Dark knight 101

Hiya, very nicely done, how long where your exposures to make that work? And was processing difficult? I'm in 2 minds weather to get a skywatcher ed72 or a startravel102 for imaging, my fear is being able to control chromatic abberation on images with bright stars. Did you shoot many other targets worh your st80?

You certainly are sorted for small refractor scopes. Your triplet apo would harvest great images, I'll take a look at your images as soon as I have learnt to navigate this forum. I'm still learning how to go places and see stuff.

For sure I keep all my gear inside, have to pile it up in a corner in bedroom, wife hates it but my gear loves it

It is!!! It seems it would be a decent rich field scope for visual observation. If I do take the plunge and buy one f these little scopes, I'll try a bit of imaging with it aswell. I simply cannot afford the awesome ed apo refractorors with flatteners and what not, married with kids and wife would kill me if I rocked home with one. I also found a thread with an image that was taken using the scope. Someone had comented that the level of chromatic abberation / blue halo on stars was less than would have been expected from an achromatic refractor. Also a plus, I love imaging under the stars and I can live with imperfections at that price. I am seriously thinking about ordering one up!!!! Would you consider one yourself?

I am loving that photo olly, as soon as I work out how to load it in it will be there Sorry I should have been more Clear, I have watched the mounts behaviour with out guiding, checked for snags, tried balancing and mount fails to calibrate if go to east heavy. One thing that does repeatedly appear is no east movement detected and no south movement detected during calibration. ???????? I was just wondering if eqmod could be used with my enhanced dc motor drive to analyse and improve the mounts behaviour to eliminate that as the cause of my bad guiding. I see that there is a st4 to usb cable that can be got, and that the option is there to use it in phd2. st4usb (ascom). Wondering if the method will even work for my cheap mount, and if so is it an improvement over oncamera method I am currently using with mixed results. Strong possibility I have much to learn about phd2. Aswell lol. Just dont want to buy the £34 cable if it doesn't work on my mount. Thanks to olly and thanks to anyone else who might be interested in my nightmare lol. I have attached a log that I saved that was the best guiding in ra I have achieved had to turn dec guiding off. Would that be considered acceptable for the eq3-2 mount? I think I would be happy with that if I could consistently get my graph that nice!!! I will attach a log of typical bad guiding, the guiding I normally have to deal with, it just doesn't work most of the time I'll go hoke a bad log out here. Clear skies

Cheers that was an interesting read louis

Hi everyone, I bought the enhanced dual axis motor drive for eq3-2 mount, I have it guiding but have bad guiding most of the time due to what I believe is the periodic error of the mount, the image settles for a minute or to and then goes off on one for about four minutes till it returns to starting position. Any how my question is this, can I use an eq mod cable to connect mount via ascom? I am aware that there would be much functionality as the motors are dc rather than stepper, but I was hoping that I could use pecprep to try and sort my guiding problem. Has anyone any experience with this please as phd cant guide my mount very well at the minute. Thanks everyone in advance Gary

Stumbled across this thread, did you buy one of these scopes in the end?? would be interesting to see how it performs.