fifeskies

Sun looks a bit grumpy about being photobombed today

18 hours apart so not strictly a full day , but hopefully might get more this week to add to the set

Fife this afternoon , showers about and thin high cloud , but worth a go anyway  

Zwo585 and 2x powermate

I have the Altair pier with 4 bolt rat cage set at about 100mm spacing between plates.

Guiding my EQ6-R with around 15kg on it , I get guiding of around 0.4 to 0.6 arcsecond accuracy most nights with a balanced payload.

This is already better than seeing in UK skies so the rat cage is not causing degraded performance as far as I can see.

I also have a pulsar pier with no rat cage in my ROR, guess what , I don't see any better guiding with my AZEQ6 , tho I usually only have my smaller rig (8kg) on that pier.

So in my experience, for my location and rigs, there is no difference in performance to having a rat cage top to the pier or having no rat cage.

for reference my pier has 4 x 16mm diameter threaded rods between the plates.

(if you were to have thin long rods , say 300mm long 8mm rods , then you will probably encounter significant vibration)

Dull and grey morning finally cleared away , but some high thin cloud still.

Sun over Fife

And now at 10:45 , looking at the main spot

Taken from Fife approx 8.50am today.

The image is taken using a Baader Coolceramic Herschel wedge and a Continuum filter.

Vixen 80m scope with a 2x Powermate.

Video capture with Sharpcap, best 100 out of 2000 frames stacked. ZWO 585mc camera.

Processed to false colour yellow/orange from the original green image.

Been clouded out for weeks so good to get a clear patch this morning over Fife, Scotland.

It is worth making sure you have the FTDI drivers loaded.

They are supposedly downloaded automatically with some win installs , but I found that direct download of them solved my "driver not found" errors which stopped EQMOD working for me.

VCP Drivers - FTDI (ftdichip.com)

(remember to reboot laptop after download)

I cleaned my OOUK mirror without removing it from the cell.

As long as you allow it to fully dry before powering up the fan again it will be fine.

Distilled water and cotton wool balls is the way to do it.

Only needs cleaned if there is a lot of dust on it though , a small amount will not matter a lot.

My mirror had several years of dust build up so did benefit from cleaning.

Pour the water over the mirror first to wash off any loose dust, then just be very gentle and wipe from centre to edge using each cotton ball just once,

That's the big group off round the edge now, not much other sunspot activity just now.
Image gives a nice view of the "Limb Darkening" effect , where the edge seems a lot less bright than the main disk.

Turned out to be a display screen problem

I use win10 pro and "remote desktop" to run my dome.

There is a PC inside the dome connected up to all the various bits via USB.

From there a single Cat6 cable travels the 25m to the desk beside my cosy woodstove where I have my other PC set up.

Never had any problems logging onto the dome and watching the magic happen.

4 hours ago, Pete Presland said:

 Registax will not accept very large video files, max is 2GB

I think the 2GB limit is actually the 32 bit Microsoft Windows limit on file size.

I use Registax 6 on a 64 bit Windows computer and process full disk solar captures of around 50Gb.

Also make sure you have the latest version of Registax 6 as file handling for large AVI has been tweaked in latest versions.

(Note: this will take forever unless you have a fast PC with lots of RAM and a very fast SSD storage drive , I have 32GB of RAM, an NVMe SSD capable of 6Gb/sec read/write and a multicore processor at 3.9 GHz, and it still takes some time to complete)

Astronomy Threads Explained (agenaastro.com)

Hope this helps

While that will work it gives no control over the heating straps , ie full on all the time.

You generally need to reduce from full output, mine run around 20% to 40%.

Only higher if very heavy dew on a cold night.

There are several options for in-line control that sit between the PSU and the heating strap itself.

interesting to compare rotation from yesterday

32 minutes ago, Ouroboros said:

I’ve seen those connectors. You reckon they’re OK do you?  I don’t like that they look open at the back end. There won’t be any shock hazard but it’s still open to damp.  I might get some though just to play with. 

Among other ways to seal these other than grease are :-

 adhesive lined heatshrink

(But this makes for a very rigid connection)

Or self amalgamating tape

(This forms a flexible rubber like sealed cover, but remains slightly sticky for a while)

I should have added,  I use a big 13.8v linear supply, so can easily cope with a voltage drop of a volt or so out to the mount.

If your supply only delivers a flat 12v , as CraigT82 has mentioned above you may need to use heavier gauge cable.

Most of the re-wirable adapters can be persuaded to take up to 2.5mm stranded cable, but check the exact ones you are considering , they vary in quality.

Crimped termination sleeves to the cable ends can help to fit them into the adapters.

rewirable adapters allow you to easily make up any length of high current DC cable without having to solder large cables onto small fiddly tabs.

I use 1mm 2-core rubber cable (or 2-core 0.75mm for shorter runs)

It can be a good idea to also use an inline fuse.

Rule of thumb is that focus will change by 1/3 the thickness of the filter , so a typical 3mm filter will add 1mm.

It is because the refractive index of glass is not the same as just air.

To focus with Ha filter and Bahtinov , just push camera to high ISO , just remember to lower it again before imaging.

False colour image derived from Green continuum filter.

Derived from narrowband continuum filter and Baader Coolceramic Herschel, Vixen SD103s

Zoom in for full view

False colour conversion from Green original.