alacant

Yes, camera only, although the filter seems safe. Holding it up to the sun cuts out so much light, it's difficult to see where the sun is located. IIRC, using the same filter, we needed an exposure of 1/8s with an ordinary eos zoom, but have no idea what that may be with a 6cm opening over 1200mm...

Hi This one. Thanks. **Oh, and focus. I was thinking the moon or say Vega with a B. Mask tomorrow night and then clamping the focus barrel...

Excellent. Thanks. I'm guessing that getting the sun on the sensor is going to be the most difficult bit. I'm gonna have to track and I know that both the eos screen or laptop are pretty useless in sunlight. Dry run tomorrow. Never done solar stuff on this scale before. No idea what to expect. So much easier at night!

Thanks. Do we think that 1200mm gives enough magnification to show mercury?

Will the sun's full disk fit in a DSLR frame on a 1200mm telescope? Cheers

So in this diagram, for Alicante, I must add 1 hour to the times shown? TIA

Thanks. We're planning for the Mercury transit on Monday... Alicante is 1 hour ahead of London, so Alicante is UT? IOW the times I see as UT on the transit diagrams e.g. this one, are Alicante local time? Sorry, plain English to the rescue. I'm being yelled at in several different languages!

TIA

Hi everyone Looking reasonable in Alicante. Am thinking about a 6" refractor f8 so 1200mm focal length. Do we think this will work? No idea how to fix onto the sun at that fl without having plate solving. Trial and error? Exposures for a dslr? No idea! Any advice most gratefully received.

A marketing slogan came to mind, 'Turns a week long nightmare into a hobby' perhaps? And yes, I admit to being guilty of more than just a touch of envy; a 45 minute gap in the cloud indeed! Lovely image.

Hi everyone Not had the little 130 out for some time but this session gave me the chance to try out a cheepo non-branded cc. It plate solves to 585mm so gives a bit wider field than out of the box. The stars are not very good, not as well defined as with the -rather nice- gpu cc,, and the colour aberrations surrounding them are noticeable. So, wider field, worse colour, fat stars. You win some you lose some! ngc457, eos700d

Hi I don't think it's the tube material which matters. We found that the tube flex came from too short a distance between the tube rings. Replacing the existing dovetail mount side with a longer, wider plate than the flimsy affair which is usually supplied [1] and bolting an aluminium box section to rigidly tie the rings along the top of the tube tamed even our f3.9; spread the load along as much of the tube as possible. To eliminate what little flex and mirror movement which remains, you can use an OAG. HTH [1] e.g. the rings on our steel tube sw-250 are 50cm apart.

Hi everyone. A mini double-cluster. This is at 585mm focal length. Gotta try this with longer. May have 1200mm for the weekend. Not very nice stars; really clear last night but noticed them bouncing around rapidly during focusing. Difficult with the Bahtinov mask to nail the centre spike it was so bad and phd2 giving me high minimum movement suggestions. Probably 'rescued' too much by Siril's deconvolution. But enough excuses... tell me about the colour or anything else I could improve. Thanks for looking. 700d @ ISO800, eq6, t7m, 90 minutes

Hi. yeah, that's unfortunate. You lost a lot of the galaxy, but I found recently that even with a dslr I was going to have to mosaic or get a telescope with a shorter focal length. I combined the frames in Siril and had a quick poke at the colour. Is this closer? Cheers and HTH

sw130, 700d, eosOAG, t7m, eq6, ~2h light frames, flat frames, bias frames, ISO800, no filter, EKOS, Siril, Ubuntu. Cheers, clear skies and HTH.

PM sent. Thanks

Hi everyone Forgot this was so big. Even at 580mm it runs out of the frame. It looks as though 400mm would do it justice but unfortunately ATM we have only an achromatic refractor to cover that focal length; maybe worth a go as there doesn't seem to be too much which would suffer blue fringes. I also had a quick look at making a mosaic, but the matching from one frame to the next looks difficult. If I did go for it, I was thinking two frames with the camera turned 90º. But may just be lazy see if I can beg a 400mm refractor for the night. Anyway, it was good to see some of those m33 style blue nodule/dots appear in the outer arms, something I've not got before. Any thoughts on the colour, mosaics or ideas for improvement most gratefully received. eos700d @ ISO800

Hi. Nice image. Deconvolution may bring some more detail. Otherwise as you've already guessed, it may be better to use a longer lens, say 300mm. Cheers and HTH.

Hi Park the mount and purge the mount configuration from the telescope tab as below. restart kstars and you should now be able to slew anywhere. If that fails, move the database at ~/.local/kstars/userdb.sqlite to say, userdb.sqlite.old and restart kstars. If that fails, repeat the above and also remove the EQMOD configuration at ~/.local/.indi Otherwise I'm sure the devs would gladly teamview in and fix it. Good luck.

Hi everyone Not sure about the simultaneous. Get the centre spot of the primary coinciding with the cross hairs of the sight tube by adjusting the secondary only. Then leave it. Now -the nice easy bit- tweak the primary. But hey, tell me I'm doing it wrong! Cheers and HTH **edit: +1 for losing the laser;)

Siril with a final colour check in GIMP-2.10. HTH

Oh dear, yes. I agree. But it gets worse; my gf says it looks like 'Christmas'. Help!

Hi everyone What do we think to this? Dunno how to describe it. To me it's too 'busy'. Stretched too much? It's 24 frames from around 04:00. Not sure if more frames would make much difference. The sky was super clear and seeing so steady the mount was around 0.5rms so can probably eliminate atmospheric condition issues. Thanks for looking and all comments most gratefully received. 700d @ ISO800

Hi everyone Disappointed with this. I think that unless you do hours on end night after night, this is never going to reveal much. But would you just look at those blue stars:) Anyway, thanks for looking and do please post your version if you've had a go; can't find much on this at this sort of scale. 700d: 2h @ ISO800

Hi everyone I've been trying this one for ages and maybe I'm getting somewhere at last. In my quest for blue stars, I had to go really in-your-face on this one. Any less and they turned white. Anyway, this is what Siril's -rather nice- photometric colour calibration gave me, so I'm reasonably confident it's at least in the right direction. Maybe a lower ISO would help? Any comments, particularly on the colour, most welcome. Cheers , clear skies and thanks for looking. 700d @ ISO800