Datalord

3 hours ago, Astrobug said:

TS started to sell the fornax mounts. They are on the market for several years.  The Fonax 52 seems to be a nice alternative to a EQ8 or CEM120. The design is more traditional but the finishing looks really great. 

 

This looks super interesting! 40kg payload for £4k. Serious contender! Thanks! 

2 hours ago, Whirlwind said:

Another option would be the Vixen AXJ.  That has a quoted payload of 22kg and can be bought with encoders (or a can be upgraded later if needed) if you decide it's necessary.  Should just about fit into the budget. 

Note I think the distributer has recently changed and there can be discrepancies I think between 'old' and 'new' prices because of this.

22kg is too borderline for me. With 23kg of gear, I'll never get help if it doesn't work well. 

37 minutes ago, Space Hopper said:

TTS-160 Panther......?

I'm not going into the additional complexity of an altaz mount trying to be an eq. It's a very interesting mount, but I don't think it is well suited for remote operation. 

38 minutes ago, MarkAR said:

Here's a Mesu for sale

https://www.astrobuysell.com/uk/propview.php?view=160555

Hmm, in my end of the country too. Thanks for the heads up, I'll consider that one. 

Just for the sake of it, I tried to set up my system tonight. Without fail, this mount is worst pile of dog excrement I have ever tried. I am quitting in rage after this happened 15 minutes into an already atrocious run.

Yes, I know all about USB cables etc. No need to try to help with the problem. I'm done. If anyone is looking to buy a second hand excellent Celestron CGX in prime condition and working order, ping me. 

Apart from that, I'm very much looking for comments to the original topic.

So, my RASA has been sitting idle in my shed for 8 months mostly because I've dreaded my battle with the Celestron CGX garbage. And I kinda miss the simplicity of an OSC compared to my setup in Spain. So, new mount must be had.

Requirements: RASA11 plus extras ~22kg. Tripod. Prefer encoders. Direct drive is a dream at this budget. 

Budget: £6000ish. plus minus a few £k.

Contenders:

Mesu 200. No encoders. No stock to be found.

CEM120EC2. Seems like there has been a lot of issues with this one.

CGX-L. lol, no.

CEM60. Not enough load capacity.

Paramount My-T. £8k including tripod and no encoders. That's a bit steep. The payload is quoted at 22.6kg, so it is also very borderline for the RASA.

EQ-8Rh. RA encoders.

10Micron GM1000HPS. encoders on both axis, a safe bet from pure performance point of view. But £7.6k and a ridiculous extra £2k for the tripod. £2,000 for a tripod. Had to repeat that one.

I'd very much welcome comments and personal experience from anyone owning one of these. Or if you think there is something out there I have missed and should consider.

EDIT:

Fornax 52. Formidable contender!

Used Mesu 200. Sounds like a very possible option.

TTS-160. Atl-Az with a rotator. I don't want that complication.

Vixen AXJ. 22kg payload is too little for my liking.

iOptron in general. I was woo'ed by them previously, but I worry a lot about the software side. They seem to have quite a few issues all around.

GM1000HPS. Can use my existing tripod? Puts it back in the budget range.

Crux 200HD. £8k, but serious reviews and performance.

18 minutes ago, Star101 said:

Comet lay'd on top of stars?

180s I would expect slightly elongated stars.  Or was the scope following the stars and the comet moving...Then I would expect a elongated comet head!

Pray tell

The comet head is indeed elongated, as you can see. Yes, my mount was doing normal equatorial speed.

And yes, I processed the stars and the comet separately and then blended it on top of each other. Here are the separates before I did the blend and merge in PI.

By chance I saw Atlas would be in a good spot and there was some clear skies for a single night, so I figured I'd give it a shot. Processing in PI with the help of CometAlignment script. I'm happy I know what I'm doing, because that was a complicated thing to do.

Anyways, 23*R, 22*G and 19*B, all bin2 180s shot on April 2nd with my RC equipment.

I browsed my data folder and found some data I had captured during Christmas and forgotten about. It's taken with 180s and 300s subs, where I usually use 600 and 1200, so I'm not completely happy with parts of it, but it's still a decent photo.

3 hours ago, symmetal said:

Great image and write-up along with it. I took images of Abell 1656 Coma Cluster over the last few days using an ASI071 OSC APS-C sensor and 360mm ZS61 scope just to see what comes out as there weren't any suitable wide field OSC targets around at the time. It looks promising with a quick process but I don't think it'll match yours. 😀

Alan

Thanks!

The beauty of groups of galaxies is that they are at all distances, so you'll be able to find some that match your focal length, I'm sure. Good luck with it!

38 minutes ago, old_eyes said:

Beautiful image. And such a lot of colour information as well. I struggle to get much colour in my galaxy cluster images. My wife prefers the local big blowsy nebulae, but I like these subtle deep time images. Harder to read, but with a much better story to tell. And thanks for the annotations. I really brings it to life.

