AstroNebulee

With 0.8 rms on the oag sounds great if it can be tamed. At least it was a bright moony night, be much more frustrating with a new moon. Hopefully you can cure the disappearing stars with the oag 👍

Think it's back on in April as they always seem to have a break from Jan to Apr

Just an update on my tinkering now I've had two small sessions with my setup. The Dec behaves so much better now, after a calibration it soon snaps into place and the same goes for after a dither too. Now I shall have to do the same to the RA motor and mesh the brass gears tighter and maybe re-engage the spring loaded part, as the RA which before was great in comparison to the Dec is now needing a tinker. Had a go at imaging the owl nebula, very tiny and the moony not helping it.

55mm is the general rule of thumb for most zwo cameras, though mine is around 62mm for my set up. So hopefully 55mm will be the one for you and will sometimes be plus or minus 1 I've read before.

Keep the faith, it will get sorted for you. Like saud before the binding is a common issue and easily rectified, I'm sure flo will sort this for you and your az gti will perform admirably 👍

Is there supposed to be 55mm of back spacing between the FF and zwo 553 mc pro? I could be and probably wrong

I'd just send an email off to flo about it all if I were you and don't want to go tinkering with the mount. I had the binding issue and followed the video suggested by @ScouseSpaceCadetand mine was just the grub screw to tight rather than fitting a plastic washer. I just remembered on the leveling. I used to put a spirit level on my scope and get it level that way.

I used to get aot of that at high magnification, maybe to do with backlash or the gears and worms in the motor not meshing properly 🤔 superb view of moony 👌

I found the bubble levels to be out a fair bit too they aren't very well put in.

You can give flo an email anyway, they are very helpful and will do their best. When used to spin the mount around it would alter its level. After the az gti has done a good 2 or 3 star alignment it should get better and better after that with gotos.

Stunning image here! I know what you mean with the mojo thing but these images and times out under the stars make you forget it and enjoy astrophotography agsin, keep going your doing great 👍

Hi So just to be clear you are only connecting the laptop to the mount via the eq dir cable? And once using the synscan windows programme says no device found. Ignore this reply and use knobbys above 👍 Cheers Lee

Hi @DusknightbyFatma Hopefully someone will be along shortly who uses nina transferring from stellarmate. I use an asiair pro so cannot commernt to much. But I have seen this video before where he uses nina on his az gti mount, there maybe some nuggets of help in there. Cheers Lee

Ask away with your questions that's what this thread is for. I use the star adventurer mount and extension pillar that can be bought with the az gti. I use it in its unextended form to give me more stability and find its a good height when sitting down. Ideally I would like the skywatcher 3/8 inch stainless steel tripod to give even more stability to my set up. https://www.firstlightoptics.com/skywatcher-star-adventurer/sky-watcher-38-stainless-steel-tripod.html Portability is what I need living in a first floor flat and taking my set up outside but even the 3/8 tripod is doable for me. The type of scope depends on what you'd like to do with it be it visual or image and many threads on that in the forum. I used to do visual but went to the imaging side along with my wallet.

Hopefully the final update of my eggy star issue. I've added a 1mm T2 spacer to my imaging train and another slight adjust to the tilt adjuster and on this 3 min crudely stretched M51 the stars are much rounder now and I'm happy this has been mechanically sorted (it may need another thin spacer to be added in the future) Then whilst searching through my star tools software there's a heal function with warp or redistribute algorithm to help with any oval eggyness in images as long as it's not to bad, so tried this and wow. (I know it's cheating in the processing but mechanically it looks OK too) I'm so so happy now, after 2. 5 months of adjusting, purchasing parts, waiting for clear skies, stress, more adjustments and ballache I think I'm finally hopefully there. First image is the crudely stretched 3 min sub without the Startools heal function And the second is using the Startools repair module then redistribute algorithm. This thread is entwined with this thread about scope or sensor tilt Cheers Lee

When I connect my az gti via eq dir cable I select eq mod in the mount type, when using asiair pro and phone.

I never bothered linking to the synscan app. The asiair app can do everything you want that the synscan app can, plus more 👍(unless I'm being a baffoon which I generally am)

Glad it worked for you by taking the alt gear out and reseating it, these kind of updates and tips to fix things sure do make the thread invaluable, cheers 👍

Thank you, nice to see the full strip down, something I think I'll do in the summertime 👍

No problems atall. It is a great video for the az gti tune up. Easy to follow and we'll explained.

I removed the Dec motor assembly completely and adjusted the meshing of the two brass gears to be closer together. I followed Cuivs video for this.

Just one word with the 300p.... WOW 😍

Whilst on a day off waiting for the the ground workers to address my mains water leak I decided to tune the Dec (alt) motor in my az gti as I was suffering with a lot of movement when the clutch tightened up and also when guiding the Dec would take ages to settle after calibration and after a dither be erratic. I'm showing the before and after of the movement on the motor. Its much tighter now and regreased it up with some white lithium grease, tested and appears no visual binding anyway. It'll need a test which I'm hoping to tonight. I have opened the mount before to solve the stiff RA (az) axis and previously tightened the spring loaded motor to the worm so the spring is obsolete. On inspecting the Dec spring loading motor is was meshed tight too (from the factory) so in an experiment I've altered this to have the spring working. Maybe together with the tighter meshing on the motor gears and the spring activation my Dec guiding will be better (probably be worse haha) if tis I shall do away with the spring loading and mesh again. Just thought it was worth putting on here to see the workings. And yep the after video has rotated, I'm a baffoon. Dec motor before.mp4 Dec motor after.mp4

I'm still learning with star tools and photoshop, I use dss for stacking but trying to learn siril.

It's brilliant Ray, well done, I expect the breeze would account for the differing rms, I'd be proud of your image and nice round stars too 👍 bit of green in the image but can be processed out, can't remember which processing software you use, but I'm still learning too 😊