RodAstro

I caught Jupiter to about the same time. Seeing was the problem that night for me to, my 10" SCT on good nights comes close to my big refractor but not that night, smaller aperture 6" and no central obstruction helps with seeing. I also used a blue green filter and a fringe killer, this helps to sharpen up the features as does monochrome, colour is hard when seeing is bad, each colour (RGB) moves around at a different rate, blue the worst, red the least, you can see this in your colour image as it has a blue halo and blue haze indicating seeing. Your eye can keep up with the seeing, you ignore the bad bits and absorb the good bits to build up an image so when you get those sparkling moments you see everything and it's awesome. Just keep taking images and hope one captures a moment of clarity. This was my best shot, I'm no expert I prefer visual but sometimes make the effort, sadly I lost Io's disk, it was very visible early on in the transit and imaged well, no idea where it went, still leaving a good shadow though. Cheers Rod

Nice one Mark There are some lovely white light captures on here, great sharp ones and ones that capture 90 percent of what most of us saw. Rod

Hi all Lovely and sunny now😡 I sat through it all ready to go but only got about two minuets through fast moving cloud, I took several captures but only one would stack because of the cloud and I didn't think it would work but I got this below😲😃 very pleased. In one way the moving thin cloud made it all look more real through the eyepiece, am I being to positive? Hope you like Taken with a Daystar SS60-DS sopped down to 30mm to give f35 ish , and a ZWO ASI174MM with a 0.5 reducer, piggy backed on my main scope that I was using for visual white light. Cheers Rod

Hi all Just thought I would bump this thread. I bought a new camera a couple of weeks ago Opticstar DS-616C-XL+ and a Astro Physics CCDT67 telecompressor (reducer) to use on my Meade SCT. I have seen some pictures taken with the Zeiss B 150mm f15 Apochromatic and the AP reducer made for f9-f18 scopes, so was wanting to try it on my Zeiss 150mm f15 Semi Apo scope to see if it all worked. Well to say I am pleased is an understatement.🙂 The image is of M3 using 19 x 5 min subs with 50% gain in Bortle 6 sky's. From the image with the APS chip the reducer seems to be giving me around f8-f10. Good result F15 rules

Hi I don't use a filter with the standard scope, no need the objective is to small. I just use a UV/IR when using the removed quark unit on my 6" scope to take the unnecessary load of the first little quark filter so the UV/IR goes before the quark. As the UV/IR filter is a reflection filter and not an absorption filter it will not come to any harm, clear glass absorbs very little heat. For photography no other filter is needed as they just reduce light throughput so increasing exposure time so the wrong way to go. Because everything is moving on the sun you need to keep the length of video as short as possible otherwise as you stack you will blur your image due to movement of the features on the solar surface. Using a polarizing filter for visual use can be useful to dim the image for chromosphere detail especially if using full aperture but I find reducing the aperture much better. You only need one polarizer as the quark etalon is polarised so with an eyepiece and polarizer attached you can just rotate the eyepiece to very the brightness. For reducing the aperture I just use a set of filter adapter rings, the first ring 67mm to 72mm just fits the front of the DS60 with the 67mm male threads neatly inside the dew cap and this is taped on using insulation tape, the filter rings can then be screwed to the 72mm female thread at the front and staked as you like down to the smallest ring in your set. These sets of rings can be bought on ebay for about £7 so not expensive to try.

Hi Are you thinking about the standard scope or are you thinking if it is good enough for a larger scope mod?

Hi Roy Does your F16 have a Carton lens I think that's what Skylight use? I have a 76mm F16 with a Carton lens it is superb, just in the middle of restoring the tube then fitting on a Unitron 145 head. I have a set of T circle ortho eyepieces for it but I don't think they will get much use with the CZJ orthos about. People don't realise how good and bright a well made Huygens is, all comes down to the least amount of glass interrupting the beam. Very rare items since Tasco gave them such a bad name. Rod

Yep that is nice will show a lot of colour fringing though but stopped down to 10" f15 or even 8" F18 on planets it would be very nice. The Bayers mount is very nice.

About the Atmospheric dispersion, it is an old trick many planetary observers used and worth trying with Jupiter and Saturn being so low at the moment I have found that many of the cheaper 70 degree eyepieces are ideal for this. All you do is find the centre line of the dispersion then maneuver the planet along this line from the centre of the eyepiece field, one way the dispersion will get worse the other side of centre the dispersion will decrease until it has gone and the planet appears much sharper. You only need a AD unit for photography, although you could probably use the eyepiece method afocaly with a large enough camera chip where you can select your ROI on any part of the chip, I have never tried it though.

