Leeps

I did it yesterday, and managed to reach focus! It made a remarkable difference, I actually have a little bit of wiggle room either side of my focal point now. Surprised it makes so much difference! I bought the scope used, and unfortunately it only came with a red dot finder. So I'd have to get the mounting hardware and the finder. I am seeing what you mean about finding a star with the OAG though, that might be the tricky part. I got it working last night and tried PHD2 for the first time. It's a bit of a learning curve, and I've stumbled onto my next issue now - the mount isn't smooth enough to be guided, so I might need to do some tweaking When I'm guiding east/west I can hear a loud audible clang as the mount sticks and releases. Onto the next issue!...

Thanks for the info guys. Little frustrated, I wanted this to be the cheaper and simpler option! My collimation is unchecked and all out of whack anyway, so I'll try that when my cheshire arrives. Will that make a difference to the focal length? I went for an OAG because I was originally going to use an old M42 mount lens that I got, but I couldn't figure out mounting it. Once I looked into the price of a guidescope and the mounting hardware I'd need I figured an OAG would be cheaper and simpler in that respect. That plus it'd be 1000mm focal length guiding. so seemed better? I also find them cool I'll try to adjust the mirror first, it's pretty close to coming into focus.

SO I tried out my new OAG setup tonight, and the DSLR I'm using as a primary can't focus I can't get it to go in towards the body of the scope enough... I'm sure I should be using some jargon around "Back focus" but I don't want to get it wrong! What are my options? It's a 200p scope. I was looking forward to trying this one! It's a 16mm OAG (TS Optics TSOAG16). Can I modify the draw tube to let me focus closer?

I tried 1 min subs on my new image, and I seem to either have much better noise performance, or the neb I was shooting is just brighter... I can't decide. Image is here: https://telescopius.com/pictures/view/61230/deep_sky/dumbbell-nebula/by-lee_davison

I've been doing some fairly amatuer use of pixinsight. I'd be happy to share the data and see what other people might be capable of! Yeah I shot them in twilight, and 10s was needed to get the histogram to hit the middle. I did shoot flats the day after, but I think the sun was too bright and angled into the scope so it gave me a hot corner of the image. I reshot these, and it seemed to clear it up. I can try shooting ISO400, I';ve been shooting at 200 due to the indication here. They got the research from here. I'm a little confused about it overall, but followed the advice since I don't want to waste clear nights. I can try 400?

I took my first shot of a dark nebula over the last couple of nights and struggling with DSLR noise/"colour mottle". I can usually accept that the background has a bit of noise, but when it's a dark cloud of dust I want to be able to show it with as little noise as possible. My usual processing methods of masking out the light objects and denoising doesn't help here because they're obviously... dark. Any tips or am I asking too much from my gear and old DSLR? I was looking at the idea of dithering, but honestly the objects move a lot over the sensor due to unguided tracking errors at the moment anyway, so I don't think I'm really introducing correlated noise. The shot in question and capture details are here: https://telescopius.com/pictures/view/60833/deep_sky/by-lee_davison

I'm planning to do it with a laptop and remoting into it. It might be the easiest option, just to have a cheap SFF PC always running?

Ah, that makes perfect sense. This place is great for learning

Well, small update while we enjoy these cloudy skies 😞 I adjusted the RA as best I could, got rid of the play nicely. It turns full round with no real snags, so that's good. One weird question, should the RA axis turn both ways when turning at rate 1? I can't hear it turning in the left direction when I have it on rate 1, but all other directions I can hear the motor modulation - seems a bit strange. I'll get out and see how this aligns once we have the weather.

Excellent, thanks. I guess that's step one! I'm a little paranoid that it got a little thrown about in transit, and I'm hoping there's not a bent worm, but I'll try to finesse it and report back.

I only replaced the motor, and soldered up some connections. I was a little worried that it might have taken a knock in transit, the RA axis does wiggle a bit... Yeah a bit. I managed to break my old mount by messing with backlash, so I was hoping to avoid it! Do you know a good guide to do it? I also thought it might not matter so much, as the RA axis is being driven, I didn't think it'd show up I think it was good, barring the alt bolts. It's a pain now because I have to wait for and waste another clear night figuring it out!

