Stickey

God, I hate smart text 😳

The chimneys about there being better astro-imaging software packages than Affinity Photo are no doubt true, but it has one huge advantage over many of the other specialist image editing tools - it's much, much cheaper and it's permanent licence covering all your computers. No having to pay a subscription or a separate licence for each computer. It also comes with a Gradient Removal tool, I think it's under the Filters menu. James Ritson did several You Tube videos on using it for astro work and has produced a suite of macro to perform common astro techniques and there are a number of 3rd party astro macros for Photoshop. Most of these will work on Affinity Photo to. It's quite memory hungry, so you'll need 8 MB or more.

Hi Rojay Welcome. Your going to have a wonderful adventure here 🙂. Regards, Mike

AFAIK, DSS shouldn't care what camera you use, as long as it can handle the image files. It produces. Most such cameras can produce RAW or JPEG or both. I'm not sure whether DSS can handle Sony RAW, but if not, you could convert them 16-bit TIFF. Generally, JPEGs are considered to be too "lossy", but depending on your target and how good the JPEG files produced by your camera are, they may be good enough for use in DSS. Give it a go and good luck. 🤞

Beautiful image, Chris 👏

Hi there. Congratulations on your gift, now all you need are a few dark nights 🙂. I believe that the Celestron Powerseeker has a focal length of 1000mm. This means that you'll get x50 magnification with the 20mm eyepieces and x100 with the 10mm. You'll see the larger planets, but perhaps not as big as you'd like in the view. Typically, you'd want x200 magnification to get a really good look at Saturn. This is where a Barlow Lens can come in handy. These effectively multiply the focal length of the scope by the amount in its description - a x2 Barlow multiplies the f.l. by 2, so you'd get x200 magnification with your 10mm eyepiece and a x2 Barlow. However, with Barlows, the more you pay, generally the better you get. The same is true for eyepieces, so if yours are just stock eyepieces, you might benefit from getting better ones before you invest in a Barlow. Hope this helps. Mike

Ditto for joining a local club. I joined a club a few years ago and the amount I've learned is incredible. We also have club observing sessions when a bunch of us get together at a nearby dark site and do some observing. Any issues, there's always someone to ask and pandemic permitting, they can help you sort it out

Cool 👍

Welcome, and I second the above post.

Welcome back, Bazz. Mike

For me, it is my ZWO ASIAir, without a doubt. I tried hard but unsuccessfully to achieve Polar Alignment using the Polar Scope, but I could just never achieve a decent alignment. When the AA arrived and I hacked a RA finder scope to take a 120MM Mini, PA became a doddle. My best was 6", but regularly achieve <20". Then add the Goto feature, aided by plate solving to put the target bang in the optical centre and observing became a joy. Instead of spending most of the time trying to get PA and find the target, now the vast majority of my time is spent actually observing my targets. The AA has been transformational for me.

Hello and welcome, Claire. You could have a look for M31, the Andromeda Galaxy. It will look like a fuzzy blob in your scope (a nice one, btw), but it blows my mind to realise that it's another galaxy, bigger than the Milky Way, containing perhaps 1,000,000,000,000 (1 Tn) stars. It's 2.5 Mn light years away but heading towards us at 110 km/sec! Don't worry, it'll take ~5 Bn years to get here

SGL recently updated its access policies to restrict access to the Classifieds section until users have submitted enough posts in the general fora. This happened to me too. Until then, most of the retailers have Used Equipment offerings and there's always the "other place" - AstroBuySell

The main reason for the sturdier mount for astro -imaging is the need for a rock-steady image during long exposures. This is even more so with long focal length telescopes like Daniele's Skymax 127. Tbh, that scope isn't a great one for DSOs. It's much better suited to Moon and planetary work. The targets are much brighter and exposures shorter, which means the excellent HEQ5 @ £700-800 2nd hand is probably a bit ott atm. Undoubtedl, it's a great investment if the OP intends to get into deeper and fainter targets in the not too distant future, but for now, is it really necessary? I've tried to find the weight of the Skymax 127 without success, but given the entry level mounts it's bundled with, I can't imagine it's too heavy. However, none of the bundled mounts are much good for a heavy scope or imaging of DSOs. PeterCPC suggested an ordinary Alt/Az for Moon and planets or for future- proofing, maybe an EQ5 or the hybrid AzEq version would suffice for now?

Hi Daniele, It all depends on the weight of the scope and all its ancillaries. You should also be aware that the weight limit for doing astrophotography is usually lower by about 30% than that for visual observation. However, if you're mostly going to be doing planetary imaging, that's probably not such a critical concern. I'd expect a package of telescope and mount to be reasonably well matched for visual observing and planetary imaging but if you want to upgrade to a bigger scope, you'll probably also need a better mount. Buying separately enables you to have some "top cover" in the mount. Hope that helps, good luck in your search 🤞

I subbed up for these macros. There is a lot of them in the set, some more intuitive than others and a Jerry says, the simpler ones can help give you a quick look at what needs fixing. The individual steps of each macro appear in the history tab and you can explode them and tweak the parameters. Welcome to the wonderful adventure game that is astrophotography 🙂

FYI, Dave Eagle is the author of the book mentioned here - He's very helpful.

Hi. That's one beautiful M33. Congratulations 👏. But you say the problem is you want a bigger FoV. How much bigger? There are a number of online FoV simulators that you could use to work out what scope aperture would give you the desired FoV with your camera. As Vlaiv explained, it's maybe not just as simple as aperture size. In addition to FoV simulators, there also one that calculates Pixel Scale of a camera/scope combination. Apologies, I can't remember the name but you should be able to find it easily enough

I've got a very similar one to this and it does work very well. I've taken some nice photos of M31 and Sirius but a couple of pieces of advice - 1. The clamps that grab the e/p are hard plastic and need a folded eye cup to grip on to. If the e/p just had a hard metal surface, the grip can be a bit weak. A bit of insulation tape sorts that out. 2. Depending on the angle of the scope and the weight of the phone, the adapter can flex a bit and the phone camera come away from the central hole a mm or 2, allowing stay light into the shot. A bit of masking or insulation tape fixes that too. Mike

Do you mean between the lens elements or simply on the telescope-facing surface? And what kind of telescope is it?

I struggled to get good PA with my HEQ5 Polar Scope, until I got an ASIAir. That , for me, was probably the 2nd best investment i ever made in astronomy (the 1st being a scope🙂). I think it will work with a Canon 800D, it works with most modern Canon and Nikon DSLRs, but you'd need to check. I can usual achieve <10" accuracy, which means I don't need to guide as I'm not into narrow band imaging and very long exposures. The same device offers catalogue-based (M, NGC, IC etc) goto, with optical centering and it provides imaging sequence planning and execution. It works with a mobile phone or tablet and can be velcro'd to the tripod to protect against an accidental drop. It may not be relevant to you, but it also means I don't need to carry a laptop to a dark site with concomitant reduction in dark adaption and risk of damage from it being dropped.

Bit of an update on the original issue. It seems to have resolved itself. I'm still not getting 30 f.p.s., more like 20. But the good news is that I'm able to capture images and get some decent stars. Not sure why it's fixed itself - maybe just a driver issue. Thanks for everyone's help. Long live the SGL community! Mike

Excellent image, Grasmere 👍

Beautiful image, well done. Looks like that scope is a good'un. Thanks for sharing it. 👍

Wow, respect 🙏