Hi Mark Full set of the original brass Abbe Carl Zeiss Jena Orthos, they are so sharp and flat to the edge you can use the field stop as an occulting bar. Picture of my set here with the bino head and rotating turret and all the fittings for afocal projection and the schott rotating filters. Interestingly for scopes that were to be used in very northerly latitudes Zeiss also supplied a set of paired Huygens eyepieces to be used in the bino head for planetary work as you can use their field curvature as an atmospheric dispersion corrector by placing the planet in the correct part of the field, they work very well. Cheers Rod

Hi Peter that Eling Beck is a lovely mount. A 16" Meade replaced my Zeiss at St Andrews Uni they said the optics are good but the mount has never worked properly so never gets used, it has had numerous boards and has even been back to Meade, Just not in the same league as these professional scopes. We also use some Clave true Plossls that my friend has we can never make a decision between them and the Zeiss orthos both are excellent. I will have to come and visit you sometime I have been meaning to for years.

Yep just like the good old days but a lot easier to do a meridian flip noerdays 🤣

Hi Dave Very interesting, no mention of naglers. Yep I love the Zeiss Orthos I have the full set and two of each for the bino head and a 40mm and a 63mm Zeiss huygens that is fantastic. These all came with the telescope and are always my preferred lenses to use, everything is so flat and sharp, I see no reason to have a wider field of view if it is full of distortions. The Zeiss bino head has a 1.5 times correcting barlow that is removable so eye relief is not a major problem with the orthos until you are using the 6mm and 4mm, 843X for the 4mm so not used often. The dilemma I have found is that the more modern designs of wide field eyepieces and flat field eyepieces are pretty awful at F15. They seem to be designed to correct some of the aberrations in short focal length scopes so once you get to f15 they are actually creating aberrations. When I first got the scope I was all up for getting a 31mm type 5 Nagler as we had one in the club and I loved it in all the newtonians we had but when I used it in the F15 it was awful and probably one of the worst eyepieces I have ever used in this scope. I put this down to the flatness of field the Zeiss F15 has, they originally came with a 4"X5" plate camera. I have found less expensive wide field eyepieces work better at F15, by chance I picked up a SW panaview 38mm and found this to be very good with only about 10 percent of the field having slight distortions so bought the 32mm and 26mm for wide field and have used them for the past few years as the best I could get but the other day I decided to try a cheap Ascension 30mm 80 degree secondhand off ebay (I could always sell it again) and it is excellent, you have to look hard at the edge to find any distortion. In the old days when most of us built our telescopes and used ex-military eyepieces, there was a lot of talk about matching your eyepieces to your telescope, that idea seems to be long forgotten. Your lovely FS128 f8 has the dilemma of being in the middle of the two extremes but Tak has made some excellent eyepieces for it and as you say the Pentax and Vixen W lanthanums should be very good as they were designed for your focal length scope and are lovely eyepieces. Rod

Hi all Yep as you say Rusted f15 is a big operation I have a crane stored away for working on mine. Yes it is folded and has the bonus of fixed eyepieces. Orientation is not a big problem, you just let the object drift then you know where you are. As you say Rusted mounts are the biggest problem for large refractors another plus for the folded design is you end up with a correct size mount, not very portable though. The RA axis of my mount is the basis for the 36" Zeiss cassegrain so I have no problem piggy baking other scopes. Out of interest I would like to hear views of others with long focal length refractors on eyepieces they use. Cheers Rod

Yep F15 rules Here is a picture of what I own and use day and night over the past 15 years. Mine is one of three that is in private hands, only two are working. The 6" lens is in the class of apochromatics visually and is of steinheil design, flint first. One of the great things of F15 refractors is they have wonderful flat fields and are very tolerant of eye position at the eyepiece, unlike modern short apos, even F8s. This is the public observatory at Brisbane as it shows the size of the scope. The scope was designed to fit a six foot observatory, mine is in a seven foot observatory and hard to get a photo that shows its size. Cheers Rod

Hi With christmas coming up If anyone feels compelled to get a star named for someone don't go with the scammers (apparently WH Smiths are among these scammers) Go here instead at least your money is going into astronomical research and not some individuals pocket. https://adoptastar.org/?gclid=EAIaIQobChMI6Jb0qKjx7AIVOYBQBh1w8ggzEAAYBCAAEgI4uPD_BwE Apparently you can also choose your star from what is left so you may have a chance to even see it. Cheers all

Hi Not a chance yet it takes so long to set everything up and get aligned the clouds roll in. It's just so much easier to open the observatory and switch on and away we go. It does make me realise why I built the observatory though, so that's a positive. Cheers Rod

Hi Steve The four port externally powered USB3 hub arrived today. So far just plugging in the ZWO ASI174mm USB3 camera works fine and does not seem to drop out. I have the ZWO connected to the hub via its original 3m cable then the hub connected to a 6m repeater cable to the laptop. The hub has four power switches one for each port and the camera only becomes active when the power is on so the laptop power is disconnected from the ZWO. The hub has a 2amp power supply so plenty for the ZWO on its own 3m lead. The data transfer is uninterrupted so the repeater cable takes care of that. One thing that does not work is having two cameras connected to the USB3 repeater, when I plug in my QHY5ll guide/wide field camera with the ZWO, the laptop and PHD recognises it is there but no data gets through so no image from the QHY. But the QHY5II runs fine on its own USB2 port through a seperate repeater cable while the ZWO runs on the USB3 port , I just thought it would save having another cable to deal with if I could have run both on the USB3 input. I hope that makes sense, I will confirm this fully once I get a chance to use it outside but it looks promising. Cheers Rod

