Anthonyexmouth

Hi, been away from imaginig for a mere 6 months but forgotten the little I had learnt.

Could someone take a look at this and advise me how to best process this. At the moment I only have DSS, APP and GIMP. Can't remember how to remove the light pollution or gradient. 

Many thanks. Also, any advice on what is wrong with the data itself would be appreciated. Can provide all raw data if anyone is bored. lol

Autosave.tif

Yeah, M10 1.5 pitch

Is it worth running APT with the new native driver support or is it best to stick with the ASCOM drivers for the 294mc pro?

17 minutes ago, vlaiv said:

I think you have a light leak.

You should not have such gradient on your dark, and there are hints of dust shadows, although, depending on type of light leak - I would not expect them to look like that.

It looks like it might be front side IR leak perhaps? If scope cover is plastic, and plastic can sometimes be transparent to IR wavelengths. This would also mean that you did not have UV/IR cut filter in place when you took your darks.

In any case - making sure you don't have a light leak would be first priority. I can't explain that brighter patch, but let's see if you have a light leak issue and if solving it solves other issues.

the l pro filter should have IR cut. hopefully it's light leak. i cut a perfect circle of 70mm celotex to fill the dew shield and then the cap went on top. I'll shoot some more later when its dark and hopefully won't eat into my imaginig time too much. 

thanks for your reply . 

Hi, just re-doing my calibration frames as over the 6 month enforced break something has gone wrong. 

just taking some darks in APT and noticing a smudge/smear pattern in the top left quadrant. Can anyone here with more knowledge take a look at a frame and let me know if these are being captured ok.

Thanks

D_2020-03-25_15-16-13_240s_294mc__Color_G1_OFS22.fit

ok, so it's been 6 months since i too the cover off my imaging rig in the garden, got 5ish hours last night, 40 mins on the Flame and the rest on M101. Now when I came to stack it seems somethings happened in the intervening months and my darks/flats and darkflats don't match my lights i've just taken. APT is now recording the gain as 1.0 and when stacked with calibration frames its gone all purple without calibration frames the colour seems fine. This is cropped a little and stretched in Gimp just to show  the colour is ok. 

Any ideas what I might have done or forgotten to do? 

Setup as in the sig, capturing with APT and stacking with DSS. 

9 hours ago, SimM said:

Why do you need a usb serial cable? My HC has a USB connector - so any old "printer" USB cable would connect PC to HC. There is a Direct or Passthru mode in the HC to control the mount.

It's much better to connect directly to the mount. minimise connections and cables. 

looks ok, are you switching the mount on when its in the home position. whatever position the mount is in when its switch on it assumes it is in the scope pointing towards the pole star and weights down. 

21 hours ago, BungleHilton said:

So had a clear few hours last night to try have a play. All set up. Polar aligned. Fires up the laptop and all programmes. Mount connected to it all. Chooses moon as object to slow to before doing alignments. As thought I'd see how far out it was. The mount set off. Ended facing total opposite direction. 

check your lat/lon in eqmod. make sure longitude is negative if you're west of grenwich. also make sure the mount is in the home position BEFORE you switch it on. 

13 minutes ago, tommyr said:

It's aimed at people who want an easy to set up and use telescope that allows them to see deep sky objects easily. That's the main objective of the scope.

As you know most deep sky objects are not easy targets in small scopes. Especially with all the light pollution now a days. They are nothing more than faint blobs of shades of gray light. Not very impressive to a lot of people. 

I would not recommend it to newbies. It IS expensive and if I had to pay $3,000 I would have not joined the kickstarter for it. I paid $1,299. I typically recommend an 8" dob. to newbies. 

There you go, at that price for the release model it probably wouldn't have got negative attention . 

2 minutes ago, tommyr said:

It's not for you, move on. The hate for this scope is beyond stupid. I've been using scopes for over 50 years, I like this concept. I also still love/use "regular" scopes. You will see more scopes like this in the future and they will get better and cheaper priced. Get used to it. Or don't.

 

The "hate" as you call it is kinda valid. I agree, the concept is good but the execution is poor and expensive. It needs to be much cheaper considering it's very limited uses, it's a 3 grand dust collecter after someones seen a few bright nebula and nothing else.

Who would you say this is aimed at?

could you in good faith recommend a newbie spend 3K on this? I truly hope not.  

3 minutes ago, tommyr said:

You need to do more research. The tripod is solid. It's not thin and shaky. Unless there's gale force winds the tripod will hold it's own. And again, no one ever said the scope would give views that rival traditional AP set ups.

I can see the pictures and iv'e used enough tripods to know what i'm looking at, legs are thin. It just screams of a college electronics project. great proof of concept but zero real world use. 

Who is it aimed at?

1. Newbies, well they won't be spending 3k on a scope that has very limited use if they've done any research

2. experienced users, Well they would/should know better

3. outreach, refer back to 2.

EV is great for outreach but not in this form, much better with a scope they can look at but do the viewing on a laptop screen, even a proper tripod doesn't want to be touched when imaging. 

