Tomatobro

I run one laptop to manage the mount, navigation and guiding and another for the imaging camera. The mount control laptop is a used £70 win 7 version and works flawlessly, first time every time just like an Anvil. The imagining laptop is not quite as reliable but near enough. I keep looking at ASIair pro to replace the mount laptop but still undecided. I have seen that when both the imaging and guiding are on a single laptop when both download images together then a conflict seems to occur and its PHD that looses its guiding camera but it usually re-establishes its camera connection after the camera timeout setting limit is reached.

Have a read of 6x30 finder + neximage for guiding?on SGL

Nor atmospheric distortion.......

When Tomato built his Pulsar dome we wanted to check the horizon profile which was the prime reason for knocking it together but the horizon picture is how my view looks from where I set up my scope. Those digital angle finders are now about £13 and they have back illumination that wakes up when moved. Great for Alt/Az mounts. The protractor is printed out using Blocklayer. Just type that into your search engine, set up the size and print it out

Best views with no power applied?.....That's the same reason why mine has gone back to Flo.

Compass, cheap angle finder and a guide scope with cross hairs.

One star is all you need.....

The only comment I would make regarding the 220 mini is that the USB connector does not like the cable to hang free. On mine it results in occasional dropouts. Easily fixed by folding the cable back on itself and tie wrapping onto the camera body.

The antenna is receiving two signals, one a ground wave and the other a sky wave. Because of the uneven travel distance the two waves arrive at different times and interfere with each other so the voltage output is a function of the combined signals. X-rays remove the sky wave component so the resulting signal can either increase or decrease depending on location. It's that sudden change in output followed by a slow recovery is what we are looking for. The wave length is 13 meters

Things are sorting themselves out. The big spikes at the start of data1 is the washing machine when it goes onto fast spin. The receiver has been moved from the house back into the outbuilding loft where its logging away as I type. One small problem is that we had a short power cut which meant that on power up it started to over write the existing data so I need to add a routine that scans for the first blank memory slot on power up and starts recording from there. I will add an LED to warn me that a power outage occurred sometime during the week. Power outages will mess up its recording times but I will live with that as they are quite rare.

Mrs Tomatobro reckons mine is called "Why the Hell is it not connecting now"

The number of gaps and therefore slots alter the brightness of the interference pattern. The more light that can get through means a brighter image. I must find out if Mr Bahtinov was ever honoured for his gift to the world.

no you don't have to lock the screw. The gearbox has enough reduction to make it lock when the motor is not turning. If however you have a Crayford focuser then the holding limit is governed by the spindle friction.

I only have two unbranded versions. One is just a plain red dot and the other I can change between a dot and a cross by turning a wheel. Both can vary the brightness In terms of visibility I always calibrate the finders in daylight as a first setup using the top of a tree which is about a kilometre away. I put a cross hair eyepiece in the telescope and position the cross hairs on the tree top. Using the left/right adjusters on the red dot finder I then position the dot onto the same part of the tree. Further positioning calibration can be done at night on a star if required. Depending on the quality of the shoe mount the repeatability from removal to reinstall is quite good

To check alignment accuracy don't use DSO's use bright stars like Vega etc. Practice on these first. Once you can slew to these first time every time then go for globular clusters as they are easier to identify. Stay cool. Check and recheck settings if its not doing what it should.

If you are looking for photographs of objects then apart from a couple of the moon this is not the book for you. Having said that I use this book (Turn left at Orion) together with Stellarium as my navigation guide. I really like the view options for each object as it sets the orientation of the star patterns for finder scopes, reflectors and binoculars. If I have guessed at your needs correctly you will not be disappointed with it.

Still not getting good data. Next step is to bring it back into the house and see if I can duplicate my earlier results.

Reading your post I have exactly the same problem with mine. I contacted Flo a couple of times but did not get an offer to replace. I will contact them again.

My auto graphing software is not working properly so have been sorting that out and I have reduced the plot to 12 hours per jpg as this gives me better resolution. The rig will be moved to the outbuilding and the UKRAS radio output adjusted to suit its new environment. Will see what the improvements are in a few days Update. The auto graphing software has been sorted, the receiver adjusted and recording started at 16:00.

Well all I did was to disconnect the laptop and move the rig to a "quiet" outbuilding loft. this is 24 hours starting at 14:00 hours on the 4th June. Clearly I have more work to do as it was working great before.

A wicked piece of kit. love it

I think I am guilty of confusing you a bit. The diffraction is (usually) because when you look down the tube you will see that one or two of the secondary mirror support vanes is not parallel with the light path and it is twisted slightly. If the vane support screw is slackened off a bit the vane can be twisted back and the screw re tightened. When that is done it may (read probably will) push the collimation out a bit. So what I mean is that just straightening the vane is a bit of a bodge if done in isolation without going through all the collimation steps.

I agree. Vane checking is part of collimation so I just used it as a reference. My guess was that Neil did not know that there was some extra information in the picture of the star that might help with his problems.

see how those diffraction spikes are split into two on two spikes. That's a hint that your mirrors need collimating.