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cathalferris

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Everything posted by cathalferris

  1. Alright - I know full well the quality of this is not great, but good enough considering how it was taken. I saw this morning the notification of a flare underway on the phone, so I decided to go and take a quick visual look with the PST to see what's going on. After a few min of admiring the fast-paced changes and showing the flare to hersefl, I decided to try using the phone camera to take a pic. The capture I got is afocal, with the Samsung S10 held in the Celestron XYZ phone adapter above a 13mm Ethos eyepiece, through my slightly rusty-of-EDF secondhand PST. Exposure details: pro mode, (ƒ/1.5 1/125 4.32 mm ISO800), Curves applied quickly in paint.net for aesthetics. I know full well the camera isn't perfectly on-axis or fully centered. Focus may not have been *perfect* either - and hard to get right with afocal autofocus phones, and seeing from the sunlit balcony is horrible it would appear. For some reason the afocal is significantly harder to get right than e.g. proper focal plane with one of my CCDs, but I could see that the flare was dissipating and I had to do this setup in a hurry. Maybe I should keep this set up and ready in case of a decent flare this week, given there's a fair amount of sunshine forecast and there's a good chance of more flares. I promise, the next capture will be significantly better!. Still, I managed to capture an H-Alpha flare fairly clearly, so happy enough really.
  2. I got my very rough looking CPC800 secondhand, as scrap/spares/repair, and with a few hours, some HCl, and a few replacement circuit boards for less than €100, I had a working SCT for the first time. I did notice the curved focal plane compared to the Newts and refractors I've been accustomed to. Combine that field curvature with Ethos eyepieces and I was having a bit of a hard time with the field edges. I figured "why not?" for the reducer, then I realised that the Celestron reducer also flattened the field - and that made things a fair bit easier for me. For the moment, I do keep the reducer in place. It seals the tube from dust while I have the scope indoors, and I do like the extra field of view available with my 1.25" eyepieces. It's not really worth my time and effort to put a 2" back on the scope, and getting the extra FOV is more useful than getting the higher magnification. For my balcony observing area, the effort in getting the SCT up and running of an evening is significantly less than getting e.g. my 8" Quattro on AVX working, and the SCT has an easier viewing angle and eyepiece location. When it's still of upper atmosphere then it's worth getting the 130m mapo out for the planet views. The ease of the SCT means I get more viewings than I otherwise would, and having the reducer on it is a low-cost (in time) benefit to me.
  3. I've not been terribly busy with the astro stuff in recent months, with various work-related things and also having moved to Switzerland from Ireland. I'm a bit out of practice too. Last week, one of my friends here in .ch gave me a lend of his Orion Atlas EQ-G mount, as he was not getting the use of it. I don't have the permission to disassemble it (yet) but I was asked to give it a bit of tune-up. My friend knows it'll get back to him in a better state than he got it in.. The mount was slightly binding on the worms, and needed a little bit of tuning with the worm positioning. Not that hard of a job. It's one of the mounts that has the 9-pin d-sub handset connectors, so it's not a new mount. I suspect it's one of the first European examples of the EQ-G. I have a Synscan handset in preparation for the arrival of my AZ-GTi, whenever TS get their shipments from China, and I obtained the right cable to attach the handset to the EQ-G, both to test the mount and to see if the handset actually worked or not.. I have also borrowed the EQ-DIR cable to see what all that fuss is about Last night, being a clear Saturday night, with a nice air temp of ~25-20 degrees, and few clouds, it all suggested that it might be a good night to spend out on the balcony with various bits of equipment. I chose the night to familiarise myself with the EQ-G, and also to try the TS130 triplet for planet video capture, see how it performed. I put the Pegasus Astro motorfocus on the TS130 Photoline triplet apo, and mounted that on the EQ-G. The main camera for imaging this evening wasthe second ASI224MC I have, with the help of a ZWO ADC and a 2x Televue barlow. I put my 50mm guidescope+ASi224 guidecamera on the apo to act as an electronic finder, as well as an ordinary right-angle finderscope. I did the polar align with the Synscan handset as I do not have view of the Pole from the balcony. (My AVX and Starsense plus the Celestron ASPA really helps out with that mount.) Setup was issue free. I used my Pegasus Astro Powerbox (v1) with the mount and scope, plugging both of my ASI224 cameras into the USB hub, as well as the EQDIR cable. I needed this box to run