Demonperformer

Hi, BradO, and welcome to SGL.

We;'ve all done silly things ...

As Geoff says, your budget would help. Don't worry ... you will find us very efficient at spending your money

Enjoy the journey.

Hi, Space admirer, and welcome to SGL.

I'm guessing when you talk about "magnitudes" you are referring to different eyepieces (magnifications?). This would certainly rule out it being a problem with a particular eyepiece. My first thought is that something has gone wrong with the collimation of the scope. Your manual will have instructions on the precise adjustments necessary for your scope model.

Enjoy the journey.

I have one of these (although not used since I got the neq6 working). The only thing I found to help was to hang a "weight" (aka bag of dirt) from under the tray bit. This lowers the centre of gravity and helps a bit ... not a particularly big bit, but noticeably, so might be worth trying ...

51 minutes ago, alacant said:

How do you deal with such intense star fields?

start in the top left - one, two, three, ... this may take some time ...

The cluster is standing-out nicely against the background stars.

3 hours ago, MKHACHFE said:

Sorry for the rambling post

And that's when you are "speechless"

Seriously, I know where you are coming from ... Saturn tends to have that effect on people - certainly did on me.

A moment to treasure.

On 08/07/2019 at 08:35, Icesheet said:

If you have decided you ultimately want to shoot mono then my advice would be stick to your 60D at the moment.  Post images, get feedback and when you know you’ve reached the limit of what your camera can give you make the jump to Mono CMOS/ CCD.

I would agree with this. You say the quality of your images "feels horrible", but this could be down to any number of things, including your post-processing and no amount of new camera would solve that.

A copy of this book is worth getting. Tons of good advice from someone who actually does imaging. Posting images will enable more informed feedback/advice.

Hi, Brian, and welcome to SGL.

Determining the planetary positions in relation to each other is fairly straight forward. Take a look at this wikipedia page. But if you want to see them specifically from Polaris, you would also have to consider the inclination of the entire solar system in relation to your line of sight ... it might be seen edge-on (as the Jovian satellites from earth) or face-on (as the Uranian satellites from earth) or anywhere in between. I have no idea how what that angle is or how it would be calculated.

Enjoy the journey.

That is a very nice result. Well worth the time spent on it, I reckon.

Hi, DarkLane, and welcome (back?) to SGL.

The sky is very patient ... most of the things you could have seen between 2013 & now are still visible, so no worries there.

Enjoy the journey.

The main problem I can see is whether or not you will be able to achieve balance if you mount the tube too far forward. Adding additional weight to the back would solve that problem, but you don't want to overload the mount - apart for increasing the strain on the mechanics, this will tend to increase vibrations, which is the last thing you want when you are using eyepiece projection! IMO, these one arm mounts are not the most stable at the best of times ...

Great image of one of my favourite galaxies with its surroundings.

Great piece of outreach.

At the risk of going a bit off-topic, do some of us (DEFINITELY me included) get a bit obsessed about the horizon? I've just done a quick search and there are no fewer than 2630 UGC galaxies (so 14th mag or brighter) that pass within 10 degrees of my zenith. That is quite a lot of SN-hunting ground. So I guess that, even with horrible horizons and obscured views, given a permanent setup, I could still do something worthwhile (probably more so than what I do currently) and would never actually run out of work to do.

On 07/07/2019 at 16:07, dokeeffe said:

One way to confirm if something in an image is a hot pixel or cosmic ray strike would be to have 2 telescopes and 2 cameras pointing at the same target. Both scopes with synchronized exposures. Say constantly taking 1min exposures each aat the same cadence. If something odd appears in both images in the same ra-dec coordinates then there's a good chance its some transient event rather than noise.

If I could just get a second C11 and Atik383 I'd give it a shot 🙂

 

That has to qualify as one of the best excuses for buying additional gear I have ever encountered. Wonder how many of us would get it past the "expenditure officer" ...

But does the tube clamp separate from the arm? Genuinely don't know ... it might, but if so why ship the two bits attached? Strikes me as a bit inconvenient for packaging.

5 minutes ago, Gina said:

it's just storage (muddle) space

I have rooms like that all over the house ...

Always on the ball ... I've only just noticed this. Guess the fact that I didn't notice anything when it happened merely reflects the smooth way in which the changes took place. Other organisations could learn a lot from this ...

Looking at the manual, I would have serious doubts. It says that the OTA and arm come as a single piece. If they were seperable, I would think they would be shipped that way.

I have an STC duo, which has produced some promising results ... although I would not claim they can match individual filters & a mono camera. My main concern about these so-called tri-band filters is that it is not possible to separate the wavelengths. With the duo, the red channel is basically the Ha and the blue & green channels are the OIII (a bit simplistic, but you get my gist). Add SII, and that just mixes with the Ha on the red channel. Trying to separate them is like trying to turn green paint into blue paint and yellow paint ... AFAIK it cain't be done ... but I would love to be proved wrong!

Maybe I am being particularly dense, but if you are getting no image at all (from which I am assuming the black screen in the software does not change), how do you know that when you press the connect button, "the camera connects to the polemaster software"?

Is it worth trying it on another machine (even if that machine would never be useable for astro work) to see if you get the dark/light alternation as you cover/uncover the camera?

Hi, Chris, and welcome to SGL.

Enjoy the journey.

As long as it isn't instead of replacing the roof when water starts pouring through (something I had to do a few years back) or something similarly "important" ...

One way to get to a dark site ...

2 hours ago, Geoff Barnes said:

Who needs thousands of SpaceX satellites in the sky when you've got all those power lines cluttering your view, terrible!  

They actually aren't too much of a problem as they disappear during the stacking process.

Here's the view. South is just on the left edge of the big tree.