AstroMuni

Hi and welcome to SGL. Go to a local astro club. You can lookup here https://www.firstlightoptics.com/locator.html. That should give you the opportunity to physically try out scopes and get hands on advice. Good luck! To make a quick start get a pair of binoculars. Sometimes there are good deals at Aldi/Lidl for their 10x50 binos. You will be amazed at what you can see even with those.

BTW, Ekos is not really geared for planetary captures. I tend to use Firecapture for that. So use Ekos to manage the mount etc and Firecapture for the images. In your case run FC on the Linux laptop nearest camera and remote into it from your laptop inside your home. You can run Kstars from either device.

What is the setting against Save: in Capture tab? If its local it will save on device where Kstars is running and if Remote then the device where indiserver is running. You can also set it as Both. Hope this helps But its indeed odd that images are stored locally but videos are not. What tool are you using to capture videos?

I use an Android phone and use https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.astrotools.polarclock&hl=en_GB&gl=US

I have a question - if a Bahtinov mask is in place are the HFR readings (taken with mask on) meaningful? I have seen tools that show both the deviation of central spike and the HFR and in my simple brain I thought that due to the diffraction spikes we would not be able to accurately measure the HFR.

I am not sure we are both talking the same units....At 11pm the hour angle is around 10pm on a 12hr scale. Great image for only 60 x 90s

Are there any vendors in UK who sell the 571 cameras?

But is there a genuine change or just a name rebadging? It appears that optics wise nothing has changed (atleast no mention in any specs) and its just cosmetic changes. So pretty hard to figure out if its worth buying the latest version or just get one of the older ones!

Anyone from @FLO who can throw some light on this?

Stellarium has an option to set the Bortle of your location and adjusts the star visibility to show the effect.

I have been looking at the range of WO GT81 scopes that have been made since around 2014-15 and I am utterly confused about what has changed. As far as I can see the old edition was a triplet, had a camera rotator. In the middle the GT81s did not have a rotator, but with GT81 - iv this feature seems to have been brought back. The carry handle has changed a bit but I am looking at whats changed in the optics? And to confuse matters there was one version which was a doublet ! The spec of the glass seems to be pretty much the same. Am I missing something?

Yes it can allocate more than 4gb per app. The author @RadekK is aiming to release 64bit version later in summer is my understanding.

More like out of stock entirely 😞 hence the guys with any stock are making hay while sun shines. No longer. Check this out https://www.raspberrypi.com/software/operating-systems/#raspberry-pi-os-64-bit

Others have answered your basic question. In simplistic terms the more the lenses/mirrors you add to your optical train the image is going to deteriorate, as each of these surfaces will not be perfect and will cause imperfections and also absorb light. And in astronomy, we are aiming to get the most photons from those distant sources. Hope this makes sense.

Have you seen this? https://binocularsky.com/binoc_reviews.php and the Best buys section on this page https://binocularsky.com/binoc_choosing.php

Thats true. If someone could model which days are going to be cloudless more accurately then I am sure that person will soon become rich. :-) In our local astro group we tend to use different apps to forecast and each one says differently. So in the end its a matter of averaging the results or relying on your own sources, including your own sky temperature sensor etc. So having a tool to forecast in advance will be a great addition! And when you live in a country where the Gulf stream and Jet stream influence your weather so much, its key to forecast the behaviour of these two!

I personally find that doing local platesolving is way faster, hence I opt to do that. I use the internal solver in Ekos.

Out of interest dont you keep the data files on your pc for offline solving?

Have you taken a look at the Clear Outside app/website from FLO? https://clearoutside.com/forecast/50.7/-3.52

The point that you used a laptop in the past made me head in that direction. I was assuming that you connect the laptop to the mount to build the model. If that is indeed the case you could connect your laptop to a wifi hotspot from your mobile phone and achieve the 15 sec interval time stamp from the time server. Other Mesu owners maybe able to help with more pertinent advice.

Scotty38 has answered your question 🙂 Once you have chosen something which you like post your specific queries in this forum and folk will be able to help. Good luck.

If you sync the laptop clock with a time server then you should be good in that case. If you are using Windows I think it picks up time from time.windows.com. You can alter the frequency of when it checks with the server.

Where was the previous version getting its time from?

I'll second that. Its a great camera, albeit with a small sensor.

Take a look at this advert. May give you ideas for pier