the motorfocuser. Seeing was moderately poor to be honest, not a great night to try and get useful planet data. Still, it was worth setting stuff up. I had great fun pointing and focusing and generally getting familiar with things, and I got enough video to show these: About 25 min of Jupiter, 3 min videos at 97fps, 320x200 capture area, 1/125 sec exposure I think, 300 gain (iirc) on the camera, and I get this reversing Gif from that data: Then I tried Saturn, exact same optical setup, but instead now going with 1/30 second instead of the 1/125 from Jupiter. Nothing spectacular, but pretty enough: Then I remembered Neptune was in the area, so I took a 3 min video of that: Then, late into the night as it was almost setting, I remembered that Pluto existed and was a thing that was above the horizon, so I pointed the scope (removing the ADC) to Pluto, and I started taking 4 second exposures for a live stack. 2m48s later I had this on screen, I added the labels I got from Cartes du Ciel, just so I could be definite about which red smudge was actually Pluto. This is far from pretty, very noisy and a terrible image, but it is an image that has Pluto in it, taken with a 130mm scope from my balcony. I'm quite happy with that even if the aesthetics are poor: I call this a successful evening, and a validation of a proof of concept I was curious about regarding the usability of the TS130 for planetary capture. I do have a resurrected-from-the-dead CPC800 that might give better planetary stuff, but I do like how contrasty the Jupiter captured looked on screen. The EQ-G gave me an insight into why people like using mounts that are too big for their equipment. I found it to be very stable, not too badly affected by people moving in the apartment building as I put three Aliexpress-sourced vibration pads under the tripod and they work very well indeed. The EQMod stuff is interesting for sure, and I think I may end up getting myself an AZ-EQ6 or something in the future. I also think I'll be selling onwards my 12" Dob and my Quattro 8" scope, the Dob is just not best suited to upper floor apartment life and the TS130 will give me similar captures with a flatter field than the Quattro. I'll hold on to the CPC800 as it's in such poor physical condition I couldn't sell it anyway. Feels weird to consider pruning out some of the hardware A very successful and enjoyable night, and I'm happy with how the evening went with the testing of the equipment, and I'm also reasonably chuffed with the quality possible with a 130mm scope in mediocre seeing; bodes well for nights of steady skies..
  4. I've recently earned my amateur radio license (EI4IWB), and today I tried seeing meteor scatter for the first time. I pointed my EAntennas 13 element dualband 2m/70cm Yagi towards the Graves radar, tuned the SDR to 143.050, and watched the waterfall. Lovely short pings from small meteors so far, certainly makes for an interesting intersection between the astro and the radio hobbies! I have a spare 144MHz antenna that I am not using, and I may set that up as a consistent meteor tracker if I get the time and inclination to do so. Either way it's pretty cool to see meteors this way as well. I'm just kicking myself I didn't think of this for the Quadrantids.
  5. Yeah... Why did I have to pick such capital-intensive hobbies.. Mountain bike (XC/DH), kayaking, astronomy, PC gaming - and a new Covid hobby of Amateur Radio.. The ham radio stuff is nifty, and I've been licensed for only 3 months. But it can be a money sink as well.. A cheap good antenna is ~€500 (I got a Folding Antennas hexbeam, as well as a DX Commander, and an Aerial-51 807-HD, all antennas for different things), and 50m of very high quality coaxial cable like Messi&Paolini Hyperlex-10 to feed that antenna is €170 *for the cable alone*; and a proper high-end solidstate amplifier such as an SPE-Expert with 1.5kW (!!) output is near €5000.. and the radios themselves (new) vary between €500 and €10000. I'm also waiting for payday
  6. I'm actually the other way around for the advice. I got a UHC first, then an OIII. I based that decision on the knowledge that if I could only get one filter, I'd get the one that would give the best improvement on the most objects, and the Lumicon UHC fits that bill for me. I later got a Lumicon OIII secondhand at a really cheap price as it was degraded at the edge but pristine in the middle. The OIII definitely does give a darker background than the UHC, but I've preferred the view and the colouration in the UHC. I've also now got a H-Beta filter, but haven't used it that much. I found that UHC in a smaller scope gave more useful views, precisely as it dimmed the stars that bit less, and the OIII filter I had allowed a fair bit of red through to the eye. Then again my OIII filter is a degraded Lumicon that has the "rust" so it is fairly obvious that it's not performing at best. Still works very well, but better at small exit pupils <2mm as the degradation is only around the perimeter of the filter - hence why I still use it and have not consigned it to the scrapheap.
