Tomatobro

I was impressed with your short talk last night and in particular the contour map. I had a go a few years back with no success but will have another look at it.

The Website says its down for maintenance and will be up shortly.

The really cheap RTL dongles are a waste of time (IMO). I used a FUNCube pro plus for a long time for meteor detection using GRAVES and found it to be very good. More recently I got involved with the group that set up a beacon at the Sherwood observatory for backscatter and have been using the RSP DX and a Leo Bodner frequency calibrator which performs very well. The antenna is a MOXON which came via the BAA shop. Being located in Telford my main problem is backscatter from aircraft using Bham airport and East Midlands. Bham have a curfew but EM does not so filtering out the aircraft backscatter has been my main occupation over the last few months. What I am trying to do is to get a accurate meteor count, Meteor entry pattern and Time stamp backscatter events so I can match them to the UKMON published data. The attached image shows the scale of the problem with aircraft backscatter and the progress with filtering so far

given the state of the hole you might find that a M14 tap will go in without drilling out. My experience of the mount material is that it is pretty soft and cut's easily.

The last all sky I built with an RPi and HD camera use meteotux software and it worked well. I have built a few and I learned early on that the lens quality is everything

The earth is predicted to pass through a debris field of Comet 3D/Biela on 1st/2nd or 2nd/3rd of December. This comet is one of the ones that disappeared about 100 years ago. Computer predictions suggest that this could be the meteor event of the year with a display of very slow meteors (<>16kms) I guess that the press will at some point get hold of this story and will attach to it the usual hype but if predictions are correct should be a good show.

My experience with Flo (and others) is that there is no risk involved only inconvenience if something goes wrong. The odd issues I have had over the years have taught me that suppliers will do all they can to resolve whatever the problem was. In particular Flo's post delivery support is first class so I never worry about ordering from them. The very worst is that you would be without the kit for a few days. I order a lot of stuff from online suppliers and some of the delivery outfits are a bit flaky with the "tried to deliver but no one was in" excuse but I cannot recall ever not actually getting my hands on the item even when its involved a trip to the depot. And I am taking of 1000's of items here.

Three clear nights in a row will test my stamina so is all it will take for me to look again at Sharpcaps sequencer😑

this sequence was posted on the Sharpcap forum. May be helpful....... SEQUENCE GUIDING CONNECT ABORT True TARGETNAME "AD Leo before" PRESERVE CAMERA SETTINGS MOUNT GOTO "10 19 36.27 +19 52 12.1 " DELAY 20 SET GAIN TO 500 SET EXPOSURE TO 10 MOUNT SOLVEANDSYNC DELAY 20 END PRESERVE GUIDING START DELAY 20 STOP AT -1 FROM MERIDIAN CAPTURE START DELAY 200000 END STOP AT CAPTURE STOP GUIDING STOP TARGETNAME "AD Leo after" PRESERVE CAMERA SETTINGS MOUNT GOTO "10 19 36.27 +19 52 12.1 " DELAY 20 SET GAIN TO 500 SET EXPOSURE TO 10 MOUNT SOLVEANDSYNC DELAY 20 END PRESERVE GUIDING START DELAY 20 STOP AT LOCALTIME "5:00 AM" CAPTURE START DELAY 200000 END STOP AT CAPTURE STOP

On the Sharpcap forum I asked if when doing a meridian flip PHD could be turned off to stop the loss of star alarm. Sharpcap have just released a manual update but I had a quick look through and MFlips are not mentioned. When a flip is required I stop PHD, park the mount, Re acquire the target, plate solve then restart PHD. I have used Sharpcap's sequencer but have not done this process in the sequencer. I also have the dome rotation to do to align with the scope. Experience tells me that so much can go wrong during this operation that its best to be awake and watching

I also have a tiny camera that is connected to a PI zero W2 This camera looks over the edge of the dew shield and allows me via Google (only) to look down onto the mirror to see how much dew is formed. I remember when testing it how well it performed .

I purchased a job lot of FTDI boards from Ebay but now find that they will only work on vintage laptops and not Win 10 or 11. Seems like FTDI wised up to the chip clones and windows does not recognise the device. There is a downloadable patch but every time an update takes place it blocks the device. I now pay more and only get genuine FTDI chips. Does not relate to the above but thought I would share my experience

during the day I have a wall mounted (inside the dome) Tapo CWS320 which is linked to my phone. It allows me to keep an eye on things during the day and is good for checking on dew on the inside of the dome and scope. I sometimes will use it to check for cable snags or mount position but when I turn the camera on the IR reflection on the inside of the dome will white out any image that is in progress so I have to pause the imagining run before using the Tapo camera

I have tried various ones and the best is the ZWO mini camera using Sharpcap with the exposure around two seconds. I use the wide field lens that came with other ZWO cameras' I have mine mounted on the scope so it looks through the dome aperture. Even though the inside of the dome is matt black I can see everything. I guess on a roll off roof you would wall mount it. Its monitored via windows remote desktop.

That link to ESAsky looks to be useful.

Daystar quark. Having seen images taken with this device on the internet I just had to have one. Try as I might it just never lived up to the hype. Thankfully the supplier took it back. My 500 year old second hand Coronado PST out performed it in every way. I know some have had a good experience with quark's but I was not one of them.

https://www.imo.net/listen-to-the-sound-of-sep-9-meteorite-fall/ The audio playback is at the end of the article

I have used "Blocklayer" a lot over the years.

I guess you were looking for a at the eyepiece solution but I see that the measurement can be made using plate solving and a bit of maths.

There is a paper on 3D printing one see https://digitalcommons.olivet.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1086&context=honr_proj Also on Cloudy nights a post on how to adapt a Unitron microscope filar (one on Ebay in the USA)

I don't see a problem if the stars in the subs are nice and round. I never worry about PHD graphs. The graph looks horrendous because its set to +/- 2 degrees. Alter the update rate from 3.0 to 4.0 if the seeing is poor. Use the stars in the subs as a guide to tracking performance

https://www.altairastro.help/info-instructions/faq/how-do-i-stop-dew-moisture-forming-on-the-outside-of-my-tec-camera-optical-window/

Can we engineer the problem out?

Getting a UKMON camera and so contributing to the citizen science project of meteor detection is my daily activity. My name gets listed in the papers that are published. You have to look for it as there are around 250 cameras active in the UK and with the availability of Raspberry pi's more names will be added this year for sure.

while waiting for some solutions and we get a clear night PHD will guide on a slightly out of focus star so don't loose out on a clear night. Like woldsman says more detail on the guide scope setup would help.