Xilman

No need for you to emigrate. If your kit emigrates to somewhere with good internet connectivity ...

Buy two more to bring my total up to five.

2 hours ago, jjohnson3803 said:

You could buy a subscription to a remote imaging service.  I tried SLOOH for a year.  It was ok, not great, but was inexpensive and gave me something to play with when I couldn't observe at home.

 

In my case I use the 50% of the time spent in Cambridge to analyze data taken in La Palma. Keeps me active doing astronomy whatever the hour and whatever the weather.

Indeed, so many images have been taken that I have difficulty keeping up. Some from 2020 is still on disk and waiting to be processed properly. Only urgent stuff can be analyzed quickly.

A Heisenbug indeed.

The issue re-occurred after a few more hours up-time.  I had moved the FS2 to a possibly better cooled location.  The loopback test still succeeded after the comms to the FS2 became unreliable. Beginning to look very much like a FS2 p`roblem.

Anotehr test is to plug in a RPi with EKOS running and see if that sees the same behaviour after the Win box has failed to communicate. That test will have to wait until later.

1 hour ago, Franklin said:

If only we could all have problems like yours☺️.

You want not to be able to use your telescope for three months at a time and then be at the mercy of the clouds thereafter?

Curious,,,

On 27/07/2023 at 18:23, Mr Spock said:

So, the last time I was outside I had an hour and a half on the moon looking at Aristarchus and Gassendi. That was it more or less for June. I have had nothing in July. Nothing but cloud every single night.

Oh look, we have dark skies again, well, light grey for here. Sadly all I will see of it is more cloud. Is this just becoming a pointless hobby and we are all better off doing something less frustrating?

Could be worse.

I have three months at a time being unable to do any observing. My observatory is in La Palma and half the year I am in the UK.

Returning to LP a week ago I found that the telescope control system was having difficulties chatting to the dome, focusser and mount, so nothing has yet been done. With luck today's work will have solved those issues but, of course, the clouds are now building up.  Cloud over has gone from 0% to 50% in the last two hours and it is still quite a while until sunset.

I hate Heisenbugs.

This afternoon, in the full heat of the day, I started by running the loopback test. Both the cable and and the USB serial port passed with flying colours. Incidentally I already had Putty and psftp installed, the latter being the method by which I transfer images off the TCS.

I then fired up MaximDL and connected to the telescope, successfully. They were both chatting away without error several hours later, during which other hardware debugging was taking place so a few reboots were necessary. The link always came up perfectly first time.

No idea what went right, except that running the loopback test may have dislodged some crud in the connectors.

With a bit of luck some astronomy may get done tonight, though a little light cloud is beginning to build up.

5 hours ago, AstroKeith said:

Is your old one broken? 

Hard to tell.  It was old when I bought the observatory and contents. I have never managed to get the autoguider working very well but the mount is so good at sidereal tracking that much of the time autoguiding is not necessary.

The real problem is that the serial comms to the FS2 is becoming very erratic. Since returning to LP a few days ago  The Sky will connect satisfactorily for 30-60 minutes, then errors start appearing and eventually it won't connect at all. This behavior is very reminiscent of overheating but the ambient temperature, though warm (it is summer after all), is nowhere near as hot as it has been in the past when things worked just fine.

7 hours ago, Oddsocks said:

Hi Paul

Was looking for an alternative to the FS-2 myself a few years ago for use with a Gemini G41 mount.

Have a look at the Ursa-Minor MC3 MKII:

https://www.365astronomy.com/MC3-Mk-II-Motor-Controller-for-Telescope-Mounts?search=ursa

No personal experience of these MC3's though, at that time I bought a replacement Pulsar II controller for the Gemini as it was easier to stick with a system I knew.

Alternatively, maybe OnStep? although you would need to build that yourself:

https://onstep.groups.io/g/main/wiki/3860

Regarding RoHS rules, with very few exceptions, the same rules that allegedly prohibited the selling of the FS-2 in the UK/EU still apply to the UK after we left the EU.

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/rohs-compliance-and-guidance#full-publication-update-history

I had the impression at the time that the FS-2 was removed from sale in the EU that the issue was more to do with the legally demanding admin side and open-ended EOL manufacturer disposal liabilities rather than the materials and components used in construction, which could have easily been switched to RoHS compliant.

HTH

William.

