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For sure. That’s exactly what I experienced when needing to send my 10Micron to Italy. Long transit time, quick fix. It was as trouble free as could be expected.

Adrian, Great to hear some feedback from another user of both mounts. I didn’t really cover performance of the mounts because really, they’re identical. The only exception might be carrying capacity. Both will handle my largest telescope (EdgeHD 11). I can only perform a model with about 50 points in my location due to my home blocking most of the south view. But with a 50 point model both mounts perform to around .25-.3 RMS error. I agree there are plenty of modeling options for 10Micron mounts. MountWizzard is my favorite by far. But I just find it strange that no modeling software comes with the mount nor do they officially recognize any specific software for users to use. Even though AP has Paid Ray to make APCC, it’s considered a first party software, and comes with the mount.

Thank you. I've had validation from a few others that had similar experiences with service. A little bit surprising for a premium mount, but I guess you can't catch everything when these things aren't tested in the field as they come off the assembly line.

Hi All, I don't know how many across the pond consider AP mounts, but having recently purchased one to pair up with my 10Micron mount, I started getting asked what my thoughts were on the two. Suffice to say, they are both really good options, but if you were curious how they stack up from a service, hardware, and software standpoint, I put my thoughts down in a blog post. I tried to be fairly objective, so please let me know what you think.

I got an early look at the Mini and used the ASI2600 with mine. During higher speed capture (like taking flats or bias that were a fraction of a second, the Mini was able to write 6 out of 10 frames before it could send one over WIFI to be displayed on my iPad. So capture speed was not an issue. It's likely only a problem for planetary or solar where you want max video frame rates.

I shot this widefield image of the Wizard nebula with the SkyWatcher Esprit 100, and ZWO ASI294MM-Pro. I love this target. I've shot it before, but not wide field. There's a lot going on here, including a cool looking bow shock from the star in the lower left corner. There's a good amount of signal in each band. This process is SHO, with synthetic RGB stars made from a Ha, SII*.5+OIII*.5, OIII palette. Processed using a combination of tools, Photoshop, StarXterminator, Astro Pixel Processor, and PixInsight.

After reading through the thread I found it interesting that you all had settled on collimating on the sensor cover slip window reflection. In our tests through the Cloudy Nights thread we ended up collimating on the pixel spot closest to the cover slip and front window reflections. In tests, collimating on the furthest reflection resulted in 20% tilt, cover slip window resulted in 6% tilt, and the pixel nearest resulted in 1% residual tilt confirmed by CCDInspector.

Ah, yes! I'm familiar with Daniel's rig. He showed his progress in the cloudy nights thread that I mentioned. It was really helpful in understanding how to collimate. This is such a great community. So many good ideas. Fantastic setup by ollypenrice. I saw someone a few years ago make a similar version but used a glass table, and just set the camera on top just like you have. They did have to have a brace very similar to yours to keep the camera in position.

I've been meaning to write up the details on my camera sensor tilt rig for some time. Sensor tilt seems to have become a big issue over the years as the hobby has grown and QC issues coupled with mass produced cameras has lead to less than perfect sensor alignment in the cameras. Along with some folks on Cloudy Nights, and through an example presented by StarlightXpress, we undertook creating a collimation rig, and learned how to collimate our sensors for perfect orthogonality without having to use the stars at night. It's a very straightforward method, that you can do yourself in a few minutes. It takes collecting some easy to find parts from the hardware store, as well as a few accessories to put together the rig. Hope you all enjoy. You can find the full set of instructions at my website as they're too lengthy to detail here. Before adjustment (This is Caroline's Rose shot with an Esprit 100 and ZWO ASI2600MC-Pro camera before tilt adjustment. Note the tilt in the lower right corner.): After adjustment (This is Caroline's Rose shot with an Esprit 100 and ZWO ASI2600MC-Pro camera after tilt adjustment. Tilt completely removed. CCDInspector results show 1% residual tilt.):

I shot this over two nights as the cool front rolled into my home town this week. I managed to capture around 16 hours on this subject. I actually wanted more, but the third night sky wasn't cooperating with high altitude clouds that kept interrupting my images, so I tossed the whole night. I processed this as a standard SHO palette, but processed and incorporated the stars separately using a synthetic RGB mixture of HA, SII*.5+OIII*.5, OIII respectively into RGB channels. Only very slight tweaks are needed with saturation and a + b CIE Component. One day I'll take the time to write this up somewhere, but it has become my preferred method of adding RGB stars without actually going through the time required to shoot them. In my light polluted skies, you need more than half an hour into RGB to get decent color, so I opt to use this instead. I think the color turned out especially nice in this one. Astrobin link: https://www.astrobin.com/omxnk5/ SkyWatcher Esprit 100 ZWO ASI294MM-Pro Rainbow Astro RST-135E Astrodon 5nm filters

I'll second Planetary System Stacker. The developer has had direct feedback from Emil who works on Autostakkert, and the algorithms are very close now, there is little to no discernible difference to the same processing done in both applications. And I believe in the latest versions of PSS wavelet processing has been added which you need Registax on PC to do. So now it can all be done in a single application.

