teoria_del_big_bang

I was hoping to use my ASI1600 with this rather than the QHY268 as I would leave that on the Esprit. 
I have seen others using this camera on tis scope so hopefully should be okay.

Steve

2 minutes ago, Clarkey said:

Don't be. I felt similar when I got my RC8. Collimation is tricky, but once sorted it is relatively simple. I now have my own method which works quite well. I collimate the secondary first (lining the centre spot reflection with the centre of the focused draw tube. I use a Reego, but you could probably do it with a Cheshire. I then align the focused directly with the centre of the secondary to get a near alignment. Once I have done this I use a star test (or lights on the M6 a few miles away also works) to get the primary collimated accurately.

WRT a reducer /flattened you will probably be ok without. I use my RC8 without a reducer or flattener and it is fine. I do have a CCD67 which is good, but not needed. As for the focuser, mine was iffy and I replaced it. However, it was better than many so you might be ok.

Work with it. I think they are great scopes.

Thanks 🙂
I will, I think I just saw so many negatives on other forums really not so much SGL that it worried me, now I feel much more confident. 🙂 

Steve

Thanks @vlaiv that gives me a lot more confidence and sounds a better idea to try what I have and then upgrade as I feel necessary.

Steve

2 hours ago, Alien 13 said:

Regarding Astro project or indeed any semi mechanical part whats the best filament to use? bear in mind I am using a magnetic bed so stuck with PLA..

Alan

I think probably ABS would be best for most astro projects but in my early days of printing I really struggled with ABS as it has a real tendency to warp and so the corners of your print curl up (quite dramatically sometimes, and you end up with a  base that is nowhere near flat.
Now I have a better printer and an enclosure (enclosure really helps as I can regulate the temperature inside the enclosure and generally run at 30 degrees so the part cools much more slowly, also it eliminates any cooling draughts) I can now print ABS without so many issues but because of my early bad experiences with ABS I started using PETG which is also very strong, slightly more flexible than PLA and much more UV resistant (not that I suppose that matters so much unless you are into solar stuff) I tend to print with PETG. Its cheap to buy, prints really well, adheres to print surface really well without any glues or hairspray and the like, so I can recommend PETG, and the one I use most is eSun from Amazon. Normally is around £19 for 1Kg but they often have price reductions and last year bought several Kgs as it was down to less than £13 per Kg.

Steve.

Having just acquired an IOptron RC6, through an impulse buy, I have spent most of today reading up on what I need to do to get this scope imaging.
And to be honest I am now a bit scared and thinking maybe this scope is beyond me.

So the scope is cheap fr what it is but what scares me is how much more cost and time I need to put into this to give me good images.

• Difficulties in collimating.
• Stock focusser weak and poor design with the  focuser tube is attached to the primary mirror cell.
• In the description for this scope it says the RC optical design delivers coma, spherical and chromatic aberration free results, perfect for color or monochrome imaging and as such did not expect to need to add a flattener or reducer to the optics but most of what I have read so far suggests you need to use one.

So my major worries are:

• I do not have lots of experience with collimation, I have collimated newts but I think these are in another league regarding difficulty in collimation.
• If the focusser is not up to job then that needs changing.
• Do I need a flattener or reducer, and if so which is best ?
• I also understand that a tilt adjuster for the focusser is a good idea so once the scope is collimated you can adjust  out any tilt.

So whilst a lot of this does not necessarily faze me I do worry that I am throwing far more money at it than the cost of a the scope  would cost new. Hence to add all the above refinements the £400 scope then becomes a £1000 scope.
 

Are my worries justified and would I need the upgraded focusser, tilt adjuster and flattener / reducer ?

Steve 

11 hours ago, Elp said:

I find it fulfilling overcoming an issue by making something myself.

Agree, one of the main reasons I like this, the designing maybe more than the printing , which can have some frustrating issues from time to time, but its that feeling you get ehrn you have designed something from scratch and then hold it in your hand, moving parts and all.

Steve

Really nice images 🙂 

So sorry for your sad loss too.

Steve

Thats a great image 🙂 

Steve

Designing the objects is fairly straight forward using a CAD program.
Solidworks is great and well worth using if you can get the discount .
I use Onshape which is free for personal use.

I had no idea when I started using this because although an engineer (mechanical and electrical.electronics) all my life I never had used CAD before.
But basically you draw shapes in 2D, and can be lines joined together or preset shapes, circles, triangles polygons of any amount of sides, then you extrude them into 3D shapes.
Lots of other tools too but that's the basics.
Then its just practice.

