chewie

Any lens you are thinking on buying in the future check out Chris Frost on youtube, he has an extensive catalogue built up for most lenses now, he usually does a coma test on them too. The 135mm Samyang is also a well regarded lens that is in common use for astro too if you are after something with a bit tighter field of view, areas like the Heart and Soul Nebula, Elephants Trunk, Flaming Star etc or even Andromeda Galaxy should all frame up quite well with apsc camera and 135mm.

A few from last weekends Aurora show, the 1st one shows the STEVE looking from Ballycastle (County Antrim) Eastwards towards Fairhead and on beyond that over to Scotland, it seemed to run across the leading edge of the Aurora glow and lasted a good 30-40 mins. The rest where taken at various times and places around the Antrim North coast, Murlough Bay, Loughareema Road (at its brightest when I was there) and Cushendun.

The "Air" is a load of different functions in one box. A viewscreen is via your phone or tablet as from this the exact co ords and time data for your location can be pulled so it knows exactly where you are setup at. Polar alignment, you start the app for it and it will snap an image in its Home position and then rotate the scope approx 60 degrees and snap another photo, from that it will tell you how far out in hrs/mins/secs that your polar alignment is out, you then manually adjust the mount incrementally whilst refreshing and this allows you to dial in the PA down to within a few seconds of error. Target acquisition, it has a built in planetarium akin to stellarium, this can be used to plot mosaics or single images. Plan mode, you create the imaging sequence within this function, exposure lengths, shot number, filter etc etc, once plan mode is engaged it will then goto the target, plate solve and set guiding, set auto focus (if you have an EAF) , set filter (if you use an EFW) and start the imaging plan until completion whereby it will return to home and power itself down. Connectivity, I run mine via a lan cable into a mains plug in extender, they also have there own wireless connection for near hand connection to a phone or tablet, the lan cable can also go straight to a router. They have limited storage onboard around 20gb for the mk1 plus with the mk2 plus now having 256gb i believe though you can just plugin a thumb drive for image storage. They are a fantastic piece of equipment and they remove an awful lot of the headaches anyone starting out will encounter in trying to get various programs and bits of gear to talk to each other and run more or less flawlessly. The one big downside to it is as almost everyone says is that it limits you to the ZWO line of equipment other than Canon, Nikon and Sony DSLR's for main imaging camera. Now though instead of a laptop and 3 cables (power, eq mod and usb) coming out from my shed to run my setup I now just have 1 (power). Those are the main functions of it though they do have more.

IS0 800 should be fine for the camera but try it at 400 first, a 600d may well be hurting from the 3 minute exposures, that's quite a long time for an uncooled camera sensor and it will be getting quite hot, try a run at 1 minute exposures with a decent 10-15 second gap between each frame if possible and see how they turn out, dithering will help clean up images too but baby steps first.

When you hit check pictures and then go to Register checked pictures under its advanced tab you will have the star detection slider, set at 2% being the maximum number it will detect, on this tab there is also the "Reduce the noise by using a median filter" check box, unchecking that will also help detect more if the slider is not getting you enough stars., for my setup unticking that median filter box more than doubles the amount of detected stars. Always hit the compute number of stars before you start stacking, this will give you an idea of what is available. It's also worthwhile running the photos through a program that allows you to blink check them before putting them into DSS. A decent program will auto stretch the images to give you an idea of what your looking at, there is no point putting cloudy pics into DSS. Don't worry about calibration frames until you can get a set of light frames run through first.

ASI Air is fantastic and it will save an awful lot of hassle off trying to get multiple programs working as one via a laptop for instance, bear in mind though that although it will work with DSLR's and various mounts any other equipment you buy further down the line will all have to be ZWO for the Air to work as its all locked in, eg guide cameras, electronic filter wheels, electronic focusers. Astro is a huge rabbit hole, your 1k budget is fine but it could well spiral upwards by quite a bit, think very carefully about what you want to achieve as it would probably be better in the long term financially to work towards an end goal rather than trying to bits and piece something together. It's probably worth keeping a close eye on your local marketplace, gumtree etc for someone selling a complete rig as these can be quite well discounted compared to buying new.

I use a foil camping mat cut up and taped on to the body, the foil windscreen covers you get for cars to keep the frost of are similar.

A Saturday night camping in the North West of N Ireland with the prospect of a clear sky, little moon and an outside chance of an Aurora which duly obliged. On Binevenagh mountain overlooking Lough Foyle and County Donegal.

Tripods are identical, as is the hand controller. You might get lucky and find someone selling a secondhand HEQ5 head only, I'm not sure if any retailers sell the mount head on its own. I did recently see a tripod sell secondhand for around £100 if that helps, seems there must be some demand for them.

A couple of photos from Thursday evenings Aurora, Cushendun beach, County Antrim. The Red light on the rightside just above the horizon is on The Mull of Kintyre.

A lot of camera lenses can cause coma so unless you know how it will perform I would avoid. Lol let me know btw where you can get 400mm F4 prime for under 400quid

This was just a quick test shot that I took during the full moon to gauge how mush of an effect the L Extreme Optolong filter has at cutting moonlight out, F4.9 newtown, ISO 100 the shutter speed was 1/50th (fully manual no exposure compensation) , usually for a shot of the full moon the shutter speed would be around 1/500th, which is about 3 1/2 full stops of light in difference. Thought I would post it in case someone may find it useful info.

