AndrewRrrrrr

Markarians chain and friends. This is 1 hour 45 mins worth of 30 second subs taken with a Canon 60D and a Samyang 135mm f2. Taken a few days ago during a rare gap in the cloudy nights. There's quite a few objects in here 🙂

thanks for the advice guys, looks like i best get saving up lol.

Evening All, Looking for some advice: I recently upgraded my camera from a 183M to a 26M. But using the same EFW with 1.25" inch filters. This is with a "wave 80" scope (80mm aperture, f6 with a 0.8x reducer so 384mm focal length) Sensor to filter distance is 28.5mm. I thought I might get away with it: according to the "CCD Filter Size" on astronomy.tools website which specifies a minimum filter size of 32mm (1.25" = 31.75mm) Attached is the integrated LUM channel and it's corresponding flat. (I might re-do the flats to see if anything has changed, I'm still in the "shake down" phase of the new camera I guess......) Or maybe it's something else altogether? I haven't attached the heater yet but it wasn't a cold or humid night . Opinions welcome, thanks in advance!

https://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/slac-completes-construction-of-the-largest-digital-camera-ever-built-for-astronomy !!!!

i'm thinking of getting one of these to go with my edge 8 and 80mm triplet, seems to fit the bill pretty well. Does anyone have any experience with this camera or similar IMX492 based camera? i think from reading around that the difficulty in creating flats is now understood with a workaround? or is that not the case? any info gratefully received.....thanks loads! regards AR

looks good! i've nearly finished one using a FYSETC E4 board for my Vixen GP mount. Very impressed with the whole thing. I'm finding the hardest bit is mounting it inside a case with cable plugs etc!

Not many clear nights these days it seems! This was taken on the 10th Jan. 47x 1 minute exposures at ISO 800 on modified Canon 60D plus 50mm lens with an Altair triband clip-in filter. Camera was on a Vixen GP mount with an Onstep setup. Processed in Astro Pixel Processor.

finally a clear (ish) night so gave the onstep on GP mount another trial with a better PA (2.4 arc-min) It's doing really well IMHO (this a C8 with a 0.63x reducer and a Canon 60D) guiding accuracy seems to be around 0.63" going as low as 0.42" at one point! onstep-guiding291223.tiff

yes - really easy. basic skills will be good enough!

I can confirm control of the onstep is good via Astro Photography Tool and PHD2. once a couple of platesolves and syncs have been done, it's very accurate at slewing to what you want. The guiding accuracy was not great, but it was really poor seeing, i have a polar alignement error of over a degree and had a fully loaded C8 on the GP mount (way over what you should have on a GP for photos). Although the guiding wasn't great it was a massive improvment over the GP mount with the SS2K on it, which basicallly wouldn't guide at all. I guess the SS2K motors and using spur gears compared to the belt drive and modern steppers for the onstep have helped here. I think I can get the guiding better with some decent seeing, a proper PA and may a bit more time spent on balancing. Certainly the poor guiding isn't down to the onstep, it's the amount of gear I have on the GP. We will see.......

hi bought this for my vixen GP mount and it works really well. looks like there's an eq3 version. they are quite responsive to email questions I've found. https://www.terransindustry.com/en-gb/collections/onstep-v4-kit/products/skywatcher-eq3?variant=42521248596161

thanks guys, i might be able to stretch to a samyang 14mm which looks pretty good, looks like I could pick one up for 180 ish. 300 too much for the 135 as I'm saving up for other more expensive stuff!!! yes the sponge is getting rinsed haha a nifty fifty does look good but think it turns into an nifty eighty on an aps-c sensor.

After some recommendations please..... I've just bought a astro-modded Canon 60D body. I don't have any lenses for it. Most of the camera's time will be on the back of a telescope but I might want to use it for very wide field or even "normal" daytime photography! I don't have a huge budget (up to £150 ish ) and happy to buy second hand. I think it needs to be an EF mount as I have a quad-band clip-in filter and EF-S lens protude backwards into the camera body and will hit the filter. What lens would you buy? thanks in advance 🙂

my belt-modded and regreased etc neq6 nearly always guides below 0.5" regular periods in the 0.3's. best ever was 0.22" which I had to do a screen grab of after my jaw had dropped..... guiding022.tiff

can recommend this: https://culturehustle.com/products/black-4-0 as long you are not associated with Anish Kapoor!