So as an example to draw a gear:

1. Draw a circle.
 

2. Add a tooth

3. Instruct CAD to do a circular pattern to repeat the tooth 30 times so no need to draw 30 of them

4. Then Extrude the shape to make it 3D

And that's basically it.
Okay you would want to add a few refinements such as chamfers and maybe make it a bit more lightweight but there just as easy.

Okay not perfect it does take a bit more working out if gears are to mesh smoothly without too much backlash but that is just an example how you can knock these things up in a few minutes with only a little practice.
Honestly, If I can learn it (maybe not master it) then anyone can 🙂 

Steve

1 minute ago, Stuart1971 said:

Yes and not even RGB the the L-Xtreme  filter is narrowband, Ha and Oiii only…👍🏼

Yes good point I missed that

With the amount of users having 3D printers I would very much like a sub section in the Equipment section for 3D printed Astro stuff (not really just any 3D stuff as this is an Astro site).
That way would be easy for us to share STL files for astro gear and find them easily instead of searching the DIY section.

Steve

I think that looks good for around 2 hours of RGB data

Steve

S

16 minutes ago, Alien 13 said:

I have only had my printer a few days but the things I want to print grows daily, as for upcoming astro projects these will be a screw on solar filter holder with a 77mm thread to fit my camera lenses, a screw in bat mat mask for the same lenses, wifi or maybe bluetooth controlled DSLR mount (for general photography), Tracking mount for my mobile phone....

Non astro Items include upgraded parts for my Grado headphones, case for my Fiio BTR5  plus various other thingies, however I am still in the printing printer upgrade parts mode.

Alan

Sounds like you are going to be putting your printer to more use than some of my follies 🙂 

Steve 

This was one of my favorite projects a Rubiks cube solving robot.
Not my design I just printed and assembled it then made this video.

Steve

As said above it is a hobby, certainly with cheap printers, and by cheap I mean under £1K to £2K.

It however is one of my hobbies and one I enjoy.

Have I spent more then £200 - yes far more. My original printer was one from Ebay at around £120 and I was impressed how good it was (for the price) but it was fiddly to set up and every so often major issues with the prints  that meant a partial strip down and rebuild, but it was useable and certainly got me into the hobby.
My next (and current) printer was an original Prusa, cost a bit more at around £700, same size and in theory capabilities as the first, but the quality was so much better and so much easier to keep printing good quality.
Does it run forever without intervention, well no but intervention is required much less but does require maintenance every now and then.

And, I think that printer would have done me, with maybe just a replacement part every now and then but as it is my hobby I have upgraded the extruder and hot end adding another £300 to the price but it prints really nice prints, pretty fast and reliably.

Have I printed anything useful - well yes, but in all honesty probably only about 10% of what I print are useful other things are just out of curiosity, full size very realistic skulls, dragons, vases, Notre Dame cathedral, Section of a jet engine, internal combustion engine, Marble runs, need I go on.

But also I have managed to make repairs on several items around the house that saved a bit of money, such as some bits for the Dyson vacuum cleaner.

So as a 3D hobbyist I would recommend one but be prepared to be constantly tweaking things to get prints right on the cheaper printers, and to waste about 50% of the filament you buy, so whilst you think it is good value getting 1Kg for £20 in reality you probably will throw half in the bin, so essentially costing £40 per Kg  (not good for environment I know that is another battle I have with my conscience 😞 ), but 1Kg does go a long way as the things you print are not solid, they will have a number of outer layers then a sort of 3D honeycomb structure inside to save plastic and printing time and are just as strong. 

By the way you ask about Astro stuff I have made quite a few bits for myself and other SGL members, Handles, brackets to hold RPi's holders for USB hubs, and my latest some very nice rollers for my planned roll-on roll-off Obsy that has saved some money on buying them and means  can make just the right size I need.

I think if I were just printing files I found on websites I would be bored by now though.

What I really like is doing a 3D CAD drawing of something and then printing it and having it to touch in real life, it still amazes me.

And here's another completely useless print done recently:

Steve

2 hours ago, Jonny_H said:

What about Ant & Dec.... Dec is the smallest one out of the two and so is the Dec axis on the mount visually? 

i havent figured out yet how to bring Ant into it. Maybe 'R'ant about Ant 😉

Great idea, problem is I can never remember which one is Ant or which one is Dec 🙂 

But after this thread I can now reverse engineer it and because I know my RA and Dec and can use that to remember Ant and Dec 🙂 

Steve

7 hours ago, vlaiv said:

Never thought of it

Here are some possible ways to remember things by - Ra is Egyptian sun god - and sun moves across the sky as does mount track in RA?

RA is right ascension - mount can rotate left/right in axis that tracks earth rotation?

Deck - or platform is something stable that does not move - DEC axis does not move when mount is tracking normally?

 

Now, I like that one 🙂 

Steve

16 minutes ago, Gasman said:

Slightly off topic but does anyone use PI for anything other than astro?. I have a license for PI but never really got into it when I did astro but now I mainly do microscopy and wondered if it could be useful with 'normal' short exposures jpegs and Raws?. Also had a thought about now using darks and flats for microscope shots although with short exposures noise is not really an issue.

Thanks

Steve

I don't personally, but then do not really do much with photos other than astro stuff.
All the program does in the end is mess about with intensities of individual pixels and the program has no idea what sort of image it is working with so yes it can be used for any sort of images and I guess the standard stuff such as the Histogram transformation, colour saturation and some of the noise removal stuff will work fine but things such as stacking frames requires stars so I do not think would work.
Also many of the processes are dedicated to astro needs so probably will either not work at all, or will not really be of any use.
So yes it will have some use (I guess) but you would be far better off with PS or other similar cheaper software such as affinity photo and for the cost of affinity photo would not bother trying to use PI on other images than astro stuff as I think it would be just too hard to get it to do what you require compared to the many other photo imaging software that are largely designed to cope with photos other than astro images.

Steve

Steve  

23 minutes ago, scotty38 said:

Worth pointing out that a lot are free especially the extremely well done WBPP series

Ah okay I was not aware there were some free ones.

Steve

I too can highly recommend Adam Blocks tutorials. However, they are not free and so probably an unnecessary experience if you just have the trial period and may not stick with PI long term.

I think one question I have is if you are used to PS is it just the fact you have an never-ending ongoing cost to remain with PS or are you hoping for better images with PI, whether thats in conjunction with using PS or instead of PS ?

PI is very different to PS in the way it works and the way you use it and I think people who are well used to PS often find PI very difficult and struggle to get into the mindset of how to use it because they are so used to PS.
For me it was the other way round I chose to use PI pretty early on after processing my early images with the easier but more restrictive programs such as Nebulosity and whilst I would not say it was easy to get to grips with I did manage it without too much pain (although mastering it is far more tricky and I am still not there yet), however, I have since tried to use PS and I find I struggle somewhat with that.
A few people do mange both PI and PS really well and then use both for various tasks to process their images.

 So really just a warning really, that if you are very conversant with PhotoShop you might just struggle to get going with PI, and believe me that 45 days (or whatever it is you get for the trial now) goes really quickly, I think I emailed them after my trial had ended to say I was still evaluating it and they gave me a 2nd trial period.

Also using past data you have already processed and know to be good data and process it again with PI is a great idea and as you are familiar with the data and the image you first produced will help speed things up.

Steve 

Just now, fozzybear said:

over here they have a high price tag why god knows

I am not sure how much they are new in UK but that does seem excessive.

Steve

19 minutes ago, fozzybear said:

by any chance a Bell mixer as the trash we have over here no use to the home owner unusable loved the orange UK version either on the ground or on it;s stand 700 euros here

https://www.outillage-btp.com/betonnieres/914-betonniere-minimix-150-mono-220v-90-litres-5031403060778.html?gclid=CjwKCAiAx8KQBhAGEiwAD3EiPwKzFi25vocTxaCrL1aB-Ab92rBtVousHvzQrRPnMmvcCDAUVoy_wxoC-dgQAvD_BwE

 

Not quite a nice looking as that one but that's the exact model I have. 
Considering it was well well used when I got it, it has served me well for at least 15 tonne bags of aggregate and I don't know how many bags of cement.
Like I say one winter I did strip the gearbox down and replace the bearings and give it a coat of paint but what a workhorse it has been.

Steve  

8 hours ago, david_taurus83 said:

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. 

Luckily I have had a mixer I bought second hand 15 years ago for £25 and after one overhaul with new bearings and an oil change in the gear box is still going strong.

Steve

1 hour ago, david_taurus83 said:

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.

I would also very much agree with this.

Steve

14 hours ago, Matt S said:

Stunning - I can’t offer any advice as I’m not even a novice with imaging, but I can see plenty of detail in that second image and the colours work really well for me. 

I agree it is a great image.

Also, very much like yourself, I probably do not have the experience to critique a superb image like this but it is always worth following these threads and pick up the advice given to others.
To the unknowing when you look at the first image you might not easily pick out the fact it maybe had been over worked on the de-noising, and despite it still being a great image it potentially could be better as can clearly be seen in the second attempt.

So one bit of constructive advice can help so many, I think always worth following these threads and not just look at the original image.

Olly has mentioned in a few threads not to go mad with any sort of denoising which is often the complete opposite of what you see in many so called tutorials available, and I am now beginning to see what great advice this is.

@barbulo Some fantastic data there and initially a great image and a second superb image, what a start to Mono 🙂 

Steve