david_taurus83

Great guiding tonight. I haven't touched the mount. Simply switched from EQMod to GSS and PEC train. Also, the pointing accuracy is spot on. Slewed from home position to target and was within 52 pixels without platesolving. Meridian flips with NINA also work flawlessly.

I will echo my comment at the top, its like having a different mount.

Guiding will transform the mount. It will correct for periodic error and slight polar misalignment. It doesn't need to be too expensive. A small 30mm guide scope will be fine and a camera. £150 all in if you look for used kit.

2 hours ago, pipnina said:

Sadly not at the moment, which of course would be great to add to my setup but I hear even without guiding my HEQ5 should manage some shorter times (like these 2 min shots) without effects as severe as those shown?

Im not sure of the exact specs for the HEQ5 but I can tell you a conservative figure for my AZEQ6 periodic error is say 30 arc seconds peak to peak over the 7 minute worm cycle. Thats a shift of over 4 arc seconds per minute and would be 8.5 seconds over one of your 2 minute subs. If you are using a 250P then I reckon you are shooting at less than 1 second per pixel so on my mount that would be an 8 pixel movement over the 2 minutes. Perfect polar alignment wont fix this I'm afraid. As David points out above, it is probably a combination of all things considered. If you are shooting with a focal length of 300/500mm then you will have a better chance.

Are you not guiding?

Its right. 21mm + 16.5mm + 11mm + 6.5mm = 55mm

3 hours ago, callisto said:

Sorry for my stupid question....does postmix work for this type of project? 🤪

I personally wouldn’t use it. I think I mixed 20kg bags of ballast and 25kg bags of cement at 4:1 which is a strong mix. Perhaps 12 bags ballast, 3 cement? Something like that.

On 17/02/2022 at 18:09, Same old newbie alert said:

The NE and SW spikes look like they need a small tweak but the rest are spot on. What's going on there?

On 12/02/2022 at 22:13, teoria_del_big_bang said:

Thanks for the info, I just need to dig a big hole now, you don't fancy doing another one do you, I will pay the train fare 😁

Steve

Lol digging the hole isn't too bad! Just chip away at it, no need to break your back! If I was to do it again though, I'd have hired/borrowed a mixer for the concrete instead of mixing in a mortar tub. I'm the king of procrastination yet I found that just getting started and getting the hole dug out is great motivation for getting it completed quickly. Just plan your method and materials well and its hard to go wrong. 

Hi, I work in this industry (construction, new builds) and depending on the local authority, they may have a dimming profile, also depending on the road if its a cul de sac or main spine road through the development. Your unlikely to get any changes to the approved illumination profile now as they are designed and finally approved by LA. Also, they will not be adopted by the LA until the roads on the entire development are finished and adopted so they may brush off any queries and point you back to the developer. Do the streetlamps in question light up your garden? Last year where I lived I had 3 sodium lamps on each side of my garden, the worst one to the south yet I still managed to image. All is not lost!

1 hour ago, wimvb said:

Which gadget is this?

It's the hand controller for the enhanced axis motors. 

1 hour ago, Elp said:

Do you find it wobbles due to shift of COG? I get it with my 130pds esp on a windy night using my imaging tripod so I had to upgrade it naturally.

Didn't notice it really at the eyepiece and tried a bit of lunar photography with a spare guide camera and it was pretty stable. It is off centre of balance as when the tube is over 2 legs it doesn't take much effort to push it up off the opposite single leg but it's not on the edge of balance where a slight breeze will push it over. I will be putting a weight on the tripod though to lower that COG for safety.

Edit: Again pointing out that this is a Heritage 150 so half the weight of a normal 150P.

Platesolving near the pole prior to issuing a goto command can be problematic as the mount could end up with the wrong side of pier being reported. This has happened to me and this is probably why people will say this.

Platesolving near the pole for polar alignment though is absolutely fine as that's what EKOS, Sharpcap, ASIAir all do.

7 hours ago, LaurenceT said:

@david_taurus83

what scope is that?

Heritage 150P

Brief gap in the clouds tonight so first light for my new little GTi. I'm using the handset from my AZEQ6 and after a simple 2 star alignment its got M42 more or less centre of eyepiece. Not bothered with a counterweight and it's absolutely fine. It's been so long since I've used a Synscan handset though, need to learn it all again.

