Lead_weight

On 08/01/2023 at 09:01, Peds said:

On the topic of AP customer service in the UK, I have been very happy so far. One of the Eagle tripod feet for my Mach2 arrived damaged. AP promptly sent a replacement to me via Michael from Baader. Both companies have always been a pleasure to deal with.

Whilst I suspect an issue with my Mach2 would be more troublesome to deal with (if shipping back to the US for repair was required), I’m sure in the end I would get the same customer satisfaction, with perhaps slightly longer transit times.

 

Pedro

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. 

On 08/01/2023 at 07:27, CCD Imager said:

Hi Andrew

You must be the unluckiest astro imager in the world! Mounts from two prestigious manufacturers and both had problems requiring returning to base. You could probably count on one had how many mounts each company have had to repair at base.

I have owned 2 AP mounts over the last 24 years and currently own the GM2000

Strictly speaking, in the UK at least, the Mach 2 should be compared with the GM2000 where both cost around £14K. The GM1000 is much less at 10K.

The support for 10 micron in the US is sketchy to say the least, only one guy? What happens when the poor overworked fella needs a 2 week holiday? But, its just the same for users of AP mounts in the UK, zero support here, any issues and off it trots back to the US. Any issues I have had and a phone call or email to Baader and they respond very quickly and when I had an issue with the knob on the mounting plate, a replacement arrived within days. Michael Risch is your main man and Thomas Baader also communicates. The 10 micron forum is awash with information and very knowledgeable people, response to questions occur within hours and will solve the majority of users questions. Baader in Europe front any issues with 10 micron mounts and if need be they ship them back to 10 micron for repair.

The clutch knobs on the GM1000 are an issue and poor design, one of its shortcomings, but the bigger mounts knobs are much better. The knobs on the GM2000 work perfectly well, I had one AP knob finger break on me, due to its shape and maybe after a few years of use, became more brittle.

The thru the mount cabling is a nice feature of the Mach 2, better suited to the mobile imager. As my mount is permanently mounted with good cable management, it isn’t really an issue. And the 10 micron mount head can be split into 2 components for easier transport and assembly in the field. I can attest to this having taken it to Kelling star party on several occasions.

I personally find the handset interface on a PC very useful, you could always use the real thing and there are many mount control packages to control the mount if desired. When powering up the mount, I always use the desktop keypad to unpark and slew to my first object, great too for looking at modelling data.

I do think that calling third party software for modelling "a bit shocking" surprising. The truth is that there are several such packages available, I know of four, giving you options and in some, with quite comprehensive tools. These were developed by third parties in direct liaison with Baader, just as AP has done with Ray Gralak for APCC. In reality that is no different to 10 micron. So there is no concern about software creators for 10 micron modelling software, dont think they will get bored or retire! Besides, this question has already been answered, sadly the author of Model Maker died at an early age, so Baader collaborated with other software engineers to develop new software, whilst you could still use Model Maker. And likewise, heaven forbid, that Roland left us, will AP become kaput? 10 micron happens to be a much larger company.

Your focus seems to be on physical attributes and software, I was hoping you would compare how the mounts perform, for example, pointing accuracy, periodic error, telescope capacity, backlash, all measured with data and graphs.

My impression is that the Mach 2 is a superb modern mount capable of unguided imaging, but its cost here in the UK is similar to the GM2000 that is larger and has a bigger payload capacity. As 10 micron support in the US is limited, you would be better off with the Mach 2 and conversely, here in Europe, we would fare better with 10 micron.

 

Adrian

 

 

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.

On 31/10/2022 at 09:21, powerlord said:

hmm, Id say thats debatable. For stuff like focusing, PAing, etc where you want to be taking lots of images, every image on something like an asi2600 will take an age to download every time. And for storage too if you want to use removable storage it would be painful.

 

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.

4 hours ago, tooth_dr said:

Nicely written up Andrew.  Your rig looks very similar to Daniel Sundström's who shared his video on here, which was then subsequently developed into a simpler rig, that a fair few of us (icluding myself) went out and copied!

Adjust your CCD or CMOS astronomy camera tilt during the day with a laser pen

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:

On 02/04/2021 at 15:57, Luke said:

What a beautiful image and lovely processing! I don't think I've seen a C5 in the flesh. I got a CG5 mount that kind of came with an almost free C6 once (it didn't cost much more than just buying the mount) and it was a lovely telescope. I underestimated what a cracking scope it was. I'd love to have a look through a C5 one day.

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 for the kind comments. I don't like to overcook the image, so a light processing will do.  

My M31. Shot over 3 nights. Only 11 total hours. LRGB only with Astrodon filters, ZWO ASI1600MM-C camera, and the WO Redcat.

4 hours ago, Buzzard75 said:

Tell me more about this Moonlite focuser. I'm having difficulty nailing fine focus with the helical focuser on the RedCat. Is this a home built rig using one of their focus motors and a belt or do they actually sell one to use specifically with helical focusers?

If you send them an email telling them you have a RedCat, they’ll email you back a word doc showing their camera lens focus system. (It’s not on their website.) That’s essentially what it is. It comes with the focus motor, belt, and mounting bracket. I did have to change the dovetail to the 11” ADM vixen dovetail with adjustable mounting holes. This allowed me to align the belt with the focus barrel. Also, focus tension is very tight, and initially the belt slipped when reversing direction. The RedCat has a focus tension adjuster at the front of the focus barrel that needs to be loosened. 

I've really taken a liking to this little scope. I think it's reached its final form. ZWO ASI1600MM-C main camera, EFW8 with Astrodon 5nm narrowband and LRGB filters, ZWO Mini guide scope, ZWO ASI120MM Mini guide cam, Baader Sky Surfer V red dot finder, Moonlite focuser, and CGX mount.

I've spent some time imaging the North American and Pelican nebula, as well as the Veil nebula. Had about 6 clear nights in a row. I had roughly 16 hours total on NA nebula in SHO pallet, and I did the Veil on the last night, only 3 hours each channel for bi-color (the OIII channel was slightly out of focus, hence the larger stars in the image). I plan on going back and adding more data for the Veil, and intend on replacing the out of focus frames.