cfinn

Many congratulations! I am on the list and would be interested to hear how much you end up paying with the current exchange rate and import duty. I would love to have my name drawn, but at the same time I dread the thought, as I won‘t be able to say no and it will cost me an arm and a leg!!

I think this new offering from JTW looks fantastic. Friction drive with high resolution encoders as standard and a 35kg payload at £6k probably (when you include VAT and shipping). Expensive, certainly, but when you consider it’s basically a competitor to the 10 Micron GM1000 (priced > £10k) with 10kg more payload and a friction drive rather than worm gear, it looks like a bargain. Very positive reports on the Trident from what I can see so far as well, so bodes well for this one.

Interesting. From the specs and the description, maybe a response to this. EDIT: I see the OP has already made this link - I missed it on first reading!

Many thanks all!

Many thanks! @ollypenrice I personally think it looks better in RGB, with all the dust and reflection nebulosity close by. The plan was to combine the Ha data with R and L in an HaLRGB composite. Alas, clear moonless nights can be a rarity, so narrowband it was, but I still may get to it.

This was a slog. The Cave Nebula is a surprisingly faint target and I acquired the OIII data under particularly unfavourable conditions, with a nearly full moon and passing high cloud. Nevertheless, I was able to make the 30 hours worth of data I acquired work hard in processing and am really quite satisfied with the result. I would like to get some RGB data next time I get a clear moonless night or two to make a natural colour equivalent. Full capture details can be found on Astrobin. Enjoy! CS Charles

Many thanks! There’s actually quite a bit of fine detail I’ve lost in the bubble with the histogram stretch to reveal the fainter surrounding nebulosity. A very difficult balance to strike, and I wasn’t able to recover much with HDRMultiscaleTransform in PixInsight. I’ll give it another go at some point. Maybe some kind of masked stretch or the like.

Everyone's favourite bubble in space. This is just 1.5 hours each in SII, H-alpha and OIII for 4.5 hours total with my Esprit 120ED, 0.77X reducer, EQ6R-Pro and QHY 268M. A one night job whilst I was away in Cambridge with some friends. Not much data so had to work hard with the processing on this one!

This is 8 hours on the Cave Nebula in H-alpha with my Esprit 120, 0.77X reducer and QHY 268M captured over the last couple of nights. The plan is to add RGB and maybe Luminance as well to create a natural colour image, as I would like to highlight the numerous reflection nebulae in the area. In terms of processing, I stacked in APP with Drizzle droplets at 1.35 pixels, which is equivalent to fractional binning since I was slightly oversampled given the seeing conditions and my guiding errors (average around 0.65" RMS). I then ran deconvolution using the EZ processing suite in PixInsight followed by Russell Croman's excellent NoiseXTerminator (denoise=0.5, detail=0.15) whilst the image was still in a linear state. Back into APP to run an auto-stretch then into Photoshop to apply a little sharpening with APF-R. I finished off in PixInsight with a light application of HDRMultiscaleTransform to recover some detail in the bright central area of nebulosity, again using the EZ processing suite. Comments and feedback welcome.

I’m just going to put this here and watch the comments come in! It should fully correct the field across an IMX455 chip with its matched reducer taking it to f5 with 550mm focal length. Polychromatic spot sizes will be well within the Airy disk limit across this sensor with the reducer, right into the corners if it matches it’s design specifications. It would pretty much be the dream wide field scope if imaging is your main concern, though I expect it will be excellent visually too.

What a phenomenal image! Brilliant work.

Hi everyone, Does anyone know how the base casting of an EQ6R-Pro can be removed? This is just the part that adjusts alt and az for polar alignment. I have sent it into a machine shop to have the threads on the bottom re-tapped and they need this part detached from the moving parts of the mount to work on it safely. I have emailed OVL about this but it is taking forever for them to hear back from the factory. My first guess is that the cap highlighted in the image below can be removed but it’s not easy or obvious that this is the right procedure. Many thanks, Charles

Thank you!

