George Gearless

Matt Damon not only did a pretty good job. He did a fantastic job. My caveat was only because I wasn't sure how much the very enjoyable read I had with the book, rubbed off in my assessment of the film. On a side note; Enders Game was an absolutely gripping read. I swallowed it down in record time and just couldn't put it down once I got started. Then I found out there was a movie too. It had Harrison Ford and Ben Kingsley on the role list, so I thought 'this gon'be gooooood'. Yikes! What an embarrassment of a movie. An absolutely toe-curling experience. The book, however, I highly recomm

I see a lot of movies in common on my list: The fifth element Equilibrium (a very overlooked and underrated movie. Not just Sci-Fi wise) 12 monkeys (not sure if this is Sci-Fi or just post apocalyptic) Logans Run The matrix Contact The martian (although I'm not sure it would be on my list if I hadn't read the book first. The book, as almost always, is way better than the film) Star Wars, A new hope or Empire strikes back Bladerunner District 9 As I wrote this, I probably re-arranged the order 4 times. Still not sure :).

I think there is a good chance that you are in fact not looking at Mars. Even though you may not be able to see many features of the surface with your telescope you should at least be seeing it as a disk. Not a point (a star) as you describe. I use the free app, Star Tracker to find my way around the night sky. Especially when there's a planet to be found. It's on google play.

I did three things to try and improve my tracking: 1. Painstakingly checking, checking and re-checking that the mount was level. 2. Whenever possible, I use the mains (230v AC to 12v DC) instead of battery. 3. The mount doesn't come with a counterweight. But it does have a threaded hole for it on the opposite side. I was fortunate to have a rod and 2½ kg counterweight from an old "cheap as chips" mount I bought ages ago. It was a perfect fit. It shouldn't be necessary, though. I'm just mentioning it in case you're as fortunate as me to have a rod lying around you can use.

We all know it, but often forget it. We spend many hours trying to 'follow' a target in the night sky. But what we're realy doing is compensating for our own earths movement. I found this video quite thought provoking. Hope you haven't seen it before. Not sure but I thought this part of SGL was an appropriate place to post it. It's the earth that's moving.

Couldn't agree more. Since I've discovered the usefulness of Stellarmates platesolver, my photography has taken a giant leap forward. Takes 30-60 seconds depending on how many iterations it has to go through and autocorrect the mount. But once it's done, it's always smack dead center. Every single time. It's a wonderful invention.

With respect to your gear, that second picture is pretty much flawless. I have a 180Mak too and I'd be thrilled to get a shot like that.

The non existant problem has now been solved. Here's an explanation of what happened and why I mistakingly thought I was in monochrome when I realy wasn't. When you open the files in DSS that you wish to stack, a list is created with a description of each file. Such as exposure time, ISO (if relevant), Dimensions and...Depth. When I stacked the first batch I noticed that it said '8bit greyscale' in the description. Upon stacking I saw that the photo was monochrome and the histogram was black and white only. I then checked my settings in Ekos and sure enough, the depth was set to 8 bit. Aa

I have used several programs. But my prefered program is DeepSkyStacker. See my response to Skyhog for further.

Will do. Worried about what you said about this being reported before. We'll see. Yeah, considering it's 8bit grayscale sloshed together with no darks or any other post production, it's at least recognizable

Hmm...very odd. I seem to remember theres a 'factory default' setting or reset button in there somewhere. Maybe I'll try that. When I find it :). Thanks, though.

Indeed I should. I did try and stack the images that I got even though they were 8bit grayscale. This was what I got from a quick stacking. As you can see, no colours:

Hi all. I've been using my ZWO385MC for planetary purposes and my DSLR for DSO's. I've only ever used my 385MC with Sharpcap. It's been working fine. So the other day I wanted to see how it would fare on DSO's. I use Stellarmate and Ekos for that purpose. I took some test pictures and was quite enthused at the result and decided to go for a longer sequence. Each picture looked fine in the Ekos Fits viewer and so I left it to its own devices for about an hour. The next day to my dismay I found out that all my pictures were 8bit grayscale. Argh! It was really my own fault for thin

4mins with an AZ GTI is pretty impressive. Even in EQ mode.

First image. There's nothing quite like it, is there? Congratulations on a very nice first picture.