gilesco

Yes, the startravels can have the following focuser as a replacement: https://www.firstlightoptics.com/skywatcher-focusers/dual-speed-2-crayford-focuser-for-sky-watcher-refractors.html But whether you would invest in one that costs almost as much as the scope is another matter. Me too, I am due to get an Esprit 120ED Pro, in which case, the StarTravel will probably be retired. I still think it has been a good scope, just frustrating focusing - I like my narrowband results, and they would improve if I continued to work on more exposures.

Yes, I guess extending the usage time is the best I can hope for. I can power the Pi off my powertank, will go with that unless I see issues.

I'm wondering now, that as England appears to be going into another lockdown with non-essential retail shutting down again, will FLO remain open during this lockdown?

I'd be interested in knowing what power you might use for the laptop. I have a XPS 15 7590, which has a 130W AC adapter, I understand that to power from a car there is no way I could run 130W as the supply is 12V 10A max. Currently I intend to run all software on a Raspberry Pi, and just do the initial set up via VNC on the laptop, and then monitor it via a Tablet, but it would be nicer to be able to do everything from the laptop. But this is the way I'm going to try and make the power last through the entire night.

If you go slowly and take care, then you will end up with something with more potential than mine. Even if you don't every outing is part of the learning, and your next result will be better than the last.

I think the earliest designs, whether they were made or not, went with Paper Tape: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Turing_machine

M31 was my first target, and the night went awful - it was freezing January - I was just unable to get my guiding to work, and in the end I just pointed the scope at M31 and took a bunch of 30s exposures without guiding, hoping that tracking was in the right place. Then I packed up my kit, and went to bed, thinking that I was just in over my head on all this stuff and I would never get things working. I looked at the exposures the next day, and didn't really have any idea of what to do, and couldn't really get anything out of them. Near the end of winter, I went to the Astrofest in London, and spoke briefly with one of the exhibitors who was demo'ing AstroPixelProcessor (APP). So when I got home I gave the free-trial a go. The result is still awful, but I was really proud of it at the time, and it's my first astro photo, so I keep it around:

I would kind of think I'd leave M45 until I had a good grasp of things, it was my second or third target for AP. I will probably return to it again as it deserves a second go. M31 remains a first target in my view, only to be returned to once you've perfected things, and found out how to avoid washing it out too much.

I always would start off with M31. It is big, it will not be your best photo, and while it does not make the best photo, you know it when you have it in your FOV.

One is a Lead Battery encased, the other is a LifePO4. I'm uncertain, but I think that if you fully discharge the Powertank 17ah model then it will not charge up again. While the LifePO4 is more accommodating in that scenario. I think you would get a lot more discharge/charge cycles out of the LifePO4, than you will with the Lead Acid one. I have the little brother of the 13.2Ah, (is it 7Ah?), and it doesn't have the oomph to power everything in my opinion... so I recently got the 17Ah ones (SkyWatcher, but it is the same product), plan to do some dry testing in this wet weather - probably this weekend.

We're just going to disagree then Stellarmate provides revenue to Jasem, who is the current lead on the Kstars project, and yes, sure, kstars / indi are all open-source, anyone can take the code and go develop their own fork of the software - and that's a good thing, as it perpetuates the technology forever. So many proprietary pieces of software eventually end up archived privately and never used or worked on again. I did not say that without Stellarmate there would be no Kstars, I was just saying that by supporting Stellarmate you assist the current lead developer / maintainer or Kstars.

There's a cold snap coming up, should get rid of all this rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain...

Just want to make one thing clear. When you buy Stellarmate you contribute directly to motivate the lead Kstars/Ekos developer to do more, without which Astroberry is nothing.

It is easier under Ubuntu to update to the latest stable release (sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade). I know that is probably of no use to you when I say that, but kstars is part of KDE, and KDE is aimed at Linux primarily. If you want bleeding edge then you will hear the phrase "compile from source" quite often, which means to take the (latest) source code (i.e. the programming language files), and convert it to machine readable code (the actual program that the computer executes) by using a "compiler" - the program that does that conversion, most often this is "gcc" (The GNU Compiler Collection)

Roughly 67.3% of the Pump price in the UK is Tax. Whereas, in the US, it's roughly 50% (changes from state to state).