Thanks for the information about the UMi MC3 MKII. That one is new to me and I will investigate further.

The OnStep was found through a web search and it looks very promising.  It is possible to buy fully assembled kits from Instein, as here https://instein.eu/index.php?route=product/product&path=25&product_id=72

Just heard back: the FS2 is on sale for UK delivery.

My mount is controlled by an Astro Electronic FS2 unit. The FS2 pretends to be a  basic Meade LX200 and does so very well. Full details are at http://www.astro-electronic.de/fs2.htm

Unfortunately they have not been on sale in the EU since 2014 because of RoHS regulations. There may be a loophole there, in that the UK is no longer in the EU and so that may be a Brexit benefit. I will try to find out.

However, if anyone knows of a similar controller on the market, please let me know!  A web search hasn't turned up anything yet but it seems unlikely that nothing is available.

Thanks,

Paul

On 21/04/2023 at 16:09, DaveS said:

A preliminary result from the ODK 12 and SX 694. 36 x 600 sec Luminance subs over the 18th / 19th. Stacked in AstroArt, DDP and Richardson-Lucy deconvolution, with a denoise to finish.

It's the ridiculously tiny bullseye in the centre. It does show a broken ring when examined at 100%.

Centre crop given another R-L deconvolution

Excellent result, coingratulations!

 It appears so tiny because the ring is only 10 arcsec in diameter.

5 hours ago, Stu1smartcookie said:

The most realistic post on this subject . Light pollution can be tackled ... but those wretched clouds ?... i'm not so sure . 

Also , there will be another twenty thousand satelites in low ordit to negotiate when trying to view anything . 

Move to radio  😉

Just as much light pollution but at least clouds and daylight don't interfere too much.

23 hours ago, JeremyS said:

They are called refractors 😊

Have you ever tried collimating a refractor? They are very far from being self-collimating and most those who have tried, starting from a set of separate lenses, tend to think that collimating a Newtonian is a doddle by comparison. The best that can be said is that, once collimated, refractors hold their collimation for a long time.

My scope is the worst of both worlds. It has two spherical mirrors and a bunch of transfer lenses, all of which must be positioned correctly. Luckily the manufacturer did an excellent job and no-one has been fiddling with it yet.

(I did note your 😊 but still thought it worthwhile to expand on your comment.)

I am primarily an imager and much more interested in science than in aesthetics. This colours my wishes and expectations.

What I hope to see

Inexpensive yet good quality spectroscopy.

Near-IR imaging (1-5 microns, say) to punch through much of the light pollution which plagues those who observe in the 0.3 to 1.0 micron range.

GOTO and plate-solving being almost ubiquitous so pointing to arcsecond accuracy becomes the norm.

Perhaps within 20 years: active optics, using field stars initially, to give near diffraction-limited imaging.

Software image plane linearization (no more distortion, coma, astigmatism, etc.)

Alt-az mounts driven in both axes and field-rotation as standard. Focal plane at either of the Nasmyth positions, switchable within seconds for two differing equipment installations, whether an eyepiece, camera or spectrograph depending on interest.

Summary: look at what the professionals have been doing for the last 30 years. If you look at what they were doing in 1990, many amateurs are now doing it today.

The ARPS section of the BAA is researching the properties of Themis group asteroids and earlier this year (1956) Artek was being observed by sundry photometrists, myself included.  Here is a stacked image with a scientific interest lying firmly in the range which runs from nil to negligible. The asteroid was magnitude 16.2 on the night in question, 2023-01-26. The precision photometry is being done largely to measure the rotation period of the asteroid and partly to determine its surface properties.

The Perseus supercluster of galaxies, aka Abell 426, is one oft he richest known and is relatively near-by so within range of amateur imagers. Here is my attempt.

Most of the objects in this image are galaxies. Those which look like stars are, by and large, bright galactic nuclei. Some are clearly surrounded by a diffuse glow.

Looks promising to me.  A higher than normal concentration of bright pixels, and, this is important in my view, of a reddish colour.

Remember that you don't have to take all your subs on a single night - this thing doesn't move around the sky.

Another TNO lifted directly from the BAA Handbook table of these things.  This one is (136108) Haumea which was 50.1 AU away from us when imaged (2023-03-21T0300Z) and magnitude 17.3 according to the MPC ephemeris. A 1600 second exposure (less than half an hour) unfiltered on a 0.4m telescope was used but either a tenth of that time or sqrt(10) times that aperture --- which is around 5 inches --- would have been easily sufficient.

