dwayne dias

Hi once again... After spending a year with the mount i built i managed to gather some info about go to systems. I am in my final year of mechanical engineering and will be displaying the mount as my project....but will b dding a go to system to it. I will b getting help from the information technology team to programme the mount. What i learnt is that you can control the telescope motion through stellarium using a raspberry pi microprocessor, a bluetooth dongle and potentiometers for motion sensing. I seen this video on youtube and will share tge link...if someone could rell me if this same setup would work on an equitorial mount??? For example...can the alt and az co ordinates be swapd with tge co ordinates of RA abd DEC...??? You can find the video on youtube...by searching Telescope + raspberry pi + stellarium =itelescope

Since my mount is not that accurate and just works using an RA motor...so it's tough to take longer exposures. I do 20 to 30 sec subs. But 90% of them get stacked in dss. May b I should try 1 min...but I'll chase to throw away most of the subs.

Which software do u use then...???

I had started of with the same video...haha... Forest Tanaka explains everything really clearly.

For now I use dss and lightroom

I had a doubt though.....suppose I achieve 3 hours of exposure with 20sec frames and stack them ...would it differ from that of 3 hours of 3 to 5 min frames...??? Or will the images differ...???

Haha...at some point I too was in this position. I had to modify my telescope. I had no idea about astrographs and ended up buying an 8inch dob. No small eq mounts can take the weight of this scope. A heavy one would cost me a bomb of about 2000 to 3000$ plus shipping. So i just decided to build a mount and it does a good job at tracking . You can image with the etx90 too. Just that you will get shorter exposures. Hopefully at some point we can blow up cash on expensive equipment..

Typically if u need a good shot...u would require some expensive gear. Or if u manually track and guide..u can get shorter exposures of 20 to 30 secs. That's what I do. You already have a good DSLR to do the job. As long as your mount is polar aligned well. You should get good images. I built an eq mount at home that just has a motor on the RA. But I get pretty decent images.

Haha...I have added more frames now..and will b adding more exposure tonight......should land up with 30 to 40 mins of exposure finally.

Yes...outskirts... So its pretty dark out here. Specially winters.

My last nights session seemed to b pretty good. Managed to get 13 mins of exposure and i plan on addinh more exposure time.

I just checked the settings . yes I can. Thank u so much for that....

I do use a trigger remote. Although my prime adaptor is a bit faulty. That may be the cause.

Oh...get it. No wonder. Its probably when the DSLR shutter opens and closes there's a slight shake. Probably need to get that problem sorted.

Haha....yea it works perfectly. 144:1 ratio seemed to be right. It takes the load well. Just that I'm having issues with DSS. It doesn't detect many stars. Just that when I reduce the threshold below 10 the number of stars increase a bit. It just detects a dozen or so. Sometimes it just 2 to 5 stars that get detected.