rnobleeddy

I use https://smile.amazon.co.uk/Dokon-Hanging-Waterproof-Breathable-200x105cm/dp/B07MNJVPJK/ref=sr_1_4?dchild=1&keywords=Dokon+Patio+Hanging+Chair+Cover%2C+Waterproof%2C+Windproof%2C+Anti-UV%2C+Heavy+Duty+Rip+Proof+600D+Oxford+Fabric+Ga&qid=1599758535&sr=8-4 and have not run in to any issues at all. I haven't left anything out in a storm yet, but we have a similar cover that's actually on a hanging chair, and that's survived outside for the entire summer without getting at all damp.

I think the pi4 needs 5V? I've just used a standard 4-way adapter in a waterproof outdoor box, and then plugged in a few separate power supplies. Cheap and cheerful, but at some point will probably need something more advanced, so will see what the advice is!

+1 for a relatively cheap and cheerful mains adapter from Amazon. Or scour your loft - this is perhaps the most common power supply, and I borrowed a second one from an old amplifier. Also worth remembering to always use an RCD if you're using mains power outside.

Had to leave this early, but looking forward to seeing the rest on YouTube.

Unless I've misunderstood, the virus is obtained by leaving SSH open to the internet with the default password. Clearly the advice to change the password is sensible regardless, but to open your SSH up to the internet requires a conscious choice, and isn't something that I'd imagine most users do.

Goto probably kept me in the hobby. Life's too short to spend nights failing to find the target you're looking for. I guess you could argue that's part of the skill, but I guess it depends if you enjoy the journey or the destination. As a brief counter argument to the ease of goto, I had the modern skywatcher GoTo up and running in about 30 minutes. The hardest part was working out what format to enter the date. With the use of stellarium on my phone, I skipped the star it wanted behind my tree, and immediately after asking for it, had M13 directly in the center of my view. I've now moved on to use EQMOD and a PC, and it's even easier to find what you're after using plate solving - it's not even necessary to do the 2- or 3-star alignment anymore.

I got an EQ5 earlier this year. Borrowed from a friend, but basically new. It's good enough to get started. Mine didn't guide that well out of the box due to what I guess is stiction in the DEC axis, so whilst ymmv, I would have to throw away more than half of the subs for 5 minute exposures, but of course, I had a much better success rate for shorter exposures. I've set out to replace some of the bearings and tune it as far as I can. There's some great videos on youtube that cover a full tune/rebuild that you can dip in and out of. I'm yet to test due to clouds, but I'm hopeful that my changes will have improved things. The other issue is total weight. I tried hard to keep the weight down, so have tried to opt for lighter weight components, but it all adds up. I'm closer to 6Kg than the recommended 5Kg (with a 130PDS and a modded 450d) and so have no room left to add anything else. If the budget is strict, a new EQ5 Pro and a second hand DSLR is just within your price range. If you're happy to buy second hand, I've seen second hand HEQ5s for the same price as a new EQ5, but they come up pretty rarely (and even more rarely within sensible driving range). From what I've read, there's not a great deal of point getting a dedicated astro camera for DSO until you can afford a cooled camera, but others may have a different opinion.

What's the the advantage if I'm imaging in a static location? I'm using EQMOD/Kstars, so I have to enter my location once and then plate solve to find the location I'm after. Given how cheap they are, it's worth finding out what I'm missing!

I had a similar question, and ended up with a decent quality hanging chair cover from Amazon for £30 which appears to work very well so far (my partner bought a hanging chair so I knew the cover was watertight). Not had a great deal of use yet, but I'm planning to leave the mount outside (and hopefully remaining roughly aligned) if we ever get any clear skies for a few nights. I tend to bring the scope in the house as I'm imaging so it has a couple of cameras, and it only takes a minute.

Whilst I wouldn't argue against using a powered USB hub, I've run into no issues powering a 120 from the usb port of a pi3. It was probably the only device drawing any power though.

Thanks - I'm happy to post the full logs, I just thought expecting someone to use them was a little much! That makes sense. I have had better DEC guiding on a previous session when I had a much larger PA error. I imagine other's can use PHD2 drift alignment better than I can, but I found sharpcap made it much easier to get v. close to PA (and is the best £10 I've spent since starting this hobby!). I'll have at tuning out some of the backlash and see what happens on the next clear night.

Yeah, even if the DEC taking a long time is driven by backlash, I hadn't really spotted how poorly the RA was keeping up. That rings a bell about seeing another post about the EQMOD default guide rates being low, so I'll try that out on the next cloud free night.

I have an EQ5 with GOTO that's not been adjusted since it was bought. I got a couple of long-ish guide logs last night (one hour in total, shown below) and was hoping someone could help me make sense of them. Few other points: - I also had problems with slightly saturated stars in PHD2 last night (perhaps I chose 8-bit for the guide cam by mistake, or focus is a little out) but don't think that made a massive difference - Using EQMOD for guiding, no synscan handset - Ignore the very large spikes at the end of log1 and the middle of log 2 - this was me touching equipment - I noticed I had camera USB cable trailing over the scope, but it was not tight - The DEC backlash is large, which is visible in the logs below. The DEC axis feels too easy to move with the knob on the mount. I intend to try to adjust the mount to remove some of the DEC backlash but wanted to get a baseline first - PA was with sharpcap, PHD2 shows this drifted to 1.9' but as far as I can tell, this is good enough? According to the internet, the RA axis takes 638s to rotate once, and I can just about buy that accounts for the periodicity in RA. However, what I'm less sure about is why there appears to be such strong periodicity in the DEC axis? I'd have guessed that there could be either drift in one direction and/or random movement - but would be interested to know what might cause what looks like a periodic error in DEC that is roughly out of phase with the RA error? I don't think it's simply DEC overshooting because I initially tried to guide in one direction only, but this cycling north/south error meant I had to switch to both directions. I know the EQ5 is limited and will upgrade in due time - it's more about understanding what's going on that expecting the mount to perform well! Log 1: Log 2: Log 2:

Thanks all - I'd totally missed the fact that the cheaper skywatcher/hitec astro solution was a cheaper dc motor and mostly the others are stepper motors, hence the price difference is probably reasonable! I'll check out the Lakeside.