  7. As per the Calsky.com main page this evening: !CalSky.com - farewell. The service will be shut down in a few days. more I had been a subscriber since mid-2011, and I will miss the site and the services. A very tough decision to make. I can only wish the site admins and the site runners all of the best in the future endeavours.
  8. Oh I have a small stable of scopes as per my signature, the most commonly used one of late is the CPC800 that I resurrected from dead, that has corrosion on the tube and replacement mount PCBs due to water damage. About as grab and go as I need at the moment, optics are good enough in it. My 12" dob is in storage, and I have an 8" newt that comes out every so often. I'm not stuck for optical devices, just waiting on that replacement tube.
  9. The supply chain problems are painful enough, but it could always be worse. I have an open order with Teleskop Service for a replacement OTA tube from a 130mm apo. The tube was ordered in September 2019, and still has no visibility of having been built and shipped from China, it had a lead time of 6 months from last September.. (a cat knocked the OTA over when I had it objective down temporarily, landing on the focuser wheel, and the main tube <-> focuser adapter jumped two threads and effectively cold-welded the two components together. An engineering shop couldn't unscrew them, so only a replacement of the OTA main tube and that adapter could work. At least it would appear that the objective and focuser didn't get jarred too much. Been waiting now for well over a year to get that scope up and running, and Mars looks lovely right now..)
  10. That's excellent to hear. Please feel free to isolate as appropriate if needed though - safety of self and staff trumps a temporary blip in business - especially with how the (sane and realistic) projections are looking for this thing.
  11. I used one of the closed-cell packing squares, chopped to fit under the 500P base, as a buffer between the base and the handtruck plate. That way, there was no slack in the listing of the scope from the build location, and it was quite a lot easier to position into the observing location. There was much less tilt of the handtruck needed to lift the 500p from the ground, and that meant much greater control of the whole thing when moving. Compression straps such as these types ( https://www.amazon.co.uk/Silverline-449682-Tie-Down-Capacity-Breaking/dp/B003H0YMSQ ) are fantastic for quick reversible immobilisation of things. I have a handful available from years of tying kayaks to roofracks, so they were re-purposed for 500p transport. I do miss the 500p to be honest. But, I'll be putting the pennies away to get something of an equivalent size at some point, dependent on the living situation at that point. If apartment in Switzerland it'll be a cpc100 with hyperstar, if somewhere else than a driven 20" from the Dobson Factory I think.. Best of luck with the dealing with the family illness - that is a whole lot of not-fun for everyone involved.
  12. One solution to the power cord issue is to use a battery source and mount it on the base. I was using one of these https://www.lidl.de/de/ultimate-speed-powerbank-mit-starthilfefunktion-upbs-12000-a1/p288766 as my power source, and I had it taped to the altitude motor casing (with tape over the blue LED. This one gave enough power for about 5hr of observing. It did take a little time to cable-tie things up and out of the way so that the cables would not get sheared between the rotating parts of the base. One of the larger Celestron LiFePO4 batteries should give a few nights worth of observing. My plan-B power source was a 110Ah SUV battery with a fuse and 12v socket on it. That did the job but had the risk of dragging cables. Having a power source on the scope mounting really removes one of the pain points of this type of scope, and makes for a less stressful observing session. It's also worth noting that some other owners of Stargates have mounted their power source at the rear of the mirror cell, as part of the necessary extra counterweights that the scope design needs when used with a paracorr and Ethos eyepieces.
