Loki1978

Right, from what I can see. OIII is an obvious blue. With HA and SII I'm getting one filter which is a bright red when I look at a white surface. The second filter is a dark wine red. I'm guessing the HA is bright and the SII dark. I checked again and the filters are purple on one side so I think they are ZWO 2nd gen. The OIII has a silver coating. The other two are bronze on what I think is the SII and gold coating on what I believe is the HA.

Louis, Thanks, I will give this a try and see if I can tell which is which.

Hi all, I have a question about filters. I recently bought a second hand ASI1600 and filter wheel. It's my first time using a mono with filters. The filter wheel has already been populated by the previous owner. They appear to be ZWO branded, and the old style as they don't have the purple coating on one side. The problem I have is identifying the filters. I have four screw ins which are easy as it's written on the side. These are luminance then rgb. But the HA, SII and OIII are not the screw in type. Just filters. Is there a way I can tell which is which? Or do ppl usually install them in some logical order?

I used to do a lot of refurbishing which involved removing paper stickers people had stuck on painted steel. The best way I found of removing labels etc was heat. If you don't mind applying a bit of heat to the tube and the foam is still mostly intact it will just peel right off. Chemical dissolvers etc have their place but my 1st choice was always heat. I don't mean hair drier heat either. I mean paint stripper heat. You have to be sensible with it though.

Ah, good to hear. I will have a look. As most of the coursera courses seem to be between 25 and 45 hours to complete I might just start running through them. Better than being sat in front of the tv of an evening. I did spend 2.5 hours watching 'Dont look up' yesterday though 🙄

Thanks very much. I did notice the centre for excellence one. I may give that a go. Not really doing it for the certification just general interest really. Might be nice to have something to hang on the wall once its all done. They are doing the course for £58.50 at the moment. I will see if the discount code still works. I did come across a site called coursera which has a handfull of free astronomy courses from various institutions around the world. I might give some of those a look too. They seem to range from beginner to intermediate.

Hi All, Hope you are all having a good festive break. I was just wondering if any of you can recommend a good Astronomy diploma course. Or any to avoid. I've been looking for a while and there are a few around but the details on the content is always a bit limited

Also I was a bit confused what sort of debayer I should set in DSS

Hi All, Thanks for the replies. I had another play with DSS tonight and I think those coloured dots were my fault mixing up the terms for my darks, lights flats etc. Below is the result of a second try in DSS with a couple of quick stretches. I still have the light corners and I think I was out of focus (got to 3d print myself a bahtinov mask) I was wondering if some problems could be the security cameras I have in the back garden beaming IR light? What sort of starting exposure times should I aim for unguided on an equatorial. This was 42 subs at 90 seconds.

Adreneline, Thanks for the jpg tip. I've got the post edited to show the image now. I was cooled to -10. When I recently cooled to -20 I was getting ice starting on the sensor chip. I've replaced the desiccant since then. I'm using deep sky stacker with appropriate lights, darks, dark flats and biases. Save as a tiff then straight into gimp.

Hi all, I just had a couple of questions about my images I'm taking. I keep getting red blue and green dots in the image. Also whats causing the light corners top right bottom left? My setup is a Williams Optics zenithstar 80, Atik 414 on an skywatcher AZ-eq6 This image just has a couple of stretches in gimp.

lol, I didn't even notice that, how did this thread get resurrected. Jez is probably on his third or fourth setup by now.

Just thought I would give my experience as I've just started in imaging in the last few months and I had this exact question. I understand the benefits of Mono, and this is a direction I really want to go in. 'But' I decided to go with colour at the moment while starting out. I found on a typical night I'm trying to get all my equipment set up. Get aligned, get guiding working, find my target. The learning curve is quite steep and while I'm sure this process will become quicker each time I do it I feel I would have got frustrated with running out of time and the extra complication using a mono camera. I didn't want an 'all the gear and no idea' type of scenario. As I say though I do want to head over to mono when I have everything else set up and running correctly. The equipment is always upgradable. If I had a permanent setup I would possibly go mono straight away.

