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The Takumar eos infinity is slightly displaced from the physical stop. Assuming you have a well fitting M42 to eos adapter with the correct 1mm optical path but without a pin retaining flange: using a bright-ish white star at 10x live view, move away from the hard stop until the red halo just disappears. If you're not going to use the lens for terrestrial photography, you can loosen the focus barrel, twist, and re-tighten to go way past where the physical stop allows. That way gives you a larger oscillation either side of infinity. HTH

Hi We're not fans of the 'L-e*' filters. Unless you're going to split channels, we find a simple UHC gives you a far more interesting colour whilst still controlling the stars. Even then, a UHC channel split -e.g. to HOO- works just as well. Here is a UHC example. No channels; just stacked as a colour image. Cheers and HTH

Hi This looks like a good target for red in NBAccents. It is a nice filter. We find the UHC does a similar job, especially HOO. Cheers

OK. So, as the 0.63's 105mm isn't critical, I'd go for plumber's teflon thread tape. Or, as it seem to be working OK, just leave it? HTH

Then I must have misunderstood. My flat-frame method is used to align the prism with the long axis of the sensor. English is very much my second language. Sorry!

Hi Mark the long edge of the sensor orientation along the back of the camera; using the writing can be misleading. Set the prism roughly parallel and take a flat frame. Push the prism stalk inwards a mm or so at a time taking flat frames as you go. Stop when you see the shadow of the prism. It's now easy to rotate the stalk to make the shadow parallel to the edge of the frame. Finally move the prism away from the edge until the shadow just disappears without introducing further rotation. Get it somewhere close, but don't stress over it as you may need to rotate it again to find guide stars. HTH

Hi Skateboard shops have them. 689Z.

Is this the sort of thing you're after? Sorry, not a very imaginative rendering. Oh, and even managed to get the stars behind the galaxies. DUH! 1-106 (1)_01_stereo.html

Your 290 has a bin2 in firmware which combined with a bigger prism, should get you there. Failing that, the next step up would be a 174 which begins to get €silly, so gotta be worth trying the 290 first. Good luck.

Hi Not sure where you are but you may not have the astronomical darkness necessary for faint stuff. Add to that light pollution and I think you've done extremely well, certainly a lot better than we were able to get. Not sure either which is the 8se model, but we tried everything with an old orange tube Celestron 8-something; with and without reducer, with and without oag. 105mm, 85mm, Focus lock. No focus lock... It was great for looking at Saturn and drew frequent 'wows' when looking at craters on the moon, but for deep sky photography...? We gave up. If we have the seeing to support this amount of focal length, we use a 6" f8 Newtonian. They're cheap, don't need a corrector and about the same focal length as your 6.3 Celestron but with clean-contrasty images. Our current favourite for galaxies is a GSO 203mm f5, which is not that much more expensive but only 1000mm focal length. TBH, if you have enough data, the focal length doesn't seem to make that much difference. Cheers and HTH

Hi Good effort. 600D, so ISO800. Take flat and bias frames but lose the dark frames. Otherwise, just keep adding and stacking. The more frames you have, the better the image will get and the easier it will be to process. Cheers

You can get it perfect by loosening the three grub screws on the silver collar. Wiggle until you have the donuts perfectly stacked. Re-tighten them whilst hand holding the position you found. Cheers

? There are hundreds thousands of them. Here are a few of the brighter ones:

A separate power supply is always a good idea. Otherwise, are you sure are there are no external sources of interference? Air conditioning, refrigerator, water thermostat, bird scarer...

An aluminium box section is fine, as is a narrow dovetail plate. So long as it's rigid. Whatever you have lying around. Go for functionality rather than good looks.

You need to stack with pixel rejection. Siril has many options: Here are your aligned frames showing the walking pixels:

StarTools, but we'd recommend using it -or any other denoise algorithm- ONLY as a last resort, and even then, sparingly. Far better to control the noise by having more data. For this target, no. You need all the light you can get.

Nice. A few ideas: Fit a rigid rail to tie the top of rings. Mount the guide telescope to that. Black shower cap. Balance: Rotate the whole tube in the rings ~180º so that the camera is toward the ground. Cables: yeah. A nightmare. The best we've done so far is Velcro at a fixed position on the side of ra. Still thinking... Lose the finder; plate solve. Cheers and HTH

Hi For only 1 hour, very good. The best way to lose the noise would be to take frames only when its dark and take loads more of them. Dither between frames and stack using a clipping algorithm. Or -and we don't recommend this- just denoise it: Cheers and HTH.

That's fine. Post the phd2 log if you like.

EQMOD under windows defaults to 0.1; make sure the guide rate is set at at least 0.5.

Hi I doubt the graph corresponds to the image, but who cares? Look at the image, not the graph! For such a short length of time, it's an excellent shot, with nice stars which are free from the usual skywatcher diffraction spikes and Baader cc edge abberations. You have a well collimated, adjusted and tweaked 130pds there. Like it. Cheers

Exactly. Look at the images, not the tilt graphic. Just convince yourself I never mentioned it and you'll be be fine!

A very old eq6. 2004 I think.

Yes, looking good. Don't be tempted to 'fix' it beyond this. It's already fixed!