Given that I have seen images posted to SGL taken with a 80mm refractor which show 18th-magnitude objects in the Andromeda Galaxy  (so lots of background light to hide things), there really is no reason for imagers not to try for 17th-magnitude objects other than apathy or a lack of self-confidence. Agreed, visual observers of TNOs are likely limited to Pluto.

I very strongly recommend that you go with what you have. You already have sub-seeing resolution and easily enough aperture and camera sensitivity to reach below 22nd magnitude within a single clear night. You could quite likely reach mag 24 by collecting subs over a week or two,

(Incidentally, I have over 1200 hours subs of a single field yet to be analysed. I will be very surprised if the faintest objects detectable are brighter than 24th magnitude and they could well be below 26th mag. One day I will analyse that field and report back here at SGL)

What you have described is very much  sufficient to image the Cosmic Horseshoe,  so go for it this spring if the weather will let you.

More generally: those of us with 12-20 inch apertures these days can take images which would have required 100-200 inch apertures only 60 years ago. CCD cameras and modern image processing software have made an amazing difference.  Amazing to me, anyway.

38 minutes ago, Elp said:

What sort of focal length does this need?

It depends on the resolution of your camera. The smaller the pixels on your camera, the smaller the size of each pixel on the sky for any given focal length. My scope has a focal length of 2600mm (400mm at f/6.5) and a Starlight Xpress 814 camera which has 3.7 micron pixels, giving a native 0.29 arcsec per pixel. I run at 2x binning except under unusual circumstances so each pixel is 0.58 arcsec on the sky. Note that is markedly smaller than the seeing (typically 2-3 arcsec), and that oversampling permits subsequent super-resolution in software. My diffraction limit is 0.31 arcsec, so 1x binning is used for experiments with Lucky imaging, not that I have done much of that so far.

A pixel size in the range 0.3 through 1.0 arcsec is likely appropriate for this object. The ring is 5 arcsec from the center of the galaxy, which will be 2.5 arcsec in radius when the seeing is reasonable. This diagram may help in which each "pixel" is 0.3 arcsec and R are ring pixels, _ are sky pixels, and G are lensing galaxy pixels, assuming 2 arcsec seeing.

RRRRRR_______GGGGGGGG_______RRRRRR

Do not take this too literally. Reality will depend on seeing, your camera, guidinjg/stacking, and the like.

Remember: no-one said it would be easy.  A whole bunch of people have said, and proved, that it is possible if you are prepared to give it a try. Who wants an easy life anyway? It can be excessively boring.

35 minutes ago, Elp said:

Any imaging is beyond the abilities of all amateurs due to cloud.

Seriously, I would do such things with better weather.

You only need one night of decent weather, something which will almost certainly happen within the next two months, even in these ${DEITY}-forsaken parts.

Added in edit: not even that.  The CH doesn't move so you can stack subs taken over several small periods of half-way decent visibility.

This one is for REAL men, REAL women and REAL small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri.

Almost all known gravitationally lensed objects are beyond the abilities of almost all amateurs to image with a reasonable amount of data collection from reasonably sized telescope. The Cosmic Horseshoe is a notable exception. It is the BAA Deep Sky section's object of interest for March 2023.

Here is my attempt.

and here are the technical details: https://britastro.org/observations/observation.php?id=20230225_235430_a0cc7592c8804113

David Strange has picked up the lensing galaxy but did not wait long enough for the lensed galaxy to show up.  I am certain he could manage it.

OK, so what are you waiting for?  Let's see some more images of what are truly deep sky objects. Neither an exceptionally large telescope nor particularly dark skies are necessary. They lie in Leo and so are easily visible from essentially the whole world. All that is needed is a desire to expand your comfort zone.

2 hours ago, Paul M said:

I always enjoy boring people with the distinction between precision and accuracy... 🤩

Do you mean "I always like (boring people with the distinction)" or "I always like boring (people with the distinction)"?

That is, is "boring" a left or a right associative operator?

😉

Doh!

I have nothing to declare but my incompetence.

2023-03-21 to be more accurate.  2023-03-21T02:00Z to be more precise (and more accurate, for that matter).