david_taurus83

What is the main difference between the AZ4 and AZ5? I was thinking about the 5 myself?

Long overdue review on this but the weather has been terrible. I seen a fellow SGL'r recommend this neat auto focusing unit and I couldn't help treating myself to an early Christmas present. I ordered the AF1 unit and the DC Hub late one Sunday night and early on the following Monday morning I had an email from Pavle thanking me for the order and that it would be prepared and shipped within a day or so. Any questions I had were replied to promptly and I was kept up to date with the progress of the order's preparation and shipping. 7 days later the package was received and I fitted straight away. The supplied bracket and it's pre drilled holes were a perfect fit for my William Optics GT71. Unfortunately, the supplied belt was a bit too tight upon fitting. I contacted Pavle to let him know. It wasn't a big issue as I had found a similar belt on eBay with a couple of extra teeth and would try that instead. Nonetheless, Pavle offered to send a revised housing for the auto focuser which would allow some adjustability to slacken the belt. This was offered free of charge. In the end I didn't need the revised housing as I was able to utilise the longer belt. I had to wait 6 weeks until I could finally test it! I only use APT at the moment and it connected to the focuser without any problems. With regards to auto focusing, I have had mixed results with APT. I believe I have some backlash in my focuser and I need to spend some time ironing this out. For the time being, I am happy to stick the bahtinov mask on and focus remotely from indoors. This process took considerably longer when I was focusing manually. The DC Hub is also a nice compact unit which sits just under my USB hub and has enabled me to tidy up my cables somewhat. Overall, I'm very pleased with the unit. It's light, compact, well made and has considerably shortened the time I spend on focusing. Pavle has been a pleasure to deal with and I wish him all the best with his business! David

It didn't know I was there!

Had a visitor last week while imaging IC405.

No more worrying about dead batteries

Laptop issue it is then. I thought all USB3 was backwards compatible with 2.0. Not the case it seems. Hope you get it resolved. Please post back up if you do.

Have you tried a different PC just to rule out the camera? Like I said, I've not had any issues myself. Perhaps an email to ZWO if you can't solve it?

Hi. I have a laptop with both usb 2 and 3. Never had an issue with my ASI120 on either? Also, with my ASI1600 which is USB3 it works no probs on USB2. Even the USB hub on the ASI1600 is only USB2 and the 120 is plugged into that. What makes you think you need to update it?

Hopefully the final piece of my imaging setup.

Should just take 3 second exposures if that's what you've set! It should show up as a greyed out preview as it's likely to be way over exposed during the day.

The quest for round stars continues..

It's tighter than I thought. I'm adding an auto focusser so need to rotate the scope with knobs upwards. Need to move the guide scope forward by adding another dovetail in between to do this. But my motto is "..if it doesn't fit, get a bigger hammer.."

Postie brought me a big empty box. It's perfect.

Ok thanks. Pavle uses the same camera as he's answered some of my questions about his DC power box. Looking forward to it now. Should be here in a few weeks!

Ordered! I never thought I'd need one as I used to just focus at the start of the session and it held solid all night. But since switching from DSLR to mono, and checking focus for each filter, it's a bit of a faff to go out each time. How do you find APT works with auto focusing? Or do you manually check HFD and adjust yourself?

Tracking? Guiding? You wouldn't notice any minute movements visually through the eyepiece but a camera will record them.

Looks great! I kind of wish I had kept my EQ5 now so I had a grab and go. Could double for a refractor and a Newt. Was there much work involved?

Is that an EQ5 in Alt/az mode? If so, how did you get it vertical?

Similar to my other thread, I'm interested to know what acceptable curvature is on a flat field. I wouldn't expect it to 0% curved though. With CCDI i think you need to load in around 10 images or so for an average to beat the seeing and variable FWHM values. I'm hoping to do this tonight if it's reasonably clear to try and get the optimum back spacing on my flattener.

I have the same focuser on my 200p. Great for bringing a camera into focus but for visual I need a small extension for all my 1.25" eyepieces. Just so you know!

@Wirral manis selling all his AP gear, HEQ5 and ED80 amongst it. Worth giving him a shout.

Yes, I made the perfectly sane choice to go from a working everytime DSLR imaging setup to this mono nonsense! Weather is predictably forecast bad for the week so will at least get it all setup indoors and make sure laptop and USB hubs are all friendly to each other.

Woke up to this email this morning. On a Sunday! Gurpreet you absolute legend!

I have the Polemaster but ironically I use it just for Sharpcaps polar align as it's more accurate! I get sub arc second guiding this way. Have yet to test it's accuracy when used via the guudescope.

As promised: