Hallingskies

Those first two shots are better than anything I’ve managed to get of them in 15 years... You are certainly a quick learner!

From the evening of October 2nd... It was a funny old night seeing-wise, and I was not optimistic of getting much of a result with only four hours-worth of subs. I was therefore pleasantly surprised how it all scrubbed up, especially as there is a trace of the gas shell from Cygnus X-1 as a bonus... Details here if anyone is interested...

I tend to stick with HOO and some RGB to give star colour, as I don’t care so much for the Hubble pallet. Your 5 position wheel would give you good service then. If you ever want LRGB you’d just have to create a false luminance from the RGB. That said, I have a bigger wheel with an SII filter which I hardly ever use - maybe it’s just me but I never seem to get much SII signal compared to Ha and OIII.

Satellite images show high thin cloud blowing over from the NE but I'm going to give it a go anyway...

Good thinking, but no, it’s an Atik 460. Should’ve said...

Just a couple of (probably daft) questions about this otherwise rather average image of M27 I put together last week. Firstly, there's a rather nice cascade of 12th magnitude stars just to the south of 14 Vulpeculae (the yellow star at the top of the image). I suppose such asterisms are ten-a-penny, but it seemed quite striking: it rather resembles a sea-horse. I couldn't find a record of it anywhere, but I just wondered if anyone knows if it has a formal ID as a "recognised" cluster? Also, I noticed that some of the brighter stars above (such as 14 Vulpeculae) appear to have faint diffraction spikes. I don't have a problem with that but as the scope is an Esprit 100, I just wondered where they are coming from!

Have never been to Orpington AS but I have found other local societies to be a bit “League of Gentlemen” to be honest! 🙉🙈🙊 That probably says a lot more about me than it does them, though...🤪

Those haloes must be frustrating for you. Everything else about the images are superb. I note you that you are using Baader filters, which I have never had any bother with - except when I initially fitted my old manual filter wheel back to front! Then I got off-set haloes on bright stars, just like yours. Put it on the right way and voila, haloes gone. Just wondered if you are using unmounted filters with that huge camera of yours. Apologies if I am insulting your considerable intelligence...🤪

Couldn’t agree more. If everyone used the same software and same approaches, wouldn’t it be a dull old hobby? There may or may not be “right” colours, but I much prefer to go with what I like for my own images. I personally find the “Hubble Pallet” way too psychedelic - we all know, deep down, that emission nebulae should be red, shouldn’t they..? But this is still a fine image by anyone’s estimation.

Thanks for the reply. Only value would be not having to wait 5 mins for recalibration. Wasn’t sure if duration of R.A./DEC pulse was critical for calibration, haven’t a clue how PHD does its thing. Like you say, it’ll soon tell me if I do something bone-headed!

If I change the RA and DEC speed settings in ASCOM pulse-guide, would I have to re-run PHD calibration? I'm guessing yes, but it would be kind of nice not to as I'd like to see the effect without having to recalibrate every time. Anyone know for sure?

Without wanting to sound facetious, the tool you need is “cutting up a bit of 10mm ply, banging a couple of nails in it and then cutting the nail heads off to make the pins”. I don’t know what the proper thingie is called either but making my own has worked in the past!

100% agree with that. Maybe you could just buy a new NEQ6 or its newer iteration, the EQ6-R. Only reason I put mine to one side is the Avalon came up and the backlash was definitely getting worse on the NEQ6 - but still nothing PHD couldn’t handle. Depends on what loading or focal length you want to run at I guess. I just recall that the NEQ6 worked well straight out of the box with default PHD settings. It is really responsive to guiding. It wasn’t often that I felt a need to tweak PHD. Polar alignment wasn’t helped by those awful alt-az bolts but I gather the EQ6-R is much slicker in that respect.

I was going to say NEQ6 but I see you’ve been there, done that. I have had one for 10 years, have done nothing to it and (depending on the seeing) got anywhere between 0.6 and 1 rms. Star shapes with my 600mm focal length and ATIK 460 were just fine. Umm’d and aaah’d about belt modding but picked up a second hand Avalon Linear instead. Lovely and quiet but better guiding? Not sure yet. If the Avalon works out long term I’ll be letting the NEQ6 go cheap, for anyone who fancies giving it an overdue 10 year service. I also have a 25 year old Vixen GPDX. I fitted the Skywatcher upgrade to it and got 0.6 rms out of it the one time I tried it (I usually use it as a semi-grab and go for planets). I did think about putting it in my obbo, but hey, the Avalon is shiny and red and Italian and it purrs like a cat... You often see the GPDX’s coming up for grabs second hand. It’s easy to adjust most of the backlash out of them and then they guide well.

Star hopping is great when you have dark skies. It was the only way to go “back in the old days” and the thrill of the chase was half the fun. As I have grown older though, both the sky quality and my eyesight has deteriorated. Often I simply cannot be sure that what I am looking at is actually there. Objects like M1 or even M97 used to leap out of the eyepiece at me: now I can seldom pick them out from the background murk. I use go to now, and feel no more “guilt” about that than I would about using e-mail rather than writing a letter and posting it.

I have the 2.2m dome and would probably do things a bit differently were I doing it again. Firstly I would have just gone for a dome-only build: I have accepted that the fibre glass body offers no security whatsoever. I would use concrete blocks with an adjoining warm room a second time around. I think there is a build thread on here along those lines and it looks superb. I ran a single 1 inch conduit under the base concrete and fed the armoured feed power cable to a RCD box mounted on a board inside. I used flexible ducts for lighting and power cables and stuck the duct bracket bases to the walls with fibre glass car body filler. It kept things tidy. I wish I had run a second duct for a data out cable as I now want to run some Cat 5 back to the house as an afterthought. I don’t think there is really room for a raised floor. I use a Pegasus hub on the scope and only have two cables to take back (data to the pc and 12v to the hub). I just put them through a standard floor cable shield stuck down with carpet tape. Power sockets and wiring is all attached to the walls as described. I have one of the additional cubby hole extensions and have put a pc desk in it for the lappy docking station with extra keyboard and mouse. Things would be cramped without it. You will need a dehumidifier in there as the fibreglass structure is a condensation magnet. Some folk say you can just use ventilation etc but I have found that just does not work. I have wired my dehumidifier into a Stego humidistat set at 55%. It comes on for about four minutes every half hour at absolute worst. Sometimes it doesn’t run for days, obviously depends on weather. I reduced the air gap between the dome and the body with 7mm p seal. That cuts down the air ingress without hindering the dome rotation and I only have to empty the dehumidifier once or twice a week, even in winter. I did have a plumbed in drain but that froze up. My pier is 850mm high I think - I got it from Pulsar at the same time as the dome. It’s just the right height for an NEQ6.

I’d not heard of the “Ghost Nebula” until seeing images of it recently on SGL. Is it the little bat-like thing at the top of your mosaic? Good image by the way. I never have much luck with the dusty stuff, I think my background light pollution is too much for it.

I bought a set of Primeluce rings for my Esprit 100 and had exactly the same slippage problem, so it’s not just confined to the Skywatcher rings. I had an auto focusser mounted on a dovetail below the scope and the slippage bent up the coupling, which I was less than happy about. Rather than faff about sending them back I just cut two strips of butyl rubber (left over from a pond liner) and stuck them in the bottom halves of the rings with double-sided tape. Was a bit worried the rubber might give rise to a bit of flex, but not a bit of it. Absolutely rock solid now, sorted.

The NEQ6 is rated at 18kg for imaging but with long focus SCTs your limiting factor is likely to be guiding accuracy rather than weight. Suggest you have a play with the Astronomy tools “CCD suitability” calculator http://astronomy.tools/calculators/ccd_suitability As I understand the theory of these things, your mount will need to guide to an RMS of around half of whatever arcsec/pixel combo you have. With a C11 fitted with a 0.63 reducer and CCD with 6u pixels running 2x2 binned, you are still right on the edge of what a good NEQ6 can guide at (though I hear good things about belt-modded ones).

Not me. My rig is in bits while I fit a new telescope and mount out and get all the wires and computery bits sorted. Should have done it all months ago. Clouds will roll in permanently when I am finally ready, that’s for sure...

Only sociopaths light bonfires in residential areas. “Hey, I’ve got some garden waste and I am too lazy and stupid to take it to a municipal tip, so I’ll mix it in with some plastic rubbish, burn it in the most inefficient and polluting way possible, dump the combustion residues over your property and let the toxic, carcinogenic fumes blow into your house when your windows are open in the summer. And if you dare to suggest that this may be antisocial, I’ll get angry and aggressive ‘cos I know my rights, I do....”

Cable City....!😱😱😱😱😀 Could not image in U.K. without dew heaters on both main and guide-scopes, probably same for you.

I am using the 6nm Astronomik OIll. There is some halation around bright stars but it is bearable and definitely superior to the Baader in my opinion, which put doughnuts around everything. Astronomik do not boast that there are “no haloes” with their filter and I think you get what you pay for.

My experience with the Baader Olll was exactly the same as yours. Reversing the filter made no difference.