Thank you!

There's a lot more colour in these images than what I got with my old CMOS setup. But I also use a ton of saturation and colour boosting in PixInsight. Essentially I do a small boost of colours in liniar, then run the Repaired HSV Separation script before stretching. And then more colour boosting in the end in PS.

Just now, souls33k3r said:

My goodness man, this has got to be one of my favourite images with such beautiful writeup. Amazing capture matey. 

What FL did you capture this image with? 

Thank you very much!

It's 2365mm FL on the CFF scope.

This is Abell 2199, a galaxy cluster 4-500 million light years away. This cluster is part of the Hercules Supercluster.

The annotated image shows the myriad of galaxies in this cluster. In this image I managed to capture 105 galaxies in just one frame, which is pretty decent with my gear.

In the center of A2199 is the galaxy NGC 6166, which is a fascinating beast in multiple ways. It is a supermassive galaxy, which supposedly contains smaller galaxies within its massive width. You can see the smaller galaxy cores in it.

It contains the most globular clusters of any known galaxy, up to 39,000 of them, with each cluster itself containing hundreds of thousands of stars. For comparison, our milky way has about 170. It has a supermassive black hole of about 30 billion solar masses and the galaxy is one of the most luminous in terms of x-ray emissions. Our Milky Way is bigger than most galaxies, but this thing dwarfs it. Finally, this crazy thing has blueshift, so it is coming closer to us, which is mindbogling at this distance.

Beyond the cluster, in this image, there are galaxies much farther away:
Here you see 2 galaxies at a distance of 2.9 billion light years

Here you have 3 galaxies at 4.4 and 4.6 billion light years

Here you have my farthest imaged galaxy. It is special, because even at this distance it is blue. It was discovered by the GALEX UV space telescope and it is a whole galaxy so hot and bright it shines in ultra violet. It's hard to fathom what must be going on there. In comparison, the red dot below it is another galaxy "only" 470 million light years away.

No cluster image would be complete without some distant quasars. These photon cannons in the final image sent their light out 6.5 and 9.4 billion years ago. And I caught them with my little telescope here on planet Earth as seen in the final image.

Finally, capturing details.

Unfortunatly I can't fit all of them in one frame, but I'm quite pleased with the result I got out of these two. I'm so encourage I might reprocess them with drizzle to increase the resolution.

I decided to only use RGB this time and it worked out quite well. I just extracted L from the combination and sharpened that one before blending back.

Another new for me was to use Topaz DeNoise on the images before combination. What an incredible tool!

1 hour ago, Owmuchonomy said:

Excellent post.  With such a high z value your sensor was picking up some very stretched wavelengths there.

I agree, it feels funky, but the sensor itself is actually quite sensitive in that spectrum: 

Another Abell cluster to my collection. I had a fun Sunday scavenging information about parts of this cluster.

Here with the PI annotated version:

Equally interesting are 4 QSOs in the image. It's not exactly easy to map the image to the identifications of the QSOs, but I checked a few times to make sure I found the right dot in the image.

2.17 billion light years:

8.83BLY:

10.39BLY:

And finally a redshift z=3.076 which is beyond 11 BLY:

This is amazing! Incredibly well done.

Do you have an image file to download? With your permission I would like to have it as part of my rotation of pictures on my TV.

1 hour ago, Pankaj said:

Super ! Can you please share capture details and the equipment used.

Read to the end, my friend.

I love these galaxy clusters and I have access to so many at this time of year. This one is Abell 779, 300 million light years away. I counted 36 galaxies of various size, but there are probably a few more lurking. 

I found out that my Lum contained a quasar. At 12.1 billion light years away, this is the farthest object I have imaged.

Finally got around to finishing this up. Thanks for the help!

1 hour ago, vlaiv said:

You uploaded something different? It's been cropped differently and possibly already stretched?

Ah, sorry, that was the wrong set. 

1 minute ago, wimvb said:

32 bit floating point, afaIk. 

Right, stored in the project in the xisf format?

2 minutes ago, vlaiv said:

Why do you use 16 bit format?

Inside PixInsight it is always 32bit xisf. It's only when I export to Photoshop it has to be 16bit as PS can't deal with 32bit tiff files.

I uploaded them as fits in 32bit if you want to have a poke at them.

Interesting. Thanks again!

4 hours ago, wimvb said:

DBE to remove gradients

Hmm, I decided to omit that step after trying, simply because I found so few points without nebulosity that the gradients were skewed. Did you place the points on the nebula? Should I not worry about that?

4 hours ago, wimvb said:

arcsinh stretch

I never really use this one. What's the improvement of this over MaskedStretch and HistogramTransformation?

4 hours ago, wimvb said:

For the second image, I did the last scnr at 100%

Big thanks for the efforts and steps. Really appreciate it.