Leeps

DIY cooling is awesome. I was talking about my DSLR cooling project on an astronomy discord and they were just laughing at me. It's an interesting way to learn things and get nice results it seems, rather than relying on companies to do things for you.

This is what I found on astronomy.com about it: So I guess you can take that as the magnitude prediction, and consider similar distance supernovae for the apparent sky size of the event? Edit: Well our pal B is 650ish LY away, and the crab neb is 6500is LY away, so you can expect this to be 10x the apparent size of the crab nebula 😮 2nd edit: And if the crab neb is around 7 arc mins that'd make this around 70 arc mins, and therefore around 2x the apparent diameter of the moon. I think it works like that...?

Certainly, if it's a good price I may have to wait till payday though, lol. I'm just weighing up the idea of the 18mp vs the 24mp sensor they do - I'm assuming it's the same sensor across all the 18mp cams... I got burned recently by buying a D5200 - didn't realise it was a baaaaad sensor for astro!

That seems like a great improvement, and well worth doing! That'll be my plan then I think. First step will be a reasonable Canon DSLR, and a way to mount a heatsink to the back of the sensor, I guess with a thermal glue. After that, a lightweight cooling box with plenty of insulation, and a fan to move the air from the cold plate to the sensor sink. I'll start gathering materials

Awesome, thanks to both of you for that thread One thing missing from it - what was the performance like? I've seen some before and after darks on other threads - what kind of impact do you think it had? I think the best idea in these builds is to have a box around it anyway, otherwise you're trying to cool the planet down with a lack of insulation. I guess once you're in that position, a simple alu heatsink on the back will aid the thermal transfer from the box to the sensor, so I may go for that as a starting point I'll also looking to water cool - I have a cheap AIO loop ready to do it. I'd also thought of the internal fan to move things about, so we're really on the same lines here I was thinking of putting a load of silica gel in the box too - try to lower the impact of wetness. If I do this I'll also still be looking for a DSLR to do it to, as you state in the thread the Nikon I have is too boxed in by boards etc.

Hey all, I'm looking to upgrade my D5100 to something with some cooling. I was hoping to keep costs down and make a project of cooling a DSLR sensor, but I can't find a good target camera. It seems to me to be a much better bang-for-buck to cool a DSLR than to shell out for anything with an APS-C sized sensor in a cooled astrocam. Looking at cooling the 5100, I'd have to do a cold finger mod to try to get on the back of the sensor, but at least the back of the sensor is coolable and has no cables attached. The main thing that puts me off trying this is that there's a board directly behind it, so I can't go in from the back, and this puts me off a bit. Canons on the other hand are often accessible from the back, but they put a ribbon cable connector right on the back, which makes me think I'll just get uneven cooling: I noticed that people on here are variously using cooled DSLRs, does anyone have any issues with the cable here blocking the coolth and forming a pattern? Anyone have long dark frames to show? I really want to play with cooled gear, but I can't justify £1000 on a cooled astrocam. Thanks for any help

I was looking at building a cam86, but was put off a bit by the age of the sensor used. It's a bit unfortunate that there aren't any other CCD / CMOS projects out there that we can build, the cam86 looks great. Because of this I figured I'd just TEC cool my 5100 - but that looks like it might be a fairly unreliable, error prone project given other people's experiences, so was looking for something simpler to cool - coming back to the cam86 project. Does anyone have any idea how these cameras might compare? I'd love a nicer camera than either, but budget constraints are my main worry. Even better - are there any more modern DIY astrocam projects around? Cheers!

Awesome, thanks both! I think the electronic focuser is the best move, depending on what one I go for. I've found a nice DIY variant that I might attempt to build, learning more as I go that way Details are here: https://github.com/semenmiroshnichenko/ESP32Focuser-hardware

600d seems like a great price/performance ratio at the moment. I'd personally recommend modding yourself - it's not that hard and you save quite a bit of money. Look at the guides on LifePixel: https://www.lifepixel.com/tutorials/infrared-diy-tutorials/canon-t3i

I have a 200p with the standard, single speed focuser and I'm a bit frustrated with focusing for photography. I want to be able to make sure I'm bang on, but it feels like a bit to much of a process of doing it until I lose patience at the moment. I have been using APT and the focus helper it has, but it's not that useful compared to just eyeballing it, due to the amount of shake I get doing so. The side of my story is that I'm cheap And I tend to prefer DIY or cheap solutions to problems. Is it going to be better to get a focus motor and maybe USB autofocus system, or a dual speed focuser in my situation? I guess what I'm really asking is - is there a disadvantage to using autofocus with the single speed? I'm not that into the idea of investing in both... I see that there's a manual skywatcher motor that's fairly cheap - are these reasonably accurate and decent? Sorry - bit vague

Just a check-in here to say that this is extremely cool. I'm hoping to try it out and contribute, but the "HD Autofocus webcam" I ordered is 480p, and manual focus 🤣It also died immediately when I turned the manual focus screw and it backed the lens into the sensor. Once I have a webcam I'll try this out

Sorry I haven't had the time to get back to this, but thanks for the advice. I guess I'll have to grab that adjuster and go from there, since none of my parts are getting me where I need to be. That word doc is super useful

I had a go last night, and couldn't get it at all. Wasted an entire night of clearness on it I tried no spacer, 5mm, 10mm and 15mm, and then a 30mm nosepiece, then the nose pice into the adjuster supplied with it. Focussed all of those options, and all of them resulted in coma. Really not sure what I'm doing wrong. I'll post some pictures later so you can see what I'm doing

So that's 75mm from the sensor to the 1st glass element? And you have the revelation astro, or the GSO? Nice pic!

Hi all, I have a astro revelation coma corrector, and I can't work out quite what I'm doing with it. I went out a couple of nights ago and wasted a whole precious clear one while messing with trying to focus it and plate solve. It's frustrating as there's no manual I can find anywhere online, and I have no details at all with it... It's literally just an object to me lol. I want to know the spacing between the sensor and whether it changes the focal length. I've seen conflicting information all over the place for it - I was expecting to find a manual after I bought it that would make it all clear. It's mounted on a Nikon D5100, and I was getting a bunch of what looked like Coma when using it (which was with a T adaptor, and a 10mm extension, then straight onto the CC. About 75mm). The system completely wouldn't plate solve my images either, which makes me wonder if the FL has changed. Does anyone have one of these things? I hear it's the same as the GSO... There's a guide around for that for visual use, but I want to use it for imaging.