ngwillym

I stand corrected - its the Bigger, Better Faster Telescope prog on Nat Geo at 1am Neil

Weird - its deffo 1am on my Discovery HD channel

Its 1AM not PM on the 8th

Ah, got you. My problem was that EQMod seemed to lock up- usually while slewing, and the scope would continue to slew - only way out was to shut off mount and re-boot PC. Haven't had the problem since I got a new Nevada power supply (25a) Neil

I'd be thinking that 5a is a little tight for mount and dew heaters - plus whatever else you have connected - heaters can pull 2 - 5 amps and I'm sure the mount will use 3 -4 amps when slewing. Had a similar issue until I upgraded my power supply. Neil

+1 for Sharpcap

Check out the sharpcap support forums for full details (forum.sharpcap.co.uk) but:- I) Sharpcap communicates with PHD2 for guiding ii)Some people have written scripts to do sequencing that can be downloaded iii) connect your 1600 through native driver - more control I use it for Planetary, lunar, solar and Deep sky imaging Hope this helps Neil

As Vlaiv says - its a matter of finding a sweet spot for you and your kit - fundamentally its a trade off between sub-exposure length and stacking time. As an example, on myC11 @f/10 (2800mm) I can managed unguided exposures of ~20 secs, but I still expose each object for >60 mins - it just means my PC has to work harder stacking 100's of subs - but I'm used to that from my planetary & solar work where I regularly stack 1000's of subs. There are a couple of minor benefits of shorter subs -I) less subs are ruined by stray satellites/aircraft etc wandering through the frame ii) other frames affected by bad seeing can be ignored in the stacking process and iii) shorter subs can mean that stars don't saturate so easily. I use Sharpcap as my capture - it has a 'brain' function that measures the sky background, and using calibration data from the camera, does the maths for me, so it will tell me the minimum exposure needed for the shot noise to overcome the read noise. Neil

Not sure what scope you are using but I found that for my 127mm apo, I wound it all the way in and set the zero point, and all the way out was ~32000 steps - didn't take too long to get there, but for my C11 SCT, I initially wound the focusser all way in by hand, attached focus motor and set zero - but when winding focus out it got to well over 500000 steps and was still going!. Eventually, I gave up, disconnected motor, set approx. focus by hand, attached motor, wound it in ~50000 steps and set that as notional zero. Even so, with my setup some of the focus points, depending on the configuraton are still anywhere between 85000 and 250000 steps from notional zero!

check out this thread on Cloudy Nights https://www.cloudynights.com/topic/573886-sub-exposure-tables-for-asi-1600-and-maybe-qhy163/ Neil

As above. I swapped out my JMI DC Motor driven focuser on my C11 for a Pegasus Focuscube. It's so much easier to return to focussing positions for the various combinations of kit that I have - just type in the step number and press go. with the JMI - it became a matter of counting the seconds between focus points while pressing the correct forward or reverse button - and that also meant remembering where I had left it on the previous session - or not as was the usual outcome. I've also got on one my Apo. And I must say both the pre-sale and post-sale support from the guys at Pegasus has been exemplary Neil

thanks everyone. The reason for asking was that the 'optimised' LRGB filter set from ZWO are set up to provide almost equivalent exposures for each filter - but as you say - if I just image in clear - i.e.no filter - for L, then yes , the photon density is much higher, so I suppose the corollary is - why should I be using the L filter rather than just no filter at all?

I'm imaging with an ASI 1600MM-Cool and the ZWO mini filter wheel and their matched set of LRGB filters. Given that I take all my sub-exposures all at full resolution - i.e. NO binning, why should I bother with L as the RGB pretty much cover the whole of the visible spectrum anyway? This way I would save 25% of my imaging time. thanks in advance Neil

Just one thought from me. I've got an original 2.1m dome which was perfect for my fork mounted C11, both in alt-az and wedge mounted mode. I now have the C11 and a127mm apo mounted side by side on an EQ8. The problem being that I can still only use one scope for imaging at a time.- the imitation being due to the width of the slot. The geometry of the Eq8 with the side by side bar never allows both of the scopes to point through the slot at the same time.

I use RAW16 for DSO when stacking a smallish number of longer exposures and RAW8 for planetary/lunar/solar when stacking 100s if not 1000s of frames of very short exposure. In fact I use the 'Brain' function of Sharpcap to tell me when it is advantageous to use RAW16. Neil