A single 1 minute exposure of Leonard taken around 5am 02/12/21 from a Class 4 Bortle area @900mm.

I use the 200p with HEQ5 and full frame dslr, so far no issues though as mentioned above that size of scope and wind then it will move about. One other thing if mounting a heavy camera is that it will tend to make balancing an issue if you also want to do visual, the tube will need to be turned inside the swing of the scope not on the outside as this can tend to make all the difference, mine will not balance properly as both counterweights are out as far as they will go, I reckon its about 6 oz's min of being able to be balanced to just slightly scope heavy, swinging the tube round inside the rings solves this np but would maybe make visual a bit more of a contortion act if you are doing a bit of both.

I could see it being worth it if accessing a scope for Southern Hemisphere only kinda targets but I think I would rather put the extra cash towards a fortnight away somewhere with high % chance of getting a clear/long night sky or decent second rig to maximise the time available when a clear sky comes along.

The bbc no longer use met office data but instead rely on meteo group (belgian iirc so well used to forecasting rain) , certainly some questionable forecasting from them. Met Office daily/ hourly certainly seems to have a high degree of accuracy, I use both there daily and mountain forecast service regularly.

Hiya and welcome, M 27 might be a nice visual target for you, roughly a 3rd of the way between Altair and Deneb in a straight line.

One thing that will help is to make sure your polar alignment is as good as you can get it to be, test the polar scope itself for alignment (youtube should help with that) as it has several grub screws on it to alter it. Using the scope I would have been anywhere from 3 to 9 arc minutes out, PHD2 Guiding assistant will tell you the error in alignment, IIRC if its under 5 mins then guiding should be decent, over 5 mins and it may give more error resulting in the assistant wanting you to alter the pulsing. There is quite a few ways to dial in your alignment for better tracking, drift alignment in PHD (free), Sharp cap software (subsciption) or polemaster separate camera/software combo (pricey). Great vid here with detail in depth about PHD and where to have your scope pointed when you do a calibration. Might be worthwhile to take a look at some of the mount tuning vids for your mount in RE to something like the rowan belts etc, I would try to identify the problem first though without throwing money at it first.

Look for foregrounds where the sky lightpollution is low as this really helps with sky detail , try also single exposures as it will surprise you the detail that can be pulled out from a single shot, the maths say that the 14mm samyang on a full frame camera should be good for 30sec exposure without a tracker but in my experience 25 secs is better, with 30secs there is some trailing noticeable around the edges, for your crop sensor that might just work though you may have to go down to 20secs. Try lightpainting your foreground to for a single shot, experiment with it as much as you can, one nice effect is to use a single yankee candle to light something up, really surprising how much light it will put out during 20-30 secs. This is a single photo from the summit of Slieve Bearnagh in The Mourne mountains during the summer with some foreground painting on the Torrs , shooting from class 4 directly towards a large class 5 town (Kilkeel) so not ideal but it will give you an idea of what is possible from a single photo for very little effort. Lol not sure whats worse, the light pollution or the satellite pollution.

Lol that brought back the memory of me reading this Re Blackhead Lighthouse at the mouth of Belfast Lough. By early 1900 the construction of the lighthouse was under way. It went into operation on 1st Apri1 1902. Mr E.A. Kennedy was appointed Chief Lighthouse Keeper. The lighthouse had only been in operation a short time when the captains of some ships complained about another light flashing in the town with the same frequency as the lighthouse. On investigation by an official of the Irish Lights it was discovered that the beam from the lighthouse was reflecting from a large mirror in the bedroom of a house in York Avenue. The occupant of the house was asked to change the position of the mirror or keep the blinds closed. He refused, stating that the arc of light from the lighthouse should not sweep across the seaward side of the town. Alterations were made to the lighthouse to stop the light from flashing on any part of the town.

5X10 minute dithered subs on The Dumb bell Nebula, narrowband from Class 5 Bortle, shot on unmodded DSLR with no calibration frames.

That got me googling for one but came across a post about mounting the guide scope underneath the scope, not yet sure if I would have the room once guide cam is added but will give it a go first, there was a few posts about the hot shoe option but consensus seemed to be that it was a fair weight to add to a shoe.

Ello Folks, just wondering if anyone has a relatively simple solution for this, I intend to run a second mount with 400mm prime camera lens for a slightly wider FOV which will have a DSLR or at some point in the future an astro cam hanging of it, the question is mounting a separate guide scope, I have a spare skywatcher default guidescope which I believe is able to be adapted for a guide camera but attaching it to the rail is atm what I'm trying to sus out for best way forward that's dependable and not going to budge. No problem hacking something together if need be. TY

Sometimes the nearer earth objects get in the way too

My tuppence worth would be to get the basics setup and running and once your comfortable with that then add in the extras to your setup, laptop/pc talking to and controlling the mount, imaging software talking to your mount/camera and PHD talking to your guide camera/mount at the very least you can then grab a few images to have something to work with for the other 30 cloudy nights of the month. Once you have these up and running you will have a better grasp of what's going on and can then start to work out the extras like the focuser and on mount pc. One other reason for doing that is at some point something will just stop working and having the basic trouble shooting know how to fix it could mean you still get to image instead of fumbling in the dark and end up packing away for the night.