Jeff, Cool sounds like a plan. I can't wait to get a mount for my refractor. I haven't imaged in widefield yet. I've always had too much magnification with the cpc 800.

Geoff, I recently got back into astronomy and I kinda went out and bought something familiar to me, I then started going down the imaging route and soon realised the equipment I have is not really suited. I do have a williams optics zenithstar sitting on the shelf here but no mount. I'm aiming to buy an eq5 or 6 at some point. I think when I do I will take the wedge off of my cpc and use it for visual. Then buy a c8 ota for the equatorial if I really want that much focal length. I would love a RASA but £££ Actually I did notice you can buy a hyperstar conversion kit. Has anyone tried one?

Thanks for all the replies. I think I'm going to start leaving the tripod setup in the garden rather than spending ages trying to set it up every session. My alignment last night wasn't too bad. After an hour and a half imaging M66 went from centred to bottom third of the screen (I'm using apt) so something up with the alt adjustment I think. Richie, At the moment I'm using APT and Stellarium. I will have a look at CPWI. Olly, I see what you mean about the mount. Azimuth seems pretty easy to adjust. But the Alt adjustment is extremely touchy. I'm an engineer by trade and I've been mulling over putting a microfocuser type adjustment on the Alt. Or even putting a polar scope in the middle of my C8 front plate. Michael, I'll try to see if I can do PA first. I'm not sure the HC gives me the option. I think it forces an auto align, then polar align, then makes you do an auto align again. I'm guessing the last auto align is so that it can calculate the error.

Hi all, I was hoping you could help with my new wedge. I've been imaging with an Alt Az mount for a while. A celestron HD wedge came up for sale so I bought it an eagerly mounted my scope. I'm having a real mare with alignment. I have starsense so I do an auto align and let that run. Then do a polar align first using hand controller to centre on a star to the south half way between the horizon and zenith. Then the next alignment is using the mount adjustments to centre the star again. In my mind this should be finished, but with starsense it prompts you to do an auto align once again. Once this completes if I try going to the same star its always off centre to the left, so far off it's out of field of view for my ccd. If I manually adjust the mount again without involving the hand controller my gotos seem ok. Am I expecting too much from this mount or do you think starsense it overcomplicating the procedure. In alt az my gotos were always good. The only issue I have at the moment is my ccd chip size is giving me a small FOV. Soon to be fixed with a reducer, but its making finding targets a real problem.

Michael, Thanks for the reply. Yeah I understand less optical obstacles in the imaging train is better. I think like you say I will try to use straight spacer adaptors unless the target is high. I actually bought the cpc800 before I started down the AP route, otherwise I would have bought an equatorial mount and tube. I don't actually have a decent diagonal, only the 1.25" diagonal that came with the scope. So I would need to buy a 2" diagonal as I've changed everything over to 2" I will try the straight spacers first. I've got a Williams Optics z73 which I have no mount for. I think I might stop spending on the cpc800 and save up for the mount for the Z73 as I think this may be better for the imaging I'm doing.

Hi All, I had a question about back spacing. I want to by a f6.3 reducer for my sct. I know I need 105mm back spacing to use this reducer but I'm already quite limited in lat with my cpc 800 on a wedge. I think with 105mm and an atik ccd I will hit the mount base quite early. Can I use a diagonal to use up back spacing the same as straight though extension tubes?