Happily using astroberry/INDI at the moment, but looking to add an auto focuser. The entry level choice appears to be the skywatcher focuser plus HitecAstro DC Focus however, if you google Linux compatibility for the HitecAstro the first 3 hits are issues, and it doesn't look like HitecAstro ever made support official. So hopeful that someone might be able to help: - confirm if the HitecAstro DC works on linux (and if you have the newer v2 or the older model) - are there any reasonably priced alternatives that have better linux/INDI support? Everything I found so far is at least 2x the price I may just accept that I have to get the soldering iron out and make my own arduino based controller, but I generally regret trying DIY electronics!

Coincidence, but I used sharpcap for PA for the first time last night. Was really easy to get good PA and I won't go back to the other methods now. For whatever reason by the time I got to guiding (about an hour later, due to some other issues) PHD2 thought I was 50 arc minutes away, but I'll put that down to either the fact that I had the mount directly on softish grass, and/or I'd left one of the bolts too loose, or the fact that the fov on my guide cam only had one particularly dodgy guide star. Hoping for good results tonight!

Whilst the advice that the HEQ5 is the minimum mount you need to do astrophotography is solid, assuming you don't expect to jump straight to pro level, there's still a lot you can do without spending £1500. For example, this thread using a mount that I saw available second hand for <£100 last week: Or this thread of photo's taken without an equatorial mount. As someone who's trying to make do without spending a fortune (for now) it's probably worth adding that you're going to be trading money for time/frustration. I imagine most people who use a HEQ5 set it up and it works well. I imagine most people in the EQ3 thread above spent time tuning their mount.

Depends what you want to achieve. Check out a recent post for an example. Others will comment on the suitability of the 200P, but int terms of the mount - I have an EQ5 with a 130PDS and the mount is a sometimes a pain (DEC guiding is erratic) but it's usable. I intend to upgrade sooner rather than later, but with good PA and some PHD tweaking, I've had 5 minute subs with no star trails. I haven't tried longer because of clouds! The EQ5 is never going to amazing for AP but it's not a disaster if you're patient and would like to get started as cheaply as possible. As you've already got an EQ5, the question becomes whether it's worth spending £300 for a new GOTO kit? I was lucky and got a 2nd hand one for £150 but if I'd had to spend the £300 for a new one, I'd probably have put it towards a HEQ5 instead. I agree with the comments about the lack of instructions with the GOTO kit - however, I found it surprisingly easy to fit, and a lot easier than the more basic motor drive kit. GOTO performance has been excellent.

I've got a 20000mAh phone power bank that powers my raspberry pi for multiple nights. However for 12V I've assumed I'd be better off with a car/motorbike battery?

Thanks. I have the same mount with a 130PDS and got some decent 300s subs too. Haven't had a lot of clear nights to really assess performance. Dec guiding can be erratic but seems to work best if I leave PA around 10 arc minutes away from perfect, then guide in one direction only. I haven't tried to tune the worm gears, but I did pick up some bearings with the plan of making a few upgrades to the DEC axis based on a series of youtube videos I found. The biggest issue is that I need to get up the next day, so haven't had a lot of time, but thanks for sharing - it's good to see it's possible! I got a very similar setup too - haven't got the autofocusser yet - was the arduino controller easy to build?

Looks good - curious to know how long your subs are? How is the DEC guiding?

I've been switching these around myself but not 100% sure what you mean. There's the black box with no screen, that you feed 12V power to, and the Synscan handset with the buttons and screen that you connect to the black box. Is that the case that the Synscan handset with the buttons and screen isn't powering up after you've connected it to the black box, and that the black box has power and works if you connect it directly to a computer using EQMod?

Sorry, brain fade late at night. I meant arc minutes. The one time I got good PA I was about 10 arc minutes away and guiding was good. I've learnt the hard way that at guiding at 60 arc minutes isn't as good, but still not a complete loss. I had to be up early-ish this morning so didn't stay up too late last night, but I'll hopefully get my routine sorted after a few more light nights.

Thanks. Based on what I've experienced I think I must have just done a bad job of lining the scope up in the daylight, and then when I realized I had the wrong star, found it hard to recover because at that point it was much darker. It'll help me to rotate/calibrate my guide camera to make sure I know which way is which in terms of changing alt/az. Definitely agree on the definition changing - I've seen that PHD2 is very reliable if I use polar drift alignment one the same star more than once, but can vary a lot if I choose a start on the other side of the FOV of the guide scope image.

So perhaps if you *actually* point your polar scope at polaris you'll get better PA. But now I'm not sure how to. I made the mistake of assuming the only possible star in the FOV in the polar scope was polaris. I thought I'd pointed roughly at NCP but I guess not. I can see polaris in the sky, but if I move the mount a little each way, I tend to see > 1 star in the FOV of the polar scope and then I have no idea how to choose polaris? Any tips?