ngwillym

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SWMBO will be in bed by 10pm - that should give me a couple of hours at least

I've got a couple of these on my SCT &Apo. I was under the impression that they were for SCT's and refractors only. The guys at Pegasus are extremely helpful, so just use email or their online chat to check with them directly. Neil

I've got the Pegasus Focuscube - which is a newer version just has all the electronics in one place (one on my C11 and another on my 127mm APO), - take a look here: http://astro58.wixsite.com/havenobservatory/focuscube Regards Neil

You might find the tables in this:- https://www.cloudynights.com/topic/616524-sub-exposure-tables-for-the-zwo-asi183mm-and-qhy183m-and-colour-versions/?hl=+asi +183 a useful starting point Regards Neil

According to the Edge HD white paper, page 15, for the C11, optimal back focus distance is 146mm. See https://s3.amazonaws.com/celestron-site-support-files/support_files/edgehd_whitepaper_final.pdf. Neil

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!