gorann

Hopefully you can talk Astrodon or Baader to make an ultra-ultra fast filter set for your scope🤣

Just stumbled on this. The German seller has now removed it from ebay since he apparently did not get what he asked for. Apparently it is the scope that followed NASA space flights up through the clouds. https://petapixel.com/2015/04/27/massive-2540mm-f8-nasa-lens-shows-up-on-ebay/

Nice Carole, but be careful not falling backwards while pole adjusting!🥴

I was always sad about the summer coming to an end, until I got into astrophotography😁 Here is an alternative if you cannot fit in a tilt plate: https://astrodymium.com/collections/frontpage/products/rotating-tilt-adjusters

Yes, it made it quite wind-proof😁

This is what I brought to a south Pacific Island, just before COVID happened. A Canon 300 mm f/4 with an ASI071, sitting on a star adventurer. The whole kit with tripod weighed 8 kg. The lens is only 1.2 kg (not much for what is a flat field Apo with 75 mm aperture). I made a thread about the trip:

As far as I know all the less expensive ones (Altair, Omegon and Risingcam) are made by Touptek so there would probably be not much of a difference there unless the western importers (Altair and Omegon) have higher QC standards.

Sorry to hear this! It is worrying and a hassle to have to ship it to China. For others that are thinking about a Touptek made IMX571 camera but do not want to buy it from China, I think Omegon veTEC 571C is a safer alternative as it is sold by several European companies that would also have to handle service or replacement of a broken camera. It is almost half price of the ZWO or QHY versions and I just bought one. Now I am just waiting for astrodarkness to return to Sweden. https://www.astroshop.eu/astronomical-cameras/omegon-camera-vetec-571-c-color/p,67320

He he, I think I also spent a bit longer on the road, but since I did not keep much track of time I just posted the estimated time by Google maps.😉

That is an amazing amount of dust that the RASA8 captured! Great image Olly! But I think you forgot to flip it so it is a mirror image (I do it all the time with the RASA and it messes up attempts to annotate the image). Göran

Monday this week I visited Lucas Mesu's workshop to pick up a refurbished mount that I bought from @ollypenrice this spring. Here is a post I made about the visit:

This spring I bought a used Mesu 200 Mk-I (of the first black edition) from @ollypenrice in southern France, who sent it on to Lucas Mesu in Holland for an upgrade, involving fitting a Sitech II controller to it and give it a general check-up. I went for the Sitech II since that is what I have on my current Mesu 200 Mk-I, and having identical systems would reduce the risk of midnight confusion. When he told me the mount was ready to be delivered, he asked if I wanted to pick it up. From my house in central Sweden that would be a 15 hour (1400 km) drive, so my fist thought was to have it shipped here. But then I realized that my wife had planned a trip for us to Denmark in July to see her relatives, and that would bring us half way to Lucas' workshop. So I said yes, and thought that this would be the safest way to get the mount to its new home. Lucas and his wife provided us with a very nice lunch, and we had a pleasant chat about life in general and mounts in particular. There were very few Mesu 200 to be seen in the workshop as he had recently delivered the latest batch. He works alone in the workshop and said he produces about 40 mounts in a year. However, I got to see a Mesu 300, one of only two he ever made. The other one had been bought by a university and the one he has kept is used for calibrations. Lucas was currently testing out using stepper motors as an alternative to the servo motors on the Mesu 200 Mk-II (image below). He is using Nema 17 stepper motors and a gear reduction of 1050 to 1. The Servo Motors have 2800 to 1 because of the higher dynamic range of the motors. According the Lucas' calculations the stepper motors can provide a slew speed of 3 degrees/sec or more and with micro stepping still smooth guiding, but that has to be tested with a suitable controller and controller board. He says that the Maxon servo motors with encoder and Sitech I controller will still be the standard configuration. An advantage with the stepper motors is that they can easily be controlled by various open source systems and some customers have expressed interest in such an option. Cheers, Göran

This is good news. However, it is interesting to note that Orion US has taken over Meade. It was Orion US that filed the lawsuit that brought Meade to bankruptcy in 2019, and gave Orion $16.8 million in damages. I love my 14" Meade SCT. It is a deforked LX200R, so it is the original "ACF" that Meade first called "R", as they claimed it was a Ritchey–Chrétien design. That was not entirely correct so they got sued for that too and had to rename it "ACF". I hope they now stay out of trouble👍

Yes, you could allways return to it with an Oiii filter when astrodarkness gets back🙂

Looks great with nice details and quite a bit of dust! There should be some Oiii centrally in the nebula but I guess your sky is still too bright to pick it up. Cheers Göran

Thanks Olly! I will keep you updated.

Yes, the four concrete piers may one day puzzle the archaeologists - maybe one theory will be that it belonged to someone worshiping the sky🤣

No astrodarkness here yet so, while I am adding a second pier to one of my obsies here at the farm (current status shown below), I have not only been digging into the ground but also digging a bit into forgotten data on my hard drives to test the star fixing procedure in Star Tools recently advocated by @tomato. I found this Ha data that I have not posted before. The stars did not look too good in one corner which may be the reason I had put it aside but the Star Tools' star repair procedure helped a lot. There is obviously quite a lot going on among the Ha emitting nebulosity in this area. 5 hours from 31 August 2020 with a RASA8 and ASI1600MM and Baader high-speed Ha filter. Processed with PI, PS and Star Tools. PS. Olly @ollypenrice, the plan is to have the Mesu 200 I bought from you to be sitting on that new pier - I will go down to Lucas and pick it up in two weeks🙂 Cheers, Göran

Thanks guys! I also did not know how close they were so I caught the squid by accident. I had not even attempted to frame the image, I had just put the SY135 as piggy back on my RASA8 dual rig (aiming at the trunk) to allow the SY135 to catch what ever happened to be in its FOV, with the main objective to fine tune its sensor distance. My Bortle 2-3 sky helps of course.

I have not followed all the entries on this thread, so maybe this has been discussed: JWST is an IR telescope and I got quirious. Has anyone here tried IR astrophotogtaphy? Googling it gives rather few entries, but this one got me interested: https://www.cloudynights.com/topic/554666-nirha-preview-of-horsehead-project/

I got it to work! So now I have bought Star Tools, even if I maybe just will use it for fixing stars.

Thanks Steve! That is impressive and convinced me to have another attempt on Star Tools.

Amazing image and I could not find a single hot pixel😁. Does anyone know what filters were used and how they were combined to an RGB image?

Lovely! A rapid look at astrobin just showed close-ups and I just did not have the energy to go through the 87 x 100 pages of images of the Trunk. You and me may be among the few that aimed a Samyang 135 at it.

Great image Adrian! As I said I was sure there is some out there, and dusty it was👍