gilesco

On holiday in Spain, and I doubt we'd have skies to record anything at home - looks good here, although can't capture the quality with just the phone.

Takes me back when I worked for an importer of Taiwanese electronics and a 40 ft container would come to our warehouse. Only a small company of about ten employees, so everyone had to muck in and empty the container out. Seem to remember the delivery driver would charge a penalty if we didn't get it emptied within a certain timeframe. Although given the size of each of those boxes I imagine it won't take too long to empty it all out.

Is this Seestar 50 going to compete against the EvScope 2 ? Price appears to be knocking this niche market out of the park no? https://astronomy-imaging-camera.com/product/zwo-seestar-2/

You may be able to claim back relief on the equipment when they return to the UK. There are terms and conditions to this relief (i.e. be returned to the UK within 3 years). https://www.gov.uk/guidance/pay-less-import-duty-and-vat-when-re-importing-goods-to-the-uk-and-eu

Typically you need to send the mount. I would expect the pier to be provided. They may also provide a PC which you can remotely access. You could just start talking to a provider and they will let you know how they work. e.g. https://www.pixelskiesastro.com/

Roundham is an entire town, and the postcode is shared by the entire Industrial estate. They don't have a unit there.

No, they used to say they were at some industrial estate, but someone has been there, and others have looked on google maps and they don't appear to have a unit there. We need to be careful about "bashing" suppliers on this forum as I believe there are rules about this in the T&Cs. I would recommend that anyone who has an issue with these people that you get together and collectively take action privately. This could be by means of a CCJ, Debt Collection agencies etc... etc... They have the experience and means of tracking these types of organisations down. Unfortunately, the funds that have been transferred in most cases were "non-returnable deposits", and without a contract as to when the services will be supplied then you are unlikely to be due anything. And if you cancel your order then that's it. If they were to take the website down then it would be evidence that they are no longer trading, and thus you would have a case to get your deposit back, but if they claim they are still trading then you still have to wait, unless they are in breach of contract in some way.

To be fair, a design flaw caused by user modding which I would have found ZWO hard to predict users would do, now corrected in manufacturing and also speedily announced as an issue with workarounds and fixes explained. I think this is fair play by the manufacturer to get this warning out as early as they did. So I think they deserve some kudos for doing so, and encouragement for them to issue warnings like this more in the future for other new products.

I went and bought a whole host of subscriptions (1 year) to just about every magazine I could find. This was during my extensive information gathering period as I was getting into things. After one year I decided to cancel all of them except Astronomy Now. Given the cost of all things astronomical (in more ways than one, excuse the pun), a one year subscription cost for 4-5 different magazines is not going be burning the hole in your pocket, and if it is, then you may want to find a different hobby 🙂

Apprentices on the mixing gallery too I would say. Also, they've tried to do some live interaction, but someone didn't realise that streams are buffered so live interaction is going to be very awkward with delays etc...

Yes, in short I think there is a better place to just get the images as they dribble them out: https://webbtelescope.org/news/news-releases?Collection=First Images

And the first image is..... the one we saw yesterday.

Not even a pixel for us anymore 🤏

There's stuff going on in that photo, they're not stars, they're not galaxies, there is something else no? Photonic emissions from something other than concrete stars, another force at work at the beginning of time?

Yes, on screen it looks under- well , not overwhelming, but take the full thing and look a bit deeper, you start to realise that there is real depth to the image. They did a really poor job of showcasing this.

The US probably have a bit more tolerance for lateness than I do....

Probably a US Advertisement Break... come back in an hour?

Yeah, this will be a "Woah" thing for the casual observer... (Betting on Stephans...)

I guess we're waiting to see the most expensive astro-photo ever seen, or even possibly the most expensive photo ever seen?

Livestream seems imminent here:

Yeah, also bear in mind that shipping mounts by boat from China to Europe / USA can take 6-8 weeks + customs clearance time, so they may have temporarily cleared the back orders and then sold further mounts in China (which being domestic over land they can fulfil orders in 1-2 days). I take what I read on Cloudy Nights with a pinch of salt, the USA media is constantly feeding anti-China rhetoric much more than we are. But in short, there are lots of people who have opinions who, unfortunately, have little idea of the logistics of international order fulfilment.

The calculation of the max-PE of 0.125 arc.sec/s seems a sane calculation. It looks like the min-PE will be around 0.04 arc.sec/s and average of 0.08 arc.sec/s. Combining this with the reported zero-backlash means guiding should be able to compensate pretty well, although with bad seeing I suspect people might start ditching their OAGs and start looking for wider aperture guide scopes and more expensive and sensitive guide cameras - as they look to be able to do sub-second guiding to further minimise the error. I guide my CGX, typically with 1-2s guiding exposures through my OAG. 1s is probably the lowest I can go with the guiding at the moment, and this is with the new moon, my neighbours and my wife turning their house lights off etc... In truth I think best case current error in my exposures is around 0.6 arc.sec/s and at worst quite possibly as high as 1.2 arc.sec/s - but that's why we take multiple exposures and discard the worst ones. For long exposures, guiding is going to be a must with this mount I'm sure. But the pro's of being lightweight and compact compared to the heaviness of my CGX probably makes it a mount that will be on my future wish list. As you say, let's wait and see what the early adopters report with it.

I know you obfuscated the serial number in the PE Test Report, you might also want to obfuscate the QR code as well if you really want to protect that information.

Looking forward to this thread!