Hi all, Just thought I would post this up here. I've been using my CPC 800 for a little while now (bought it second hand). Today I noticed if I did the azimuth clutch up. I could move the scope azimuth by about 5-10mm. I never really noticed it before and my gotos were ok but it didn't seem right. Not being afraid to take things apart I took the base apart to have a look. The setup is very simple and the problem was also a simple fix. But misleading making you think you have gear backlash or something is very wrong. I thought I would post this up here. It might help someone out with an out or warranty scope willing to take it to bits. Remove the six screws around the lid of the base. The clutch has a grub screw in the side of the knob. Back this grub screw off and unscrew the knob (this grub screw shouldn't be tight, it just stops the knob unscrewing too far). The base lid lifts off with some shimmying. This is what it looks like inside(ignore the victoria biscuits, I was doing it on the kitchen counter). The motor worm gear assembly is sprung for close to zero backlash. You can see the motor assembly and encoder. My encoder wheel actually has a crack in it beside the IR cutout, but it seems to work ok. If it breaks I will 3d print a new one. You can see the teflon washer that the clutch tightens onto. I put the scope back on my tripod. Tightened the clutch knob back up to check where the movement was. The movement wasn't in any of the motor or gear assembly so next part came off (if it was the worm gear moving back and forth, this can actually be adjusted by a brass bushing at the encoder end) This pic is the hub that the pinion gear clamps down onto. The rubbery material is the clutch which transmits the drive to the base. It also has a decent sized taper bearing under this hub. The clutch hub is actually where my problem was. It has two grub screws which attach it to the shaft connected to the base. Well they were both loose. Disappointingly the first one I tightened up stripped quite easily, or I was being a bit heavy handed. In my opinion the grub screws are too short and only engaged by about 3 threads in aluminium. I swapped them out with longer grub screws which allowed me to save the slightly stripped one, I also added a bit of thread lock. Worse case they could be tapped out a size up. Or drilled and tapped further around the hub if you're really in trouble with stripped threads. I cleaned all of the old grease off of the pinion. Re-greased with some decent moly. I filed the grub screw holes very slightly as they had some burs which made the pinion stiff to rotate. All back together and the azimuth movement has gone. Its now rock solid. I also use to get a bumping or notching feel when I loosened the clutch and rotated the scope. This has now gone. Initially I thought it much be flat spots in the ball bearings or grit. Now I know it has a taper bearing it was likely the burs on the grub screw holes.

Hi all, Just thought I would take a minuit to introduce myself here. Just getting back into astrophotography after a bit of a break. Looking forward to looking at the skies again.

Just finished cleaning this scope up and I can say isopropyl with distilled water works perfectly. I used 99% pure isopropyl mixed around 30 /70 distilled.. I'm finally happy with the results now. I'm really not sure what was up with the zeiss product. I'm wondering if it's like most things now where the solvents that do the work are all removed to make the product safe for the general public. Having said that I did try the zeiss on the bathroom mirror and it works well. As AstroTim said I think it has some issue with the telescope coatings used.

Hi all, Thanks for the replies. I have distilled water and isopropyl here. I might just try wiping the smears away without going to town on it. I used to have an RO setup for an aquarium but got rid of it a while ago. I've often used RO but once I had my own equipment I realised that for every gallon of RO produced you waste 4 gallons of 'waste' water. So I started buying it again rather than producing it myself. Good time to be cleaning optics as there's not much viewing to be had with this storm at the moment.

Hi all, I was just after a bit of advice. I recently bought a second hand cpc 800 and the optics were a little dirty. Like they had seen a lot of dew which had caused marks on the inside of the corrector plate and on the mirror. Like lots of water dots. I bought some pec pads and zeiss cleaning solution. I marked and removed the corrector plate. I cleaned the corrector plate and mirror but I'm actually less than impressed with the zeiss cleaner. I tried several times but it leaves an almost greasy residue. It almost smells like it has a citrus oil in it but I can't see it in the ingredients. It does say it's safe for precision coated optics. Am I being over fussy? I don't want to keep going at it as I would rather touch the mirror as little as possible. What do you all use. I was trying to get some methanol but its really expensive unless I buy 5 litres. Will isopropyl be better. One thing I did realise pretty quick is the need to stay away from the tube through the centre of the mirror as it has a grease on it which is easily transferred to your hands and the pec pad.