Tomatobro

If the dome is a new one then the supplied rubber seal does a good job in sealing the door against wind blown rain. On mine the weather comes in predominately from the west so I put my door on the east side. The door catches the wind when open and can be pulled out of your hand so some form of tie back helps

Am I correct in interpreting the title that you want to plug in a USB3 lead (5 volt) and have it stepped up to 12 volts output?

there is something weird going on that is for sure. Untouched kit locked away in an observatory that was working like clockwork before when reactivated after a spell of cloudy nights throws up all kinds of issues even though a daylight power up test was done earlier in the day.

Take a look at the UKMON website. The camera is part of a citizen science project where recording of meteors is done on a national basis. The software records each meteor track which is later analysed but one of the features is that each track is recorded on a single image i.e. they are all combined or stacked so we can see every meteor. The camera kits are £185 and you need to add a raspberry pi to complete the setup. The cameras have to be rigidly mounted and carefully calibrated but once done its all automatic. I get a daily emailed report of the 100 brightest detections and its associated data. I should add that you get a lot of help during the setup phase should you encounter difficulties

And here is last nights stack. Very impressive!

UKMON capture stack of last nights Geminids

A picture of the problem might help us make some suggestions

I was thinking about Kelling Heath and Kielder star parties for example

I wondered what the imagers at some of the more remote star parties do for power. Do they run generators during the night or use batteries and recharge during the day?

Point it near enough straight up and adjust the position so that the lens is seeing all sky with no trees or buildings etc.

Massive downgrade......stick with the PC.

I need to mention that I use geared stepper motors and build and program my own design focus controllers so my experience is limited to my own hardware and not commercial equipment. It starts to get expensive where dual rigs are involved and could not justify two commercial focus controllers which is why I did everything to keep costs to a minimum. I think each focus unit cost around £5 for the stepper motor, £3 for the drive belt, £6 for the toothed pulley and about £20 for the components to make the focus controller.

Its not perfect over the full span but the discrepancy is so small that about 10 teeth engage before it starts to ride out. Give that 10 teeth are more than enough to drive the focuser even with minimal tension I settled for that. After all its not a Cosworth DFV!

Even with a "slack" belt it works fine. On one of my lenses the tension on the pulled side of the belt pulls the optical train out of alignment so i always instruct the focuser to reverse a couple of stepper motor pulses to centre the optical train and even out the belt tension but I see this only one one of my Samyangs. For this reason I do not tighten the belt over the lens but just enough to prevent the belt from riding out. Even with level of tension slippage of the belt does not occur. Perhaps one reason for fitting a separate drive pulley close to one end is to apply the offset load of the belt closer to the focus support mechanism.

The focus barrel on the Samyang is 2mm pitch so a toothed belt will drive it ok so I don't understand the need for the extra drive pulley. it almost looks like the designers did it this way for toothed belt focusing.

Not commercial. Tomato and I noticed a big difference in the asking price of used lenses between the Sony and Canon versions and that no adapters were available for the Sony so we took a gamble an purchased a Sony to see if it could be adapted for use on ZWO cameras. Picture shows what we did to make it usable

To use the Sony version of the 135 F2 it requires the rear plastic extension piece to be removed and a custom shorter version to be machined up, Its held in place by the same three screws as per the plastic extension. The rear of the aluminium extension is then machined to take a M42 adapter which Flo supplied. When focused at infinity the rear lens is very close to being flush with the end of the adapter.

Well I never.........So it does

Try creating and using a virtual ram disk using the free software. Just remember that when the PC is powered down you loose all the data in the virtual disk so transfer it to the hard drive before switch the PC off

Flo has some in its accessories

There is a back issue available for £4.29 on Ebay Ref 202988062334 Will still have a look through my collection though.... No luck, April 2016 is the nearest I have so must have lgiven it away

Do you know what issue the plans were published? I have quite a collection of back issues that might help March 2016....will have a look through my collection in the morning

Big Dobo?

I used to take time to level the pier head before putting on the mount until I realised it was not necessary. To convince myself I levelled, polar aligned and tracked then deliberately shorted one tripod leg, then polar aligned and tracked. Even though manufacturers fit a bubble level levelling the mount base is not required for equatorial mounts.

I had that problem! I made a short extension piece to go between the mount and the tripod to give the camera clearance. The skywatcher extension tube was out of stock.