+1 for sharpcap, it's just as accurate as a polemaster that is 27 times more expensive. Also, once you start using sharpcap you never have to get on your knees to look through the polar scope again. 

7 minutes ago, tommyr said:

The scope has been used in Las Vegas with decent results. Also San Francisco and NYC just to name a few places with bad LP. 

only seen it pointed at M42 in light polluted areas and that target is super bright. and even then it wasnt looking great. As for the tripod being solid, well maybe when it's at its lowest postion but those legs at full extension look pretty thin and shaky. 

19 minutes ago, Tphillips777 said:

Thanks for sharing. I am a kickstarter backer and eagerly await mine to be delivered. For me, the compactness and portability along with the ability to use it in light polluted areas is what sold me on it. However, I have no expectations that it will replace all other telescopes. I still have 2 others and have plans for more. Time, money and space being my limiting factors, the eVscope should be a nice interim solution. 

ability to use it in light polluted areas? This is likely to be rubbish in light polluted areas. 

14 hours ago, Peter77 said:

I second the recommendation regarding the 115mm triplet apo from TS Optics, the one reduced in price.

I did a quite thorough review with lots of pics over at "Member equipment reviews".

Have a look there and see what you think. The scope is high class. I added some eyepiece projection shots as well.

Bought it for dual purpose as both visual and later on when I've gathered some more gear, also for AP. But it is a very good scope for the money. €999 for an apo with that aperture is hard to beat unless you go secondhand I think.

Have a look also at Astrobin for shots taken with the scope. That's what I did before I decided. Also: Even though it is reduced in price, it has full warranty. That's what finally made me click the buy button. I did not regret it.

 

/Peter

I was just looking to get advice/ideas for now and save up but i'm trying to pluck up the courage and pull the trigger on this one and put it on my credit card. i like the idea of the flexibility of using a FF/R and also a straight flattener when I need its native focal length. 

13 minutes ago, newbie alert said:

As a  esprit 80 user I can highly recommend it... far better than the previous 80mm scope I was using..

I take it's the focuser slip that's grating? Have you seen Dion (Astromany shed) on u tube showing how you can get a better purchase on the drawtube..

yeah i've seen that, It's been a good scope and I'll keep it but the shift when locking is annoying and who doesn't want an excuse for a new scope. 

That TS 115 is very tempting. I like the idea of having a straight flattener as well as the 0.75. would give a little range to it when needed.

ED80 is in the right range but i'm fed up with the focuser, to upgrade the focuser is going to be £250 and I think that money might be better spent on getting a nice triplet.

The Esprit 100 would be nice but out of my price range at the moment. 

Well, this year i'm gonna treat myself to a new frac to replace my SW ED80. Options so far are the WO GT91, TS 80mm Triplet and maybe the Esprit 80, but at 400mm i think thats a bit wide for me, unless i can be swayed. I'll be using it with an ASI294MC and cant afford to change that at the moment.  Would have preferred something closer to 550-650mm but nothing around near that. 

Any owners wanna jump in with an opinion? Also want one compatible with the ZWO focus motor if possible. 

Ctrl+Shift+1 will sync the scope , every time you sync it works with EQMOD to do its own star alignment/updates its position. after a couple it should be pretty spot on.

4 minutes ago, BungleHilton said:

Not tried yet. But next question. Without that hand control. How do you do a star alignments? 

Well, thats when we move into plate solving. APT integrates plate solving well. It's "fairly" straight forward to set up and once you have you'll never look back

There is a sync command in stellarium somewhere. send the mount to the star you want, if its off then maually move it with the ascom controls and when on target sync. 

its worth the effort to get plate solving sorted though. its in the point craft settings in APT. Even points you to the download locations too. 

2 minutes ago, BungleHilton said:

How do I get the new version? I just downloaded it a few weeks ago now. 

just go to the site and download the latest one. it's updated all the time. always worth checking. 

47 minutes ago, BungleHilton said:

I click ok on those settings. Then get this window. 

 

You need the latest version of Stellarium. that looks like an older one. you need to see this on your screen, the ASCOM option.

2 minutes ago, mark skelton said:

I've gone back out to scope, yes the baud is 9600 stellarium -latest. This time I laptop connected to scope started apt and connected to scope. with stellarium I right clicked and run as administrator started it up then nclicked on scope connect. this time both APT and stellarium are now connected. Now when I'm on stellarium I sellect a star say Arcturus (n.w.) and select centre on the mount move on both axis to centre on the star no problems there. When I do the same with APT then select goto the mount slews to arcturus and stellarium does show the mount centred on the star.. so looks like all sorted now thanks for the help.

These things sometimes need admin mode to get the config sorted, mostly only needs it as a one shot deal. Try unticking the admin mode and see if it still works. 

3 minutes ago, BungleHilton said:

Once I get to the screen you show i click configure. Then get this screen. What do I need to do then? 

scroll down the left hand side to telescope control and click load at startup, restart and then go to configure