Rusted

You can have our cloud if you like.

Struggling with Registax constantly crashing on Alignment. Best I can manage so far:

A really excellent effort! Until the next gales?

A refractor, with expensive [wide field] binoviewers, mounted on a 2" 45° terrestrial prism might suit. It would required a solid mounting and a serious focuser to support the cantilevered weight. Be aware that finding an aircraft in the sky is a difficult skill even with normal 8-10x binoculars. There is usually nothing to guide you to find the small aircraft against the whole sky. Except vapour trails? It's not like centring a bird in a tree where you have lots of visual clues from the branches. The higher the power [magnification] the smaller the field of view and the greater the image shake from any vibrations. It would be completely impossible to handhold such an instrument.

That is very interesting but the long training period seems rather difficult to believe. Even for one who has only a year's experience at H-alpha viewing. It used to be said that the practised eye could see subtle or fleeting detail which went completely unnoticed by the apprentice observer. Then they invented imaging and live video on a large, high resolution, monitor screen. Even in H-alpha on a colour screen. Does the practised eye see more on a screen than the beginner? I have often wondered about this. My favourite Lunar feature is Plato and trying to see the tiny craterlets. It took a very long time and the correct light to see my first in my 6" refractor. Then the other night, even in appalling seeing conditions, the largest craterlet was continuously and easily visible on my monitor. Even though the thermal movements were making the image gyrate wildly, go out of focus and change shape. I should have removed the camera and tried a few eyepieces but never thought of it at the time. Was the "seeing" too bad for visual confirmation of the same craterlet? Another aspect of the same story: My right eye is dimmer but sees far more detail than my bright, untrained, left eye. Half a century of practice really must make a difference. Now I have binoviewers. Is my left eye now being trained by my right? It does seem that way.

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever!

Looking good. External plywood bracing would be really useful to solve the figure-of-8 problem. GRP moulds are usually heavily reinforced and glassed over to maintain stiffness during shrinkage and final removal of the item. The problem then is flexing the mould enough to release the item. Which is, presumably, why they often use compressed air for separation after previously using the same vents for vacuum forming CF. In your case you could have temporary formers in a framework bolted to the outside of the mould. Have the formers in two units so they can be easily separated at the parting plane. Edit: I meant to add that removing male scratches is far easier than female. With the latter you have to reduce the entire surface. With male scratches they are raised above the general surface so only the "scratches" need to be removed. The problem is that any male projections will be carried over to the finished article. i.e: female scratches and dents must be filled. Or the whole surface must be reduced. A bit like producing optics. A tiny scratch needs the whole surface to be worn away.

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I think you mean blue magic.

In a sense. I paid for the latest ASCOM-AWR driver. 7.2. So far so good. Though without any real targets to test it properly. At least the unstable time and location coordinates didn't change randomly. Since they are all interconnected it was inevitable mayhem would ensue. Mostly solid cloud since then.

Let me see if I have this right: Your Arduino has gone all GUI for an Astroberry Ekos? And now it's stuck onboard at the traffic lights somewhere in the Andi. R.P.i.

Isn't that why they invented beards? Don't pull it out. Pull it through!

Well done! Saw it briefly between the clouds. Then the wind picked up and all hope of an image was gone. It's hell being a solar imager!

The power of the Internet and "narrow interest" forum members continue to protect the potential customer. Or at least those who use such means to research their intended purchases before spending serious money. I had imagined, from the many superb images shared here, that my PST mod was greatly inferior to a commercial Quark. Thank you for bringing this product's [apparent] lack of quality control to our notice before I committed myself to the unknown. Even if it means you must continue to <cough> "enjoy" my solar "daubs."

As an insatiable PST modder... I know my place.

Not an easy task to have access from below and maintain fire safety rules, weatherproofing and insulation. I have the same idea in my two storey observatory using a huge, aluminium, warehouse stepladder. The trapdoor is an absolute nuisance in the observatory floor. I would never recommend anything similar. But I wanted to avoid wintry climbs in the dark. So chose an internal ladder for access. Don't use an ordinary ladder because of serious safety issues. You get no feedback for balancing on narrow rungs. You need wide treads and comfortable lean angles for when you are carrying kit up and down. And you will.

Aha! The Zanzibar Fallacy.

Thanks Andrew. Is two years from new long enough to gain two minutes? I am off to reduce LST by two minutes to see if that finally brings AWR to heel on Gotos. Earlier rain has given way to sunny periods. So I'm off to play.

Hi Andrew, AWR maintains an internal quartz clock crystal. You can't override it. All you can do is set your precise location and it will/should calculate LST from the RTC. That said I had to change the summer time settings when AWR disagreed with several online LST calculators. But that was a straight one hour difference. Not just two minutes. I'm on the CET band in Europe. One hour forwards of Gravely Blighted's clock time.

The same held true with Meade PST etalons. Do Daystar assemble their instruments in Mexico using cheap labour? Optics seems to be going the way of hifi. If you can't tell the difference it must be your own ears/eyes. I prefer <cough> blind testing but doubt that would go down well with solar enthusiasts.

Thanks Tony. I monitor the ASCOM support group and they regularly warn against re-installing. I did ASCOM Diagnostics and Conformance scans yesterday to no avail. No problems found and I have all the latest versions. AWR repeated the advice to ensure I have the correct site location. I confirmed my location with three different aerial photography services to the centre of my pier. Decided averaging and rounding to a tenth of a second just wasn't good enough. So I used Google Earth which shows my pier inside my observatory to a hundredth of a second. Thanks Julian, but I have never knowingly done any plate solving. I'm more of a click and Goto sort of chap. Just finding the Moon and Sun are presently much too difficult for ASCOM/AWR/CduC. Perhaps they are simply not team players?

Hi, I am still trying to pin down why my AWR/ASCOM Goto slews are ALWAYS inaccurate when using C-Du-C. [Skychart] My observatory site coordinates are set to within one second in both Latitude and Longitude on the AWR IH2 paddle. My site location in C-Du_C is also precisely set to the second. I have set C-Du-C time to System time with 10 seconds refresh. Now comes the hard part: If I hover the cursor over the Meridian on the C-Du-C chart I think I should get LST. [Local Sidereal Time] Instead I get a difference of -2 minutes compared to AWR's LST. An online LST calculator also shows a discrepancy of exactly -2 minutes compared to AWR. Local Sidereal Time Clock But it also agrees exactly with C-Du-C. In fact have to change the longitude setting in the LST calculator [link above] by 0.62° to match the LST indicated on the AWR paddle. So, which of these three LSTs is right? A: The two which agree? B: Or the one which doesn't? 😄 None of them and I'm doing it all wrong? Thanks

Absolutely amazing images, as always.

Do you mean like this? That is my two storey observatory looking west. House is on the southern border to the left.

My thoughts exactly! Usually on a daily basis. I find the solar surface in H-a, in real life, is like watching pink frog spawn. Stills would have to be very lucky to capture what is seen fleetingly with the eye during any video capture. I'm talking about a greatly enlarged view on a decent high res. monitor here. Visual is very different. Here's a live video I took to show exactly how I see the computer screen. I was suffering from a nuisance veiling effect at the time. If you look behind the veil then that is my live H-a. 6" f/8 PST modified refractor using a ZWO120MC camera. Real aperture something like 120mm f10. I am deliberately moving the telescope around with the drives to emphasise the foreground veiling.