Hi Steve Yep the stacking software cannot run in the daytime as it needs several good star images to align. This can also be a problem at night if you don't capture enough stars. I have tried it on my 10" f6.3 and only get success on globulars because the field is to small to capture enough stars. I use it with a Skywatcher ST102 and it works fine. I am using a Celestron Advanced GT for the mount. I am still waiting for the hub to arrive. Cheers Rod

Hi Steve I have been trying a repeater cable but it is a bit dodgy it keeps losing connection and upsets the USB ports so need to do a computer reboot. Sometimes it works all night others it just randomly stops. I have ordered a externally powered hub to go at the telescope end because I have a feeling it may just be a power problem to the camera from a laptop on such a long cable and some power is being used for the repeater. That way the hub will power the camera and the repeater will take care of the signal, fingers crossed. I also run my QHY5ll C camera on the 50mm finder with a focal reducer for a wide field view if the goto is not dead on target and I can autoguide if I want to do a long exposure. The QHY also does polar alignment in SharpCap as well. SharpCap seems better at stacking but is a little complicated and needs more stars than the ZWO live stak program. I will update you when the hub arrives. Cheers Rod

I like this software it has got me into EAA. I bought a ZWO ASI174MM for solar imaging with the quark and downloaded drivers and software, I didn't take any notice of it for a few weeks, then one night I thought I would have a look at it. Love it, I can sit in my conservatory whilst my big scopes takes hours of subs for later and use the 174 as an eyepiece on my little ST102 and just go to one object after another looking at an image I could never see through the eyepiece. Brilliant and easy to use.

Hi There are lots of reasons why one scope outperforms another scope in various different situations and this depends on what you like to do with them. All I can say is I have owned my 6" F15 refractor now for fifteen years and that is fourteen years longer than any other scope I have owned in the last forty years. Rod

Hi Anthony Thats nice. I don't think you will remove the coma totally but you will do a very good job of it, I have used a Teleview Parracor and that cannot get rid of all the coma at F4. I think you would be looking at a ASA reducer corrector or a Row Akerman unit both costing more than the scope and Sw coma corrector and having never used them I would not guarantee they would be perfect although images seem to show they do a good job but you don't know how much has been done with post processing. As I say for imaging you can remove the final bit of coma in your processing software.

Hi Bryan That looks perfect all you need to do is drill and tap the holes for the grub screws and job done. If you use the original screws they are imperial 2BA, but metric 4mm will do the job. Because I don't rotate the unit at this point I use some ball ended grub screws, they are a bit more solid than the nylon tipped ones. You need to keep the barlow unit, it is not actually a barlow it is a telecentric focal extender, unlike a barlow that just alters the cone of the light beam the theocentric actually gives you a parallel light beam or almost parallel and it is this beam that makes the daystar etalons work well. You could replace it with a 2X edmund scientific telecentric if you need lower power. What I have done though to reduce my effective focal length is on my 6" F15 is just use a focal reducer before the quark telecentric unit to reduce the final F ratio. A good filter to use before the quark is the Baader 35nm Ha this will reduce the pressure on the small Andover blocking filter at the front of the Quark and make it last longer than with just a UV/IR. Cheers Rod

Hi Bryan Some pictures for you. The first SS60-DS I got was almost in bits and the Quark unit was wobbling about, all four nylon tipped grub screws were very loose so it didn't take me long to realise how the scope was put together. After removing the Quark unit I realised it was easy to make an adaptor. Firstly I machined out a 2" 40mm extension tube (the black bit) so the nose of the Quark went in up to the Quark retention rim for the grub screws. I then got a bit of ally (the silver bit) and machined it out so it was a snug fit over the 40mm extension tube and added grub screws to hold it to the outside of the extension tube. I left enough overhang of this adaptor ring to accept the Quark unit up to its flange and added another set of grub screws to hold the Quark. It is quite crude really but it works and is strong for the bino head. I used the extension tube as I needed the filter threads for the UV/IR filter that Daystar recommend for Quarks. What I do find is there is very distinct variations in illumination across the etalon hard to see visually but does show up in the field of the quite large ZWO ASI174mm chip. I go for the central dark area as my main area for my target and get the brightness about correct. Then after stacking and sharpening in ImPPG I select the bright areas by hand, with a lasso tool, with a large feather edge and darken them to match the darker area. What surprised me is the bright areas are still on band so all the information is still in there. Once I have evened the image out I then finish processing. One thing to note is all etalons suffer from uneven Illumination Daystar just grade theirs so the best ones are in the Quantoms next are in Quarks and the SS scopes are maybe the worst but still have good usable etalons as you can see by the image above. The etalons are not just graded by the uneven illumination but also bandwidth and maybe some other reasons so good luck with what you find.