blinky

You do have blue stars, but as Mike said, drop the iso or exposure a bit so you don't burn out the cores - this is a boost to blue saturation in Pixinsight on your JPG so not the best source of data for me but you can see more blue coming out...

I imaged for years with an HEQ5 Pro and 8" Newt - it worked fine but an EQ6 defiantly has more spare capacity and gives upgrade options in future to bigger scopes etc but it would be fine IMHO

I am also wondering how good polar alignment needs to be and also how good can it be..... My mount is an old EQ6 Pro, if i use PHD and use the drift align feature, will it ever be really, really accurate due to the inaccuracies in the gears. I think mine is currently around 5mins out and at 800mm focal length/0.9 arcsecs/pixel I can get round starts some of the time in 5 min exposures.

I dont think you would need to have commander set to flip at all - let SGP handle it all....

Good article, I did basically the same with my 8" mirror and it came up like new! One thing, in Scotland our water is that soft that you don't usually need to rinse with RO since its not far off that out the tap!

https://www.lightvortexastronomy.com/tutorial-narrowband-hubble-palette.html# Thats what I used, basically the same process as you have done, a mix of the Ha and Oiii for the other channel. Nice image!

Brilliant idea! Will try tonight and post the result

Im not totally happy with this, still have guiding issues at 800mm/0.98arcsecs - Think I might just go back to the frac for now until I get the EQ6 retuned in a year or so...… THis is only 15x5min subs in Ha/O3/S2 in the hubble colour scheme, cant get to grips with the central bright star, cant get a mask on it and the surrounding colour in Pixinsight and have messed about with it enough!

Good thinking! Bet thats what it was as it was a cracking sunny day (for a change!)

Nah focuser is not connected

a white pillow case over the front of the scope and the scope pointing at the sky, using the SGPro flats wizzard

I never have much luck with flats - either I get a nice smoot image or I get the above! This is 25 of the subs stacked and its still there (unsurprisingly!) - the image stats show its not overexposed: integration K count (%) 100.00000 count (px) 16389120 mean 28470.748 median 28769.440 avgDev 2090.349 MAD 2031.027 minimum 22828.140 maximum 33058.464

im trying to gather some flats for last nights Witches Broom image Im going to process, does the flat below look normal? Do newts always show the shadow of the secondary in the flats?

Open clusters are always better visually and this too is one of my favourites, always worth a look om the very odd occasion I look through an eyepiece!

Took this the other night 5x2min in RGB, just to see how guiding was, think it was ok!

Its 8mm - managed to find my calipers and also an 8mm bolt

What’s the screenshot above from? As for your problem, is it maybe a bit of grit or something on the gear? Time for a strip down and degrease maybe...

I have a dual mount bar on my eq6 and as a result of one side being a steel tube F4 newt and the other a WO little frac the balance point it very much to one side, this means I can’t tighten one of the hand bolts on the mounting plate as the hand bolt bit hits the dovetail. I want to replace that bolt with something like a hex bolt but what size is the bolt and also, the head is a bit rounded, presumable so it does not cause too much damage to the dovetail, what type of bolt is this?

will probably end up buying a new one but needed it working yesterday as we were coming up to our caravan.

That's what's wrong! Tried an earlier driver and it works but installs the new after each reboot as you mention

My EQDir module to connect HEQ5 Pro to my laptop is no longer working 😞 Last time I used it was a while ago but it was fine, now it just says port not available when connecting to EQMod. I have checked in Windows device manager and it says PL203HXA PHASED OUT SINCE 2012. PLEASE CONTACT YOUR SUPPLIER. But if I go into it, it says its working properly an the port is port 11. I have checked with the handset and that connects to the mount OK so its not the mount that's faulty.

Yes, in fact PHD2 will pop up a message telling you to re-calibrate, however, it wont stop it guiding or anything but then as the calibration is now not valid Im not sure what value you would get by not re-calibrating?

Thanks Ollie - Seems that although it says to Bin 2 a few folks have been using Bin 1 completely unaware of this and have no issues. As I live in Scotland and dont have the benefit of your skies it may well be weeks before I can mess about with this avian!

This is the best 50% from a 1000 sub stack, I used my Ha filter so I did not overexpose on my ASI1600! Just a quick stack then tweak of wavelets in Registax, then a bit of LHE in Pixinsight. How does it look? Seemed very easy to process compared to deep sky! Wonder if im missing some processing steps?

I’m gonna persevere with the Lodestar for the moment I think - get properly polar aligned and also push the prism a bit further in to see if the star shapes get any better. In theory at 1x bin the Lodestar is a little less than half the ASI1600 pixel size so I would think it would be able to guide it OK through an OAG