RikM

Yep, April 9th in my local Lidl.

Is that right? How about if my stars are round but bigger than they should be?

Fair point but I have not seen that with my images. If the seeing is good, I can have quite a lumpy graph and small tight stars or conversely a flat graph on a poor night and star are all spikey rather than smooth. Other than when it throws a tantrum and guides the scope into the floor, I haven't seen a correlation between a flat graph an a sharp image. Other things always seem to have more of an effect.

Of course I could well be wrong and I'll happily be corrected but that's the way it's seemed to me.

Hi guys! Here I am testing PHD with my webcam in the main scope first. Seems to be guiding but the graph looks like the Alpes. Any suggestions from you guys with the same setup?

So long as your stars are round, forget about the graph.

There's no green and black in my EP case (yet). I went for a nice set Pentax XW's for a number of reasons.

I have an f/4.7 scope so wanted something that could cope. Having had an 82° Meade, a 60° Vixen and a 68° Hyperion and after looking through some of MarkC's Naglers at SGL5 I realised that I prefer the 68 - 70° field to the wider 80°+ fields. I also don't really like the golden hue the TV's give. I wear glasses to observe, so long eye relief is a must. The Panoptic range don't have quite the focal lengths I was looking for and Radians are a bit narrow. The Delos look very nice, but I want a full set of something from high to low power and they don't have all the models out yet.

The XW's ticked more boxes than anything else and I have not been disappointed. I still don't think I will get a 5mm XW, but a 2.5x Powermate will find it's way into my box before too long. The 7mm XW works very well with even a cheapo SW barlow.

I don't think this will matter with PHD since it monitors star movement during callibration and will simply take the rate differences into account when issuing guide commands.

Yes. That seems to be the same with the EQ3-2 dual motors. When you press the left hand RA button in 2x, it just cuts power to the RA motor so that objects drift across in RA due to Earth's rotation. It says something about it in the motor kit booklet I think.

No worries, seeing as you've been "forced" down the laptop route. Can I also recommend APT www.astroplace.net - APT - Introduction

brilliant piece of software the basic versio is free, and the full version is only a few euros.

I would second APT as an image capture package. Does a fantastic job and the full version is a steal at less than £12.

USB.

You can do USB to PC and control via EQmod pulse guiding, or USB to PC and ST4 to mount and guide 'on camera'.

With PHD you choose your camera, chose your mount connection, press 'loop', click on a star, press guide and wait for calibration to finish, (takes a few minutes), when it's all done the crosshairs turn green and it says 'guiding' in the bar at the bottom. That's it. Press 'go' on your camera. ...even I can't screw that up too much.

I think what he is saying is probably true to a point. The idea of guiding isn't to 'move the star back into the centre', it is to keep the calculated centre of the star within the borders of the airy disc so the star appears round within the seeing conditions. So a blip on the motors at siderial rate would probably lead to overcorrection, but I don't think it would be enough to loose the guide star off the chip.

I still think your current difficulty is down to backlash rather than guide speed. Once you have the backlash sorted with a tweak on the worm gear, then the guide speed issue will come back to bite you. I am afraid I don't know how the smart guider system works but I can't see how electronically pressing the handset buttons is going to give you pixel scale guiding with 1m focal length.

Sorry I can't offer anything in the way of a solution as I am a DIY muppet. I just point it at the sky and press buttons with my fingers crossed.

I would say the 'motors not moving' error is due to backlash. A half second pulse is nothing when you have to hold the button for 2-3 seconds before the backlash is taken up. With an eyepiece in, how long do you have to press a button before you see movement?

I hope you get something sorted but wouldn't read too much into your piggy back shot coming out so nicely. With a camera and lens you can get quite long exposures even unguided if your PA is close enough. Your PA must be good to get the unguided shots you have been getting.

If you fancy a break to give yourself time to relax try bolting your camera on to dovetail bar and just take unguided widefields. With your good sky and good PA and with the shorter focal length and less weight on the mount (without the scope) you should get some great shots.

I can get a good 3 min with a 300mm lens unguided on an EQ3-2. e.g.

Edit: another image upload gets an extra stretch thanks to SGL. This looks fine hosted elsewhere, here it's got nasty vignetting

I bought a c mount to straight through finderguider adaptor at £28 from Modernastronomy. Guider Cameras @ Modern Astronomy

I just unscrewed the eyepiece bit off the back of the finder, screwed in the adaptor and then the cam and it was as close to focus as I needed. My QHY5 looks much the same as the LVI so should focus at about the same place?

Is the LVI C-mount, T-mount something else?

I would still get rid of the barlow.

Do you need the barlow in the guide cam for focus? 9x 50mm finders are about f/4 which is perfect for guidescopes, you get nice a nice bright image and a good wide field of view so you don't have to go hunting for guide stars. Adding the barlow dims the image, narrows the field and make it 2x as difficult to focus. If you don't need it to focus I would ditch it.

PHD prefers slightly out of focus stars because it uses the star disc to calculate the exact centre to get sub-pixel guiding, tighter stars give it less to work with.

I bet you won't be able to resist a 30mm Pentax eventually!

Nice though they are, I think I will be able to restrain myself. The 30mm is a 2" barrel and I hate changing the adaptor also my sky isn't dark enough to make proper use of a 30mm on extended objects. If I want a lower power view of clusters, I'll just use the 20mm in the 6" f/5. Finally, for the same money I could get a PST or a modded DSLR

Last two. My collection is complete (except for maybe a 5mm TMB )

There is no cure, but you can suppress the symptoms by getting a small scope and sticking a camera on it.

Take two and call me in the morning if it's no better.

f-ratio is important. A 6" f/11 might very well best an 8" f/5 on most typical nights observing planets.

If you are talking about a ~5" Apo like a 120ED, then yes they do give very nice views, but the 8" f/6 Dob will still show you more detail and at 1/4 or less the price.

I think the views in the 5" f/9.4 achro refractor I have are good, and on some nights they really are very good, but I have done quite a few side-by-side comparisons with my 10" Dob over the past few months and as a result...the frac is back in it's case in the shed and the Dob is by the back door ready for action whenever there is a break in the clouds.

If you mean Achro rather than Apo then I either own or have owned one of each of scopes listed (plus a 5" Mak). An 8" f/6 Dob in good collimation eats the others for breakfast.

Updated EP case. With a bit of luck the 30mm Vixen and 8.8 UWA will be replaced with 20mm and 10mm Pentax XW's at Christmas.

Great service from FLO once again. I contacted them last week to ask about how I would know which day a scope would be delivered and was told I could choose which day suited me best and they would contact the importers to reserve one for me. Monday 13th I placed an order for a Skyliner 250PX and asked for a Wednesday 15th delivery. 3pm today (Wed 15th) Fed-Ex dropped off my shiny new scope

Can't ask for more than that.

Very many thanks to FLO and James in particular.

Here's mine. Standard Maplins case with cutouts for EP's, finders, Cheshire, tools, battery pack and hand controller plus a red light torch.

I also fitted a string of red LED fairy lights to the lid

Planets never look very big in the eyepiece. With time and practice you will be able to see more detail.

First class service again from FLO. I might have only ordered a polarscope and 2" LPR filter, but here they are safe and sound a matter of hours later. Many thanks.

Rik