ZiHao

Managed to get few shots of the moon during the lunar eclipse in the occasional, brief moments of clear skies in the thick clouds.

D5300, SW150/750, PS

Here I have two exposures, one properly exposed for the details of the moon, another exposed for the shadow of Earth. I have tried Dylan O'Donnell's method on merging the earthshine on Photoshop and also Aurora HDR software, neither of them works. Any suggestions?

Hello all, back again with some moon shots and here to seek for some feedback from all!

Attached is a completed image stacked from 30 shots at ISO 640, 1/1250,processed in Registax and Photoshop and a raw image. Equipment: SW 150/750, Nikon D5300

I tried to record a 5 minutes footage of the moon in MOV format and then converted into AVI. But Registax seems to be unable to process these much of data, so I went back to stacking images instead. Does stacking frames from a video yield sharper image? I was expecting sharper results as the seeing yesterday night was good.

Pointed my telescope to the sky through the window, it shows the center spot but not the focuser edge. Second picture was how I attach the cap, is it correct? 

Found a guide on internet just now, the references in it are almost identical to mine. So I have to adjust the primary mirror as the black circle is bias to the right, anyway, I will do a star test first before making any adjustments.

http://www.opticalvision.co.uk/documents/203.pdf

Weather has been awful these days and I decide to check out my newtonians collimation. Picture attached is taken through a diy collimation cap. Do I need to collimate the scope? I notice that one of the primary mirror clip looks 'smaller' than the others, means I have to adjust my secondary mirror? If yes, how? I don't have either a Cheshire or a laser collimator. Thanks. 

After months of experimenting and practicing, I finally managed to achieve pretty decent polar alignment for my eq3 mount by doing drift alignment by Robert Vice plus drift alignment tool on PHD2. Make sure you choose the correct stars on the required portion on the sky, and use a good compass to roughly aim your tripod leg to North or you could use this method https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPdQ9pU9GJA , it really helps a a lot, trust me. Get ready to sacrifice a lot of imaging sessions just to master all the techniques to polar align  . At first I feel that living on the equator was very troublesome, but it provides a mixture of deep sky objects from both southern and northern hemisphere, which is the reason of why I love here now haha..

Problem solved. Eventually I have to update the firmware of the camera after trying multiple solutions. I heard that the original version is more stable, the latest one will somehow lower the frame rate, I am not sure. Anyone has any experience with this?

For reference:

The another laptop works fine, but that is not mine, so it would be more convenient to use this laptop for imaging.

I can't connect it to PHD2, Sharpcap as well, All the drivers installed, from the device manager it says :

This device cannot start. (Code 10)

Insufficient system resources exist to complete the API.
 

Recently I bought a new laptop and two of the USB ports are 3.0 therefore it is not compatible with my USB2.0 ASI120MC without updating the camera's firmware. I am worried that after updating it, does it affect the performance of guiding very much? And do I update my camera using another device that has USB2.0 port? Thanks a lot.

Clear Skies

So eventually the handset continue to function as usual when connected to the complete setup? Mine doesn't light up even though it beeps when connected to a power supply during update ( the firmware update failed ) so I think only if the update is successful then the handset will function as usual?