irtuk

Beautiful. Are those very faint red rings on some of the brighter stars deconvolution artefacts? I have been trying to understand what that is and what it does, thus far I have only managed to get modern art out of that feature in pixinsight. There are some useful looking articles online but I dont have the brain capacity to read them at the moment! Looks like you have it mastered with that though. congratulations Ed.

That's awful! sounds like you were lucky that wind didn't come with lashing rain though. Its been blowing up a gale down here and I keep checking on my cameras that the scope cover is still on. Best of luck with getting all that up and running again.

Hello everyone. Weather has been awful and my motivation has been a bit off with other projects, sadly mainly work but I have managed to scrape enough photons from the clouds to process this NCG2174, the Monkey head nebula Narrowband HA/O3/S2 25 minutes each, 10x150s subs, guided, capture with NINA, Sky Watcher ED80 on a pier mount NEQ6. Mainly processed in PixInsight, some learnings on this one, Narrowband subs needed pedestals to get them to process via Weighted Batch Pre-Processor (although this final image i did by hand). Lots of stuff to recall from last season because I had forgotten how to make Pixinsight do much other than beep at me in irritation! Got to confess as well, eldest daughter worked on the stars at the end in Photoshop. I think she dropped a B/W layer on then painted the nebula back in. Not sure how I feel about that! Seems to be a bit cheaty if you ask me! Anyhow, its a nice enough image. until you look at all the others All the best to everyone with pier mounted gear but no dome tonight. Its blowing an absolute gale out there. Ed.

ah sorry yes its a Skywatcher NEQ5 and the motherboard has SYNSCAN EQ6 Motor Controller Rev C printed on the other side. I have just scraped that chip with my fingernail and the deposits have come off! it looks pretty clean so, not looking like that chip has exploded or been damaged. It also appears that the mount is now working again! Maybe just sitting inside for a while has sorted something out!! Anyhow thanks all for your posts. Just got to reassemble and wait another few months for a clear night! Ed.

Bit of a disappointment, first clear night in ages and I was shooting the iris nebula with NINA. The RCD switch in our house tripped and everything shuts down. After some investigations I think I narrowed it down to an outside double socket that runs power to my mount on it's pier. One of the sockets seems to have gotten damaged over the summer and by switching that socket off I could get the house up and running again. Now I fired up the rig again and my Pegasus Astro power box is telling me that there's a short on output 1. This is the mount power. So I swapped the mount to be on output 4 which is spare and the power box promptly reports a short on that too. So, I have now dismantled the rig completely to get everything inside, set up just the mount and mini-pc and it appears that the right ascension axis has failed. Just using EQASCOM to send some slew inputs the DEC axis will spin but the RA is dead. I have pulled the motherboard to have a look and there appears to be some damage to one of the chips in what I am assuming is the RA circuitry, it has the letters RA printed next to it so I think its a fairly safe assumption. This is what I am seeing, it looks to me like there is damage to that U8 chip but I know nothing about electronics whatsoever. Is there a test I can do to check whether its the motor or the controller that has failed? I do not (currently) have a multi-meter or any electrics testing tools but Screwfix sells them and is open. I would however need someone to explain what to do with one and I do so love a trip to Screwfix on a Sunday.

Morning everyone. Just thought I would post a quick update to let you know the plastic bag and desiccant plan has worked an absolute treat, the lens assembly is crystal clear