxy so I no not have to deal with the bunnies. Al done in PS CS5 (using the files Nigel had stacked). Thanks Nigel for this entertainment! If you do not mind I may put it on my Astrobin with full credits of course.

So here are five images from my triple rig taken with a Samyang 135mm f/2, a Canon 300mm f/4, or an ES 127ED, or a combination of them (all with Canon 60D cameras). Then I take the liberty of throwing in an additional one, which is my processing of the Dumbbell nebula centre from data collected by the Liverpool Telescope, a 2 m RC scope on a mountain top so I dedicate that one to pixel peepers since it may be the most detailed RGB image ever taken of the Dumbbell. You find technical details about the images on my Astrobin site. Cheers Göran

Like all EQ8 mine is suffering from backlash and many nights I have trouble getting below 1"/pixel with guiding (accidentally I have been down to 0.5" which is what I ideally should have with my 5" refractor). It may or may not be related to the backlash and I should probably spend more time trouble shooting. The CEM120 just seem to be a rather fantastic mount and therefore tempting....

No, had not seen it so a big thank you Mike! Seems to be an outstanding mount. Just hope the QC is good so that all their mounts will perform like that.

So, I had anther look at Cloudy Nights and it looks like people are, like me, waiting for anyone to push the pay button, test it, and post a report. Also, everyone seem to agree that if this mount holds what is promised, it is by far the best you could get for that amount of money and would be a game changer.