  13. While I had a 500p (before returning it because of the problems with the mirror) I used a high-capacity handtruck. I bought one with a longer base, that would extend under the base triangle with ease. This made it very easy to move the completed scope from place to place. Something like this: This is a "Master Sacktruck with Pneumatic Wheels" and the larger diameter tires do make it easier to move about on lawns and other rough ground. It's really important to note that if moving the assembled scope, that the side bearings are not actually connected to the base. When I moved mine, I ensured that I had the scope strapped together so that there was no relative movement when tipping the scope to get it moving.
  14. I recently had the same conundrum. I had updated my main scope to a 20" Dob, and I wanted to get the best widest field. This led me to a choice of getting either of an Ethos 21mm, or an ES-100 25mm, as I wanted a 100 degree eyepiece for this role. I already had a 31mm 82 degree Celestron eyepiece but that focal length was too large an exit pupil for my eyes - hence the shorter focal length and wider FOV requirement. In the end I went for the ES eyepiece, as it's got just that much more of a true FOV. In that 20" scope the difference was an FOV of 65.2' against the Ethos' 54.5'. Regarding aberrations it's being used with a Paracorr in an f/3.94 newt and my own eyes have a little bit of astigmatism anyway (awaiting a new prescription to get some astro-specific contacts) so I was happy enough to go the ES route. Using that eyepiece over the past few clear evenings, I've been happy with that decision. It would have been a much harder choice on which to buy if TV had made an Ethos 24 though..
  15. Still love the app and the site, regularly used. Slight oddity noted today: 17th: Moon listed as "Waxing Gibbous" and 100% illuminated, 18th: Moon listed as "Full" and 99% illuminated. Full moon is 09.27 on the 18th according to the Virtual Moon Atlas. Presumably a corner case where the phase state is probably generated at one time of day and the illumination fraction at a differing time? Definitely not important in any way for me, just an interesting observation.
  16. I can confirm that there are issues with the latest firmware on the AVX mount and handset, and connection via serial. I'm currently trying to guarantee the behaviour process I'm seeing but it's intermittent and that is annoying when trying to troubleshoot. The behaviour I'm seeing is: With everything powered off, I connect up the cables between the SkyFi and the handset. I power up the SkyFi, and I confirm I have connection to my wifi router. I power on the mount and awaken from hibernation, entering the date and time, and the mount sits at the standard prompt on the screen, and has started tracking. Trying to connect via SkySafari 4 on my tablet, I get an error that I can make the wifi connection but not to the mount itself. Touching nothing else I tap the "2" button to get to the Stars menu, then I "back" out of that. Attempting to connect again on the tablet, I immediately get the telescope connection and it appears stable for the rest of the session. It's not cabling, as I've exchanged out all of the SkyFi cabling for other serial cables of the same type I had lying around, and after belling the cable to make sure I was putting the right cables on the right pins. My AVX mount went back for warranty repair (loud ticking in RA, spur gears moving radially, uneven worm/wheel interface) so I wasn't able to check the version numbers of the problematic firmware. I received the mount this morning, and all appears to be good. I did downgrade the firmware to the above version shipped with 1.9.5030 CFM bundle. As it stands, I've obtained a StarSense camera with the StarSense handset, and that is not exhibiting the same issues, even after updating to the current firmware. As an aside, the StarSense handset is definitely an awful lot faster internally than the NexStar+ handset, especially for things like "identify". I've also applied for TeamCelestron membership for access to the beta FW for the StarSense so it'll be interesting to see what happens. It is nice to see that Celestron have acknowledged the serial/ASCOM issue and have a workaround (albeit non-ideal) in place while resolving the issue.
  17. Very very nice image. I'm definitely one for buying a decently sized poster print of this if it becomes available, it'd look pretty above the fireplace! Any thoughts of submitting a lower res 10k x 6x image (still good enough for fullpage print quality to Sky and Telescope, either for their Gallery or for inclusion in their special issues?
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