6footgeek

Oh awesome that’s a great idea - I’ll check that out thanks! Of course it’s either been storms or mad heat at night so I have t actually tested it out in anger but it recognised everything absolutely fine and I’m sold! Now time to get a new cooler zwo camera methinks

Woo! I got one of these this week as well! It’s looking super pretty - I’m gonna add it to the setup shortly

Thanks! I got 15 minutes on it earlier this year without a filter / my mount - just on a star adventurer but it didnt go well! The moon wasnt helping this shot last night at 4am...

Quick edit of an hour capture I got on m42 last night - was meant to be imaging the Western Veil all night, but a windows update on my pc rebooted it just after I went to bed. Anyway at about 4am I remoted in and pointed it at Orion. This is ~ 1 hour of exposures at iso 800 for 180sec. Overcooked the vibrance, but hey, im excited From the ever polluted skies of Birmingham, UK. Skywatcher 72ed Canon 450d Guiding with zwo mini guider + 120mm mini Skywatcher HEQ5 pro SkyTech CLS Canon EOS Clip Fit Filter 15 darks, 80 bias, 80 flats Leaving a tiff here with just light pollution removed and bg calibration if anybody wants to play glory_be.tiff

Hi @freiform sorry for late reply on this. I really can’t help with those questions. I’m stuck in limbo on this myself. Torn between the 183 and 1600 monos for me I think the 183 makes more sense. But, really need to invest in reading more about them! Best of luck

The star travel 120? As far as I can see it’s not a doublet and doesn’t have the coatings on the glass of the 72ed. The 72ed comes with a lovely travel case. Additionally the st120 comes with eyepieces / diaganols. But the biggest difference beyond that is that the 72ed has a much better focuser on it. that being said I think people do image with it, it just depends on what you want. I personally would go with the 72ed for the glass and focuser, but if you wanted to get rid of the 200pds and have a single rig, maybe the quality of glass could be lessened in favour of that setup. if you had the money then you could just get the 120ed ds-Pro and get the best of both

Hmm you know I have never used it for visual - I have a 150p for that. You would (I assume, I’ve never had a refractor for visual) also need a diagonal for visual, but then I believe you wouldn’t require the 2 inch nosepiece for focus as you would have the EP.. but, all roads lead back to Rome and you would need all the other stuff for AP. I think the main reasons that this scope is recommended for imaging is that at 72mm and 420mm it’s very forgiving, with a lovely wide field with a dslr. So it’s great to get started with. Another reason is that it’s a nice price point, and the 3rd reason being it’s a great scope to grab and go. I for instance keep mine fully built upstairs and just carry it down in its entirety when we get a clear night!

Hey Simon, I have a 72ed on my heq5. I use the following combo. 72ed -> OVL field flattened and a canon t-ring adapter. Works great for me. Pic included! my understanding is that you can swap the OVL for a 2 inch nosepiece to achieve focus but I wanted the flattener anyway so it was the logical choice for me 😊

Very cool! What time was it captured?

Welcome! I spent too long running around Dartmoor to ever return for a camping trip - but I imagine the sky’s would be lovely. Whenever I was there I was very wet and scratched from crawling through gorse bushes 😂

Sorry taff just saw your reply above! The bolt is just an m10 x however long you want it (M10x114) etc if you wanted to just get a longer one

Hey @Taff there think you have 5e exact same problem I had with my heq5. I wrote about it: https://astrobits.co.uk/blog/skywatcher-heq5-pro-latitude-adjustment/

Hey, I was reading this paper and am becoming a little bit obsessed with the idea of slowly building my own system to do this. https://conference.sdo.esoc.esa.int/proceedings/neosst1/paper/438/NEOSST1-paper438.pdf Im a software engineer so I am confident I could reproduce (or at least have fun with) the code, but am wondering about the hardware side of things. If I got (and i'm formulating this idea as I type) 5 * ZWO ASI 120MM Mini cameras, what kind of lenses would I need to get the all sky coverage required? Not trying to do real science here, just have fun (I like data) Much obliged as always!

@vlaiv - following on from our discussion a while back about a galaxy hunter for a HEQ5 with a 1600mm - is this in contention for that? or is it too slow? thanks in advance as always

I have the neweer tripod - it’s fairly good! I’ve definitely overloaded it now though. I was just using this setup temporarily but I found that it wasn’t particularly stable - ended up going all out on a heq5 as well but I got it out (the SA) last night to get some shots of Jupiter and it serves its purpose well 😊 Was very nice carrying the whole setup in one hand and have everything running off of batteries!