Hi all, I am refurbishing an EQ6 mount, took it out last night for a first run. After setting up, the goto seems to work great, but when I got the DSLR set up, the tracking doesn't seem that great. I noticed trails on the first few exposures, so I undid the alignment and redid the polar align. Once I made sure that looked good (I think it may have moved, the alt bolts suck) I set back up and did a bunch of 2 min exposures. Some of them give larger trails than others, and it seems to be walking in 2 directions! Anyone have any idea? Here is a gif of me going through frames The mount has had a new motor but on the dec axis, so I was thinking that wouldn't make too much issue with tracking...? Any help would be fantastic, and any advice on if there's some calibration or motor setup features I need to do...?

It's advertised on the stellarium site, so it's "official" in that respect. It also states "Stellarium Mobile Plus - Star Map is made by the original creator of Stellarium, the well known open source planetarium and one of the best astronomy applications on Desktop PC." in the description. Link

I like the stellarium mobile app, but was a little disappointed that the paid version doesn't give you FOV prediction like the PC one does, and it has less objects it seems. I also use Clear Outside, Star Walk 2, and NightShift.

I have an EQ6, and I've just sourced a new stepper to put in it (the old one was running poorly at low speed). Waiting for it to arrive and will fit it and hopefully fix the issue. I'm entirely aware however that these motors are not special for any reason, they seem to just be normal NEMA17 steppers. They're really cheap on ebay, but all kinds of specs. Can we figure out what the specs of these guys are? Seems that they're chinese generics that can be easy to find, or could get higher specs or nice quality ones... Any thoughts/expertise?

I had this issue too and the fix wasn't that obvious - you have to download ASCOM platform here: https://ascom-standards.org/Downloads/Index.htm

Perfect, I'll send a message to Bresser and see if they can send one out. I did think their mount looked very similar. In fact, I was thinking I could get their mount and put my goto gear on it?

Wow, yes it does. Surprisingly similar. It's the aluminium housing I've broken, where that centre screw threads in. It's super weak This is a good lead for parts!

I had my first mount that I've been really enjoying using, a Meade LXD75. I tried to tune it up and remove some of the backlash in the RA worm gear assembly, and just ended up stripping and breaking the housing I'm so gutted, it was about the only thing keeping me sane right now. What options do I have to get out of this hole cheaply? I'm trying to find parts, but that's not looking likely on this older model. What might be a cost effective replacement? Is an EQ-3 worth buying? Help

Hmm interesting that we're both on Nikon and both on Reflectors. Are you firmware modded? Not saying it's a problem in your image at all, it's fantastic - but it is a problem in mine!

You seem to get the same swirly rainbow noise pattern that I get... Any idea what causes it? I thought it was due to my poor flats. This is a lovely job

Hmm so I think I realised what it might be - I think the sensor raw setting is turning off I read the tooltip for it in the camera that was put by the mod maker, and it states that it will turn off on it's own if there's a "metering sleep". I realised that one of my light frames per session was the larger resolution - that's the one that was taken with RAW sensor. After that it was turning off and I'm using the normal setting. Bummer! Extremely annoying. When I've done my calibration frames today I was sure to put it into Sensor RAW mode as that was what I used for the light frames - guess not. I'm gonna forget that all the time.

Nothing as simple as that I'm afraid Here's an example of what is happening:

Hi all, I I have a strange issue where the resolution of the images I'm getting out isn't fixed. It seems to be a real weird mix of 2 different resolutions, and DSS therefore won't stack them! It's an astro modded, firmware modded D5100. I just did a run of bias frames and they're a larger resolution than all the light frames I did last night. So strange. Any ideas?

I ended up solving this with this adaptor: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/SVBONY-SV125-Astronomical-Camera-Adapter-Bracket-2-T-Mount-for-SLR-Camera-UK/163919085178?ssPageName=STRK%3AMEBIDX%3AIT&_trksid=p2060353.m2749.l2649 This allowed me to mount the filter at one end, and adapt to the T mount on the other. Seems to work great!