souls33k3r

Given how awful that night of the Friday way i would happily accept this as a "sweet success". Well done matey.

indeed it is to blame

Oops, sowwies mate was never my intention. I would be surprised to find out how your scope does behave with everything on in vertical position. Ever tried to image anything closer to zenith and by any chance do you remember how your guiding was?

Cheers mate. Much appreciated you took time to reply because you're the only other EdgeHD 8" person I know of here. That's exactly what I've been doing in the past but started to get paranoid with my refractor when I noticed it to be doing crazy things with regards to guiding in vertical position.

Cheers mate, maybe it is not required or maybe it is essential i don't know hence the reason why i've asked because it seems just impossible to balance the SCT in vertical. I'd certainly love to hear back from others what they have been doing in this regard.

Hi All, The other night i thought i would bring out my EdgeHD 8" out of season retirement and go for a nice galaxy. So i mounted my (in order) reducer, t-adapter, FW and my camera at the back. Mounted the pegasus hub at the top of the scope and the first thing i did was to try and balance this scope in vertical. Now this was a challenge. I didn't want to waste any of my clear skies and imaging time so reverted back to my short refractor. Question is, how critical is it to balance the SCT on dec when pointed vertical (assuming it is VERY) and secondly what have others done in order to balance their SCTs? because unlike refractors, you can not rotate the OTA so basically a bit stuck. Now i'm assuming people use counter weights but i shall leave that discussion for the thread. Any pretty pictures of your SCT imaging sct setups? from memory, i believe @PhotoGav has the exact same scope that i do so would most certainly love to hear from you mate. Many thanks in advance.

very nice Carole. You just can't beat superb data from a dark site

Don't get disheartened mate, it's all fun and games with this hobby. Trust me when i say this, we've all had our fair share of disappointments. Just keep at it and one day you will most certainly produce a stunner. If you still think it's a total waste of space, look no further ... i have plenty of space that could do with another scope and camera

224 is proven to be a good choice

Absolutely mate. Well tonight is my second night out. Last night was very clear so jumped right back on this horse and immediately started to get in to issues. You know you have some serious issues with your mindset if you forget to unpark your scope isn't it? Well that was just the tip of the ice berg. Any way, mount behaved perfectly well all night last night and tonight was game time. Well i say game time, these pesky high clouds are ruining everything for me. Nonetheless i am imaging.

Hi All, Well came back home today after work and first thing I did was to check the bolt. I'm happy to report that the bolt was not bent at all. I completely unscrewed it and cleaned what appeared to be some black dust of some sort off the bolt which then made it quite smooth going back in. Will have them greased tomorrow any way to avoid them being jammed for a long time.

Thank you for your reply mate, maybe it did or maybe it didn't. I guess i will have to unscrew it tonight and find out. I'm hoping to leave work early today and check this. I only noticed that the bolt felt really really hard when i was doing my polar alignment and i had to loosen this side of the bolt to bring polaris in to the respective field.

Slight update on this. Last night was the first night i was able to test my mount properly and under the stars. The purpose of last night was not to image anything but to firstly get back in to the feel for the equipment and how it behaves and secondly getting the hang of SGP and PHD which is another story. After battling the demons for most part of it, i was finally able to take a few test images. Some short (1 min - 3 min) and they came out good and then went really hardcore and push my mount to it's limits. Did a 10 min exposure and regardless of how bad my total RMS was on guiding, my stars came out nice and round albeit out of focus (D'oh!) So basically what i'm trying to say is that i'm happy to report my mount behaved nicely. Now this might be totally unrelated but one of the altitude bolts (closer to the polar scope end) was really really stiff. I'm thinking of un-doing it and lubricate it to make it slightly smoother to work with?

Good luck with the build Sara. Hope it serves you well

Simply breathtaking Barry.