Wow, really nice. Love the coloring.

This little scope has been a lot of fun to image with. This image was 18 total hours from bortle 7/8 skies. ASI1600MM-Pro, Astrodon 5nm filters, and a Celestron AVX mount were used. I processed this in the SHO palette. I processed the stars separately in the HSO palette because the colors more closely map to RGB, then using StarNet and PixelMath, added them into the final image. Cheers! Andrew

Here's Mars on this scope: And Jupiter:

Yeah, I really think the performance of this scope is underrated. I've shot some great images of Jupiter and the red spot, which I wasn't so sure you could resolve well with a 5" but it did.

Shot this with my Celestron C5 Spotting Scope. Best 15% of 3500 frames using a ZWO ASI462MC camera. Autostakkert, with drizzle 1.5x and wavelets processing in Registax 6. Wavelets processing is some serious magic.

One note about your comment on flats. Turn on your DSLR histogram function if it has one. This will display a histogram like I show above in Photoshop on the back of your camera after each capture. Make sure the histogram (the hump of light) is bright enough that it falls squarely between the left and right sides of the histogram frame without being cut off on the left or right side. Alternatively, you can load your flat into Photoshop, and look at the histogram there to see the same thing.

Lots of good detail! Color balance is definitely off. So, good that you could see that. I took the liberty (hopefully you don't mind) of pulling this image into Photoshop and looking at your individual color channels. As you can see in the histogram, there are different amounts of Red Green and Blue, and they don't align. Aligning the channels using the levels tool creates a neutral black. This brings the colors of the galaxy back in line, closer to where it should be. Depending on the program you use to process you should be able to achieve better color correction with the built in tools. Here's your current image with the unaligned color channels. Best shown in the top histogram where you can see red, green, and blue not overlapping. Here's a version where I simply aligned each channels histogram using the levels tool in Photoshop. Now you have a neutral black, and galaxy colors appear more correct. In any image processing program from here, you would isolate the galaxy with a mask, so that you can modify it, without changing the neutrality of the black background. You would then enhance the color of the galaxy through saturation and other color correction measures to get it to a more expected result. Hope that helps.

Really amazing!

I’ve been imaging with my EdgeHD 11”. I have the low profile Edge Moonlite focuser. This allows you to lock down your primary mirror, eliminating mirror flop, and use an OAG for guiding. You’ll need an extremely sensitive guide camera, as you’ll often have only very dim guide stars. It’s not always the case, but a lot of galaxy targets that are not in the milky way will have less stars to guide on.

I've never owned an EQ6-R, but did have a CGX, and used it with my Edge HD 11. It can certainly handle the weight. My rig ran around 35 lbs. The focal length is the killer, as these mounts are cheaply made. I consider that I got a pretty decent CGX. and I guided the EdgeHD 11 reduced with the .7x reducer to around 1960mm. My guiding was sub arc second often .4-.8. But it was always worse in RA. Typical guiding would be .4 DEC RMS and .8 RA RMS. At this focal length, you could see the stars were a little oval. If you were running it with a hyper star, I doubt you would see the oval stars. They would look round. You could probably never reliably run the Edge 11 at native focal length (2800mm) with either of these mounts, as all imperfections of the mount would show in your images. Wind gusts would move the mount...dragging cables move the mount. so keep that in mind. You need a tidy setup, well balanced, with nothing to interfere at longer focal lengths. Hopefully that helps with your decision.

Thanks all!

I shot this over 6 nights. We had an amazing go of clear nights in a row. Now it's all rain until next week. But while it was clear, I managed two nights per filter on my newest scope. A total of ~ 760 3 min images. I think the total imaging time was 37.8 hours. Shot it through my newest scope the RedCat 51mm. It did well, but could have used a belt focuser. I managed to get one together from Moonlite, but only just after imaging this. The scope was able to hold focus a good bit of the night, but the quality curve looked like a swan dive towards the end as the scope lost focus at the end of the night each night. I got out my old trusty AVX to manage the aiming parts of the setup. Guided by an old Orion SSAG I had lying around and a recently acquired ZWO Mini guide scope since it matches the RedCat so well. But I think I'm going to need to swap out the guide cam for something with smaller pixels. Overall though, it worked. Main camera was ZWO ASI 1600 MMC. I used 5nm Astrodon filters.

My Redcat just came in this week. Had it out for the first time last night. I've been following the issues here and on Cloudy nights. Just wanted to add another another reference point. This is about 6 hours of HA. There's very slight coma at the corners. FWHM and Eccentricity look ok. I'd be happy to share data if someone wants a closer look. The larger stars have a very strange look to them, like pinched optics. Someone over on Cloudy Nights thought it might be an internal reflection. I've used this exact imaging train on other scopes and not seen the issue, so I suspect the problem lies in the scope itself.

I get between 1.8-2.4 on my 102mm refractor. On my 6" RC I get between 4-6, though I feel like I've seen lower, I just don't always watch it that closely. A lot of it is seeing dependent.