skybadger

Very nice build. I'm planning to make something similar for my portable rig while at home and it would have to be as small as possible.

I'm interested in the details of the drawer slides since they seem to be bigger and stronger than normal drawer slides.

also, how do you get out when the roof is open? Must be a bit of a squirm?

Would you change that direction of roof opening to towards the house ? How does that end do in the driving rain since there is  little overhang compared to the long sides ? Would you extend the length of the roof to compensate ?

Can you ssh into the asiair and look at the filesystem , see if there is an indi catalogue and what the indi catalogue says ? 

If you are convinced it's XML what's the odds that it is indi ? And that's well documented ..

It would be quick to knock up a test. 

I'm really interested what the actuators are, linear servos ?

Also how the stack is clamped once adjusted or is it sufficiently stiff once adjusted it doesn't need clamping ?

Finally, this is normally a 'once and done 'operation, what's the argument for making it easy to repeat but expensive and heavy?

I use  cartes de ciel all the time on windows. Less faff than others. Also does orbital offsets with phd2 to track comets. 

Also have ccd de ciel for when I want to run three cameras in spectroscopy mode. 

On 10/11/2022 at 09:40, markse68 said:

missing shard was still attached when i removed the mirror. It’s a real shame as i could see it’s promise as a scope despite its terrible distortion. One day i’ll hopefully get it sorted.

Have you confirmed that the absence of the shard has made any difference at all ? On one hand it could cause a relaxing if surface tension which will change the figure, on the other it's a small mirror, have you tried a NY sort of test of figure?

That's a nice setup. Clearly need some larger scopes. 

I run at 2000mm on a lodestar 8um pixels binned X2 using an oag. Typical exposures 2.5 secs and guiding .5"

Sometimes it's hard to find a star but rarely. 

Hi all, 

Ben trying to use my RC12 for Jupiter imaging but reverted to the refractor. 

This is my Vixen NA140SSF at f/22 with ASI178 and lrgb filter set. 

Captured with Firecap, stacked in AS3 and sharpened in Maxim. 

Not happy with this statement I looked it up, this explanation chimes with my thoughts but that doesn't mean it is used correctly in material Olly is reading. 

I would expect a methodology to describe the approach to selecting a method amongst several and describe how the selected method is applied. 

https://www.scribbr.co.uk/faqs/method-vs-methodology/

Ditto to that. The cam lever shown was the clutch to pivot the motor that originally hung off that large protruding bolt and was held against the gear wheel by a spring , the cam lever rotated the motor drive pinion off the gear wheel to declutch. 

Cool. 

My thoughts right now are about 30" length each side in a square, about 30" tall with a roof sloping up to the north that rolls and slides down the north side out of the way in use. 

Power is whatever is needed, mine is distributed on the scope itself by an alpaca or usb device. 

Maybe the Christmas project...

On 26/10/2023 at 08:55, Tomatobro said:

The earth is predicted to pass through a debris field of Comet 3D/Biela on 1st/2nd or 2nd/3rd of December. This comet is one of the ones that disappeared about 100 years ago.

Computer predictions suggest that this could be the meteor event of the year with a display of very slow meteors (<>16kms)

I guess that the press will at some point get hold of this story and will attach to it the usual hype but if predictions are correct should be a good show.

Have you a link ? I read an article in this but don't have it available any more. Since the moon will be old and the radiant is high it could be a very good but also quite faint shower sue to the slow speeds 

What are your basic requirements for this ? I'd like to compare with mine..

I want a small obbo I can use around my portable rig when I'm at home, so it only needs to be as big as the parked scope with a slide off automated roof. 

Is that what you are aiming at ?

Fair enough but my experience so far is that those slo Mo's slip quite easily due to the small end diameter of the stalk and so it's easier and just as effective to drive off the main dial. 

You are still getting more than 200 steps per output rev of the dial.

Ki did much the same except I took off the pinion cover and used those four screws to hold the focuser motor bracket. I think you may get bending of the relatively thin bracket under load. 

I'm driving a qhy9 and 7x2" filter wheel though.

Find a second hand lodestar, large pixels, rock solid. Highly sensitive.

Wilko sticky backed velour ?

3 hours ago, vlaiv said:

Under linux, there is already free solution available - called USB over IP.  I think that there are still no reliable Windows implementation for the other side, but one can use some hacks like running linux + virtual box and windows in virtual machine with usb pass thru and so on.

There is this repo as well:

https://github.com/cezanne/usbip-win

Btw, ASCOM aplaca deals with this nicely without need for USB connection - but suffers from same issues as USBIP would.

One really needs fast connection for seamless work.

I did some tests yesterday and got very poor throughput on powerline adapters. Although they advertise as 500Mbps, they actually only have 100Mbps ports (not gigabit) so RPI works only in 100Mbps mode. In "lab" conditions, I'm able to get 94Mbps with iperf, but as soon as I include outdoor conditions and 30 meters of extension line and attempt connection over that - it drops to ~35Mbps.

That will surely be better and more reliable than Wifi connection, but it is slow.

That is about 4 megabytes per second of transfer speed - and I'm using camera that has 3000x2000 - with 16bit - single sub has almost 12MB of data - which means sub download of 3 seconds at best. It was actually more like 5-6 between exposures. Rather slow for someone used to USB3.0 speeds (4.8 Gbps - so even around x5 that of gigabit ethernet).

For now, I'll just explore options to see what software works the best and then I'll probably switch to Cat6 cable and direct ethernet connection rather than using powerline adapters.

- I might even consider more powerful machine and use network as Remote desktop connection

- Explore further INDIGO agents and associated ecosystem of apps. It turns out that agents move some of the processing from client back to server (like exposure control, guiding, plate solving and such) and network is used just for control of agents - so basically UI that connects to agents. I'm not overly confident that it will work without issues, but am willing to give it a go.

Power line adapters work well in my situation . I have gigabit ports on mine and they report throughput of 600mbps but if you can't fill the pipe, then you will get less. If you have a noisy segment , you will get less. If you branch into WiFi, you will get much less. So use appropriately.

My connection to the obbo over 30m power line is 10mbps which is plenty for video over esp and reasonable large file transfer but uses a 100mb unit at the obbo. If I replaced it with gb powerline I'm sure it would be much faster. 

On 20/10/2023 at 14:28, DeCosta said:

Hi  everyone 

I am a newbie with just a few projects completed.  I use SGP and I always seem to get the attached message when I start up SGP.  I've trawled the internet with no success. Can anyone advise if this is important and if it is impact my imaging?   How do I resolve it?  

Many Thanks

Keith

,

It's cos one of the things that is running , presumably driven by SGP, is an ASCOM driver in executable rather than DLL form. It's benign but annoying. 

The expectation is that the DLL is used by preference and registered under ASCOM using regserver rather than the exe. 

I have and it does leak in hence remotely turn it on and off as needed rather than leave it on. 

Also try here http://basebe.obspm.fr/basebe/

Check the spectroscopy groups.io group, there's a team looking at them there from a list. I don't seem to be able to add it from my phone

I like the idea of 'ammeter asteonomers', seems like we're in the lab.

You can find wifi storage cards which will do what you want, they are a bit old hat nowadays.