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Tenor Viol

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Everything posted by Tenor Viol

  1. Sorry - house move got in the way... I'm in Penrith...
  2. Thought I'd better say 'hello' as I've not posted for a while. I made the questionable decision to retire then become a full-time student for the last 3 years. I graduate next week with a 1st for a BA in digital imaging and photography. Sadly, in no part due to the weather, I was unable to introduce much in the way of astro into my project work (apart from a GIF of lunar phases). I did fair amount of film work as part of my course using 35mm, medium format 120 film in 6x7 format, and cut sheet 5x4 film. I also made photobooks and have been doing my own bookbinding. I'm about to move further north from Shropshire to Cumbria. Although skies are meant to be 'similar' I will be much further away from large cities, so I think will be darker. Once I've moved, I hope I can get to do some imaging. I have changed my camera kit recently so it's not done any astro at all - I'll talk about that on the photography thread.
  3. If all you want to do is use a camera, then the two suggestions are fine, there are others out there too. You might want to consider a more rigid tripod, particularly if you use longer focal length lenses. If you wish to attach a scope to the camera, then you can get away with a small one with those mounts, but anything larger will need to move to a full equatorial mount.
  4. hmmmm.... distance selling rules apply and the procedure outlined by szymon.
  5. Affinity is similar in many ways to PS. If Affinity had a catalog I'd ditch PS, but because of a major project kicking off next week (which I will report elsewhere) I will have to keep using PS for the time being as I need the catalog (I have about 30k images).
  6. I'd agree that if your primary aim is lunar and planetary, then you need to look at much longer focal lengths as that affects the image size.
  7. On the HEQ5 you can adjust the brightness through the utilities menu
  8. I see AN has a review of the 180 - interesting piece of hybrid kit.
  9. I do think this is were both satellite/cable broadcasting and public service broadcasting such as the BBC, Channel 4 and 5 fail miserably. About the only hobby activity that gets any coverage on any channel is fishing on one of the Discovery channels. There is enough space for there to be at least some sort of community broadcasting aimed at people's hobbies, interests, pastimes. But they'd rather focus on glitzy productions with travel budgets so they can set up a scene, then do the set-up, then a short spiel which lacks any real content, then move to the next scene and repeat. They seem to be afraid of having talking heads providing solid content.
  10. Just to confirm for UK the time zone is 0:00, but at the moment 'daylight saving time' is Y. You'll be out by 15 degrees or more if one or the other is wrong
  11. Parallax is measured by observing the position of a star against its background. Traditional terrestrial based astrometry you'd then make another observation 6 months later and measure the position again. You can now use simple trigonometry to work it out. You have the base of the triangle - the diameter of the Earth's orbit, you now have the angle that it seems to have moved so you can now work out the 'height' of the triangle. You need to look up 'astrometry'. A 'parsec' is the distance represented by a parallax of one second of arc. It's about 3.2 light years I think.
  12. My view - dismantle and pack. I regularly go on music summer schools and consequently have to travel with instruments. You never know what weird things can happen when travelling - things move, you have to make an emergency stop, go round a bend and something shifts...
  13. No, it's a satellite. The sun is still north of the equator for a few more weeks. and Andromeda is relatively 'north'. It's probably a wretched specimen of that which shall not be named.
  14. Yes, I could do that - hang say 5 or 10kg from the central column. Some tripods have a hook for doing that, but this one doesn't.
  15. You could take the head off the tripod you've got and bolt the Star Adventurer to it. The tripod's bolt is likely to be 3/8" - the base of the SA is probably the same, if not you can get a 3/8 - 1/4 bushing. If you attached directly to the tripod would that give greater stability? You'd then just need a ball head for attaching the camera to the SA. tbh I've hit the same problem with my Sky Guider. The heavier of my two camera tripods is a Manfrotto and it is stiff enough, but I don't think it's heavy enough.
  16. An interesting talk and obviously a capable piece of software, which has had a lot of thought go into it. I'm an IT guy and a 'serious' amateur photographer. In the world of media, but also professional scientists, Macs are the computers that everyone uses. You will find very few professional photographers running anything other than a Mac. It has perplexed me since I recently came into the world of (digital) AP that the majority of software that supports AP is written for PC only. Some of the key software components are only available for PC, few are available for multiple platforms. Given that much of this is open source, this is to some extent understandable as they lack the resources for multi-platform development. Whilst Macs are not perfect, they are significantly more stable than PCs and in particular W10 - I moved to Mac because I got fed-up of the endless crashes of W10 and every other day it seemed a massive download to update it to fix the bug of the previous update... There are Mac options out there, but they're fewer in number, so less choice, and some like Siril are very unintuitive in how they work (I design IT systems and if we released such an unhelpful user interface we wouldn't last long). I realise much of this stems from the open source nature of development. I'm guessing the PC bias in products is due to perceived number of end users. Sadly, despite NINA looking to be a well designed and thought out product, it seems unless someone writes them a large cheque there won't be a Mac version available any time soon. When my kit arrives it looks like I will be using KSTARS and EKOS.
  17. The primary mirror is spherical not parabolic. The corrector plate gets its name from the fact it 'corrects' the spherical aberration of the primary. You would need to get a secondary that as well as bringing the image to the correct focus can do the work of the corrector plate and fix the spherical aberration. I'm not an expert on optics, so not sure what your options would be in that regard, but I suspect not cheap.
  18. You might have made a similar mistake to one I made initially with the HEQ5. It's unlikely because of the date last night of 29-08-2020 that you keyed that in wrong as that wouldn't work, but in a couple of days' time when we hit 01-09-2020 the date will need to be input as 09-01-2020 as it uses the US date format (which I find just peculiar, mind you I'm an IT guy and we almost always use yyyy-mm-dd). The other is you might have put the time in incorrectly or responded incorrectly to the 'daylight saving time' query as that would throw you out by 15 degrees. The other is you might not have set 'home' position correctly.
  19. Unfortunately, the NW corner of Wales is one of the wettest places in the UK - the Rhinogs are where it's worst I believe.
  20. You'd normally only have an API available if there was an expectation of a commercial use to expose the data or e.g. a regulatory requirement as happens with banks in the UK. Unless there is a use case I can't see anyone building one on the off-chance.
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