The only real difference that I could attribute to Astroberry appearing faster than Stellarmate is the use of RealVNC in Astroberry. I think Stellarmate cannot be provided with RealVNC, because it is a commercial product and RealVNC has a licensing issue with that. There's nothing stopping you from using some other remote-access method with Stellarmate, although I just use my Pi4 as a remote INDI server most of the time, and don't run Kstars on it at all (set to change when I go to a remote Dark site, but I will just be kicking off a scheduler session and then monitoring it over VNC on my Tablet).

I can only assume that Jasem released something specific to Stellarmate that is not in the main repository. Just before a real release is made the Changelog is updated, and it still points to 3.4.3. (Stellarmate is a revenue generating project, by the lead of the KStars project, so you may get some different / specific versions via that project, that you might not via the free open-source side). https://invent.kde.org/education/kstars/-/blob/master/ChangeLog

3.4.3 is the latest stable according to: https://edu.kde.org/kstars/ As mentioned, 3.5.0 is not released yet, you can build it on Astroberry quite easily (you will need to build the Stellasolver library first though). The team are gearing up for the release of 3.5.0, and the latest builds have been unstable (more unstable than Beta in my opinion), and not for use in Production. If Radek released Astroberry with 3.5.0 running at this time then he would have to field all the known issues with Kstars development as well as any issues with Astroberry. Having said that, there are some really interesting improvements with 3.5.0, and worth taking a look at, just don't complain when Kstars crashes on you, just provide a bug report, and your debugger stack trace etc... to the team and help the development along (at the cost of your imaging sessions).

I looked at his other 3 ads. It seems he twice sold an iOptron sky tracker late September, early October, but it was probably that the first sale fell through and he put it back up for sale. Price was for £100. He then put another advert on, a wanted advert for an EQ1, or AZ Gti counterweight bar, on the 12th October. That wanted advert is still live and was put on 12th October. Now he's looking to get rid of the AZ Gti, so I guess he's had it since at least 12th October. Note - he says he hasn't used it, I can believe that, as those weeks were just rain, rain and more rain, but he doesn't claim that it was new when he got it. So, I think he's a genuine seller, but I think he's just taking advantage of the fact that someone might be eagerly after one of these.

The type of problem is well documented, it only seems to occur with certain people in certain types of set up, and there is a "compatible firmware" that works around the problem. I thought it was just with Linux users, but it seems that some Windows users have a problem too. At the time I was choosing this model of camera, I judged that my set up might be affected and bought the USB3.0 version, I've since moved on to the USB2.0 ASI290MM mini (better camera, USB2.0, but not affected by the USB2.0 problem on the ASI120MM mini).

The USB3.0 works on Windows and works on both USB3.0 and USB2.0 ports. Although expect a lower frame rate when using it on USB2.0 ports. ASCOM drivers available here: https://astronomy-imaging-camera.com/software-drivers

I'm sure if you get in touch they'll modify your order.

Yes, if you want to do planetary, get the USB3.0 one, it will support a higher frame rate. As I said the "mini" ones, which are purely cylindrical are usually meant for guiding. The camera's with a different form factor (like the 120MM/MC-S) are intended for planetary, although also suitable for guiding (if you sort out the camera ridge not interfering with your filter wheel). As to the USB2.0 issues with the 120MM guide version, this, I believe, is specific to Linux (but also applies to RYO Raspberry Pi, Stellarmate, Astroberry, and other embedded controllers that you might find on the market).

The mini is more meant for guiding, if only by its form factor and USB2 interface, if your use case is not guiding then get the USB3 one. I did briefly touch on this on my blog, when upgrading to the ASI290 mini for guiding.

I do a lot of curves manipulation with GIMP which looks very similar to what David demonstrated. Would like to learn more in other areas, layer manipulation does confuse me though. Just need to try and get my head round it I suppose.