Thank you so much for your reply. I think taking it to a local machine shop is the best plan. I found this place near me. It was just knowing what to search for! Many thanks again. Charles

Hi all, I have had a complete disaster with my EQ6R-Pro this week. I was attaching it to the Sky-Watcher Pillar Mount and managed to screw on the adaptor to the base of the mount at a slightly wonky angle. As a result I could not unscrew the adaptor - it would not budge! The screw knob itself came off in the effort of trying to unscrew it and I was just left with the bolt sticking out the bottom. Eventually I got it off with a pair of pliers but it took considerable force and it has completely stripped the internal threads as can be seen in the pictures below. These are now damaged beyond repair and I cannot attach the mount to the tripod or the pillar at all! The mount is essentially useless unless I can find some way to fix this 😟 Does anyone have any ideas? I think the only way to rectify this is to have the base re-engineered. I have contacted Optical Vision about repair but I am not too hopeful. Thanks, Charles

@tooth_dr I have exactly the same. Halos are present on Ha and OIII, but SII seems fine. See the three 60s test images below on Merak, which is a magnitude 2.37 star. I am a bit disappointed given all the hype around these filters, but I will probably stick with them. I can't justify the cost of Chroma/Astrodon myself, and if I switched for say, Antlia 3nm, I am not convinced I would get a better result. What I have found is that halos disappear from the Ha images for stars at around magnitude 3 and below, but they persist for OIII down to magnitude 5 or 6. What is interesting is that my Baader Green and Blue filters have worse halos than these!

Many thanks all! My processing takes a step forward with each image I think. Stacking and selective colour is done in APP. I have been using the new StarXTerminator plugin for Photoshop, which I find works really well to remove the stars. Noise reduction is then carefully applied in Topaz and the stars added back in afterwards. The stars are still not perfect into the corners with the new Sky-Watcher 0.77X reducer. I've been making adjustments down to 0.1mm and it's still not exactly there, though maybe this is as good as it is going to get. I am currently using three 0.3mm M48 spacers to add 0.9mm extra back focus to the standard setup, which accounts for the 2mm filter thickness. I would be interested to hear of other experiences with this reducer.

The Soul Nebula in SHO (Hubble Palette). Around 9 hours with my Esprit 120ED, 0.77X reducer, QHY268M and Baader ultra-narrowband CMOS optimised filters. Full details on astrobin.

Here's my rendition of the IC 1805 - The Heart Nebula in the Hubble Palette. A total of 9 hours (3 in each of SII, Ha and OIII) with my Esprit 120ED, 0.77X reducer, QHY268M and Baader ultra-narrowband CMOS optimised filters. Feedback welcomed. Enjoy!

Really beautiful. Great job!

Thanks! And absolutely, I learned quite a lot from this as well. I created luminance with 80% Ha and 10% each of OIII and SII which seemed to work well.

Thanks! I collected equal amounts of integration time in each. The trick is to up-weight SII and OIII in the combination because they will always have much weaker signal than H-alpha. If you use equal weightings the image will come out very green. I used APP for the stacking and processing and basically followed the tutorial below, which explains everything very nicely.

This is 5 hours with my Esprit 120ED, QHY268M and the new Baader ultra-narrowband CMOS optimised SHO filters. Really pleased with the results! This is also first light with the new Esprit 120 0.77X reducer. Stars are not perfect into the corners, so I have a bit more work to do on backspacing. Probably needs another 0.5-1mm.

This is only 40 mins on the Eastern Veil Nebula. It was the result of a very short session yesterday evening as I had to be up early for work, but I am quite impressed with what can be achieved with so little data so I felt like sharing it. Can't wait for some longer nights to really stack up some integration time. Esprit 120ED, EQ6R-Pro, QHY268M, 5 x 120s each in LRGB

Taking some flats before a short imaging session last night. I thought it made for a nice photo with the ghostly glow from the flat panel and the twilight sky in the background.