19 hours ago, AstroNebulee said:

It looks amazing David, been waiting to see someone mount the heritage 150 on an az gti. Are you going to add a counterweight to it? Would love to hear when you have first light with it 😁

Thanks! It copes OK without the counterweight but when the tube is over 2 tripod legs it's close to the limit. It won't tip over but I will prob add a weight to dangle from the tripod to lower the centre of gravity as a precaution. Speaking of weights, I'm not buying another one so I'm going to make one out of an old Bisto tube, some plastic sleeve and some home brew concrete! For imaging I will only have a Redcat 51 and Canon 6D with mini guidescope so not too much.

I just enter the coords manually into every software including NINA. If there's a slight difference though NINA does ask if you want to import the mount coords (EQMOD or GSS or on mount GPS) to NINA or export NINA to mount. I always chose mount to NINA.

Hi Steve,

The hole was 900mm deep but I only filled with concrete 500mm thick. The ductile iron pipe is 1.4m long and I didn't want it any higher than 1m above ground level as by the time you add an adapter (brake disc) and the mount, your scope will be near eye level anyway. It's been great so far, polar aligned when first fitted and I haven't checked it since. Best upgrade you can do short of a full obsy. 

I've got another one of these (had one a while back) for some portable imaging but also to use for the occasional bit of observing. The mount has the EQ firmware on there so need to mount my Heritage 150 on the right hand side.

Uh oh! That wont do! I thought i was going to have to get the drill out and poke some holes in the tube but thankfully the 3 screws are spaced correctly so was able to rotate the truss assembly 120° to get the eyepiece up. 

Does it all work until you go to use PHD and the guide camera?

Doesn't matter which way round the Dec is long as there's no chance of cables snagging. Really should have a counterweight on there if the scope is left on as well.

Have you tried removing the Hitec Astro hub from the equation and plug everything direct to your PC/laptop?

I've just found out that GSS only does PPEC with compatible mounts so yes, it is save to the mount.

22 minutes ago, Stuart1971 said:

 can you then record the PEC curve into the motor controller with GSS, so it’s there all the time…?? I would assume so,  it I don’t know, this can be done with EQMOD and is very useful….

I believe it does as the light on the mount started flashing when I done it. 

27 minutes ago, Stuart1971 said:

You would have gotten the same Improvement with EQMOD PEC, it doesn’t interfere with PHD2, as long as you don’t use the `PHD2 built in PEC algorithm…at that same time, that’s when you have issues….

GS, is ok, but it does nothing for me that EQMOD does not, and it can be buggy too…

Perhaps, but the single slew pointing accuracy I experienced last night? No chance with EQMOD. As @malc-c points out above, EQMOD was developed for 2 mounts and I've long suspected if the generic HEQ5/EQ6 driver was correct for the newer range of SW mounts like the EQ6R and AZEQ6. GSS is still being developed with the latest version only released last December. It correctly detects my mount as an AZEQ6 with correct gearing ratios etc. It's my first time trying it so can't comment on any bugs yet but my first impression is very positive. 

Been looking at doing a PPEC on my AZEQ6 but see conflicting posts on a few forums that say the EQMOD AutoPEC may cause conflicts with PHD and dithering. So decided to give GSS a go. Wow! It's like having a different mount! Heres a shot of the mounts typical PE as measurements by the guiding assistant. Almost 40" peak to peak which is about right for these.

So i done a PEC training session on GSS and enabled it once complete. I noticed an almost instant improvement in guiding which was hovering around 0.6/0.7RMS without PPEC. This is typical of this mount on most nights but there's a lot corrections being applied and peak to peak can be around +2/-2. After enabling I noticed straight away the flatter graph and tighter target grouping. Decided to run guiding assistant again to see how the PEC application was working out.

Masive improvement. Theres a steady drift over 2 worm periods so the figure is doubled in the above pic but it went from around 30" down to under 8" over one cycle with the GSS PPEC applied. I let it guide for a while after this to try and get a picture of the stats which were around the 0.4"RMS mark, sometimes into 0.3's but of course a band of clouds moved in and messed that up. 

Another nifty trick GSS has is the ability to force a pier flip (near meridian flip on command). I calibrated near 0° and moved  to a star (3 Orionis) that had just passed meridian prior to running the guiding assistant. I forced a flip and was surprised to find it was very close to centre in one swoop. Very close. Within arc seconds. To test it wasn't a fluke after I finished with PHD I sent a goto command to slew to M81. It slewed from more or less due south right round to M81 and got it centre frame in one go, no platesolving or syncing. I've never had that with EQMOD. Would be 2, maybe 3 movements and syncs to get on target. Hopefully it's not a fluke and is repeatable next time out but GSS is looking very promising.