Astrodd

I use the monfrotto 055 with a sky adventurer and red cat. The tripod is dramatically more stable than the amazon basics one I had on hand from years prior.

I am using the SA Pro with a Monfrotto 055 tripod. I am terrible at this hobby so I don't have any pretty images yet. I have on several occasions aligned to a star other than Polaris. I'm pretty sure that's a reflection of my inexperience rather than the SA. I have 3 complaints with the SA. As someone already mentioned the polar scope light is a clear afterthought. It's flimsy and cheap. Hard to believe someone at sky watcher thought it was acceptable. The adjustment knobs require you keep a hex key handy. Why not make these thumb screws? Finally there is too much give in the adjustment knobs (going from moving one way to the other requires going through some slop). If feels really well built. Other than a wee bit of give in the dec axis, it is very sturdy. For what it's worth, if I had to make the decision again, today, I would have made the same one. I have learned a lot with the SA and will continue to learn a lot until my wife lets me buy a proper mount .

Thanks for the help. I will try this after work today. I will also make sure to use dithering from now on.

Here is a cropped example.

Hi All, I am new so please go easy on me if there is something I'm missing. I tried to image Bode's galaxy with a pretty wide lens to get my feet wet. I'm using a Star Adventurer with a Canon t2i and Red Cat 51. It took me quite some time to learn but I am becoming familiar with kstars and ekos. Using plate solving, I was able to position my rig to image Bode's galaxy. I was so excited to get it in frame that I didn't make any small adjustments (I'm not sure these adjustments will ever be intuitive when the target is almost overhead). I imaged 15x60s and had to toss a few because of satellites. I am using ASTAP to stack. I have dozens of weird artifacts (red/green/blue lines/trails) and I am not sure what I did wrong. For what it's worth, I did not find these artifacts in any single shot. Here is my image: Thanks for any advice.