Priesters

No worries. Unfortunately in my experience there appears to be limitless things that can derail a precious clear evening/night so I have to say I am incredibly grateful to those who give their time and effort for free developing tools such as Cartes du Ciel so we at least have half a chance of capturing anything at all. @Patrick Chevalley

Yes, that is what Sync does i.e. you search for the intended target, find it, press sync, it asks you to confirm the target and then it makes allowance for the amount it was initially out by in future slews. Not sure if it’s Cartes du Ciel or EQMOD doing the calculations but I guess that doesn’t really matter.

Hi, On the View Tab, under Tool bar is the Main Bar box ticked? You should then see the icons as per image below. HTH Andrew

I very much like the grey now I have it 😉

I quite liked red but no one had any in stock and I’m incredibly impatient so I went for Grey. Thanks for the note on the back spacing. 👍

I sprung for the WO GT 81 plus 0.8 field flattener in the end and it just arrived today so expect clouds! In a blatant attempt at homework stealing - is your back spacing the 62.1mm as published on WO website or have you had to experiment a bit?

see below, but probably not that relevant on reflection : Meade LX200 8” ACF with 0.62 Optec Lepus Reducer and ZWO ASI 294 MC Pro JMI Crayford Focuser with ZWO EAF auto focuser EQ6R Pro Mount Skywatcher EvoGuide 50, Starizona FF2 and ZWO ASI 294 MC Optolong L’Enhance filter

Thanks for that - money to spare too 😂 Out of interest, do you find the need to counter the weight of the EAF on the other side of the OTA for balance?

Hi all, The FOV of the two scopes I currently use are below and as you’ll see there’s quite a difference so I’m looking for something to fill the gap My budget is around the £1600 mark. I’ve had a reflector in the past and I’m afraid the combination of my OCD along with lack of technical ability made the whole collimation thing too stressful so it’s a refractor I’m looking for. Within the budget I don’t want to be buying anything extra so the package needs to include a flat field and fit in with my current cameras/Mount (see signature). I’m at the start of my AP journey but want something that when life allows and I can spend time post processing I won’t want to sell it and buy again. So far I’m looking at: WO RedCat 71 Stella Mira 90mm ED Triplet I’m interested in thoughts/experiences with these two plus very open to any other suggestions. Also, when imaging at this scale with an OSC camera is manual focussing ok or do I need to factor in an EAF or similar? Finally with the 4/3 sensor size of the 294MC Pro do I need a field flattener? Thanks Andrew

I like wimvb’s answer more 😂 but with the prospect of worse RMS kens answer did make me rethink my set up and I’m pretty confident my centre of gravity is better now so it’s a win win 👍. Thanks to both of you @wimvb @kens.

So, in an idle moment this afternoon (other half was at work 👍) I came across an article about using Astrometry.net to find out the true focal length of your imaging set up. I’d been curious about it for a while as I have a Crayford on the back of an SCT so I always knew the ‘published’ focal ratio with the reducer would be wrong. I was pleased that all worked fine with Astometry.net and discovered my SCT set up is operating at F7.5. I then put in an image from my guide scope. My guide set up is a Skywatcher EvoGuide 50 (242mm focal length) with Starizona FIeld Flattener 2 and an ASI 294MC. I can find nothing to suggest the Starizona FF2 has any affect on focal length. I was surprised to find out that the focal length came through as 266mm making the set up F5.32 as opposed to the expected F4.84. Last night (I.e before this afternoons discovery) I enjoyed decent guiding with sub arcsecond RMS. I’ve now changed the focal length in PHD2 from 242mm to 266mm and am wondering which way that will throw my RMS figures, if anyone can help? Thanks

OMG, does it have an engine 😂

Great, I’ll give that a go. Looks like that adjustment is even within my technical capabilities. Thank you 👍

Reckon it is stiction as when there’s no weight on it it’s pretty stiff. That makes balancing tricky but I do my best to balance in three axis. I haven’t really properly checked for tight spots but I will do next time I’m setting up.

Thanks for looking through the logs and points noted. Yes, this is my point. When I first set up it won’t calibrate at all which I think is caused by USB problems because when I shut down other apps it worked. I’ll retest my theory next clear night. See earlier in thread - initially I was guiding with a 294MC and imaging with a 294MC Pro, both 4.63 um Will do 👍 Thanks again.

ok, so this didn't turn out to be a 'quick question' after all. 🙄 Nearly full moon last night but clear so ideal guiding practice. Set up using Altair GPCam as guider this time, polar aligned etc then fired up PHD and immediately calibration failed. So much for my theory that the problem was caused by having two nearly identical cameras as imager and guider! To my horror the previous 'fix' of deleting the profile and re-running the new profile wizard didn't work either. Checked all cables etc and re-did the new profile 'fix' and still no joy. In a slightly deranged way I just kept trying and randomly it calibrated, I ran GA, applied changes and some pleasing guiding followed - around the 0.5" RMS mark. I think I must then have shut PHD down because when I moved target I had to re-calibrate and it failed again. So after a little cry I tried shutting down all applications and then only opening PHD. It worked, calibration was successful and guiding was back on - between 0.4" RMS and 1" RMS depending on which part of the sky I was in and how long I left it running. My theory is now that its down to the fact everything runs through a USB 2 hub as opposed to USB 3. For the record its a Startech USB extender over ethernet so not a cheap Amazon job. I've posted this story of woe for two reasons: any thoughts / experiences with the USB 2 theory? is the very noticeable kink in the attached backlash graph anything to worry about? Thanks for reading. PHD2_GuideLog_2022-01-16_190144.txt

It’s on a flagged patio with no wobbly flags. That said I appreciate there is still potential for small movements that will affect PA. I’ll give it some thought whether I can PA with the tripod on the patio but me off it.

Yes, at one point I noticed EQMOd was tracking at Custom but when I corrected that it didn’t resolve the problem. I’ll take your advice on the exposures time. A hand controller isn’t involved as I’m using EQDIR so at least I can eliminate that. thanks for your help.

That is very much appreciated. I too was a bit horror struck by the polar alignment error. Before starting the session I polar aligned via SharpCap but I’m just wondering whether I gave the Mount a bump when I was checking cables and other mechanical issues. Next time out I’ll run GA again and see if it improves. Thanks for the advice on calibrating for each session - I hadn’t appreciated the need to do that. When I created the new profile via the wizard I’m pretty sure it insisted on a new darks library but I’ll check again next time. I guess it’s no big deal anyway as I can restrict the range of exposures to between 1 and 3 seconds which will cover my usage so it won’t take long anyway. thanks again for reviewing the logs.

Sadly the saga continues... There was a couple of hours of semi clear skies last night so I thought I'd test guiding again, run GA and apply recommendations. I used exactly the same PHD profile that I had ended my last 'successful' session with. I was disappointed to find that when I started guiding it was way off - on one run it was so bad the guide star disappeared from the star profile in PHD in a matter of seconds. It was as though each PHD pulse was exponentially sending the mount the wrong way, however, at least it was clear PHD was communicating with the mount. Nevertheless, I did still check cables were connected firmly and I re-checked the mount for snags and any other obvious mechanical issues. When I tried again I got the same result with one attempt ending with PHD giving an error message to say guiding had failed as Dec was unable to recover. The experiment was a little hampered by passing clouds but I'm pretty confident that was not the root cause. I also checked mount tracking when not guiding and as far as I can tell it was ok. So, the next thing I did was delete the previous 'successful' profile and run the new profile wizard again. It worked. Guiding was around the 1" mark, occasionally going higher, mainly due to lost guide stars as a result of passing clouds. I didn't touch the mount at all in between the failed and successful guiding runs so I'm sure it was running the new profile wizard that fixed it. This is a sub optimal solution as I really don't want to have to re-run new profile wizard each session, build dark library, calibrate and run GA at the start of each session - it takes me long enough to set up as it is! I'm beginning to think there is some sort of software conflict because I am running with an ASI 294MC for the guide cam and an ASI 294MC Pro for imaging. Just for the record, on all guiding attempts, I double checked PHD was connected to the correct camera. My next step is to swap the guide cam to my Altair 327C to test this theory. However, I have attached the logs from last night if anyone is interested and can spot something I'm missing. I have yet to learn how to read these logs so please bear that in mind if you do review and reply. The deleted profile name was EvoGuide 294 and the new one Evo 294. Thanks Andrew PHD2_GuideLog_2022-01-07_202046.txt

Will do. No fiddling of parameters was done - only wiggling of cables 😂. Must admit I only let it run for a few minutes but I think when the RA graph goes off the scale and RMS is over 10 is a good indicator something is awry. I’ll follow your suggestion to guide for an hour (if the opportunity arises again ☁️) but I might need some expert assistance in analysing guide graphs. It’s an EQ6R Pro btw.

Think I might although they are decent quality - Lyndy Cromo. After getting calibration to work and running guide assist I tried actually guiding and it went crazy, literally off the graph with RMS over 10”. After a short but intense sulk I deleted the PHD profile and set up again from scratch. Guiding was around the 1” RMS mark which I appreciate could be better but I’m viewing it as a triumph. I’ll see what happens next time we have a clear night 🤞and if the problem happens again I’ll buy some more cables.

Thank you for your help / offer of help everyone. I won’t need to post my logs though as I wiggled a couple of cables and PHD is now actually communicating with my mount 🙄. Slightly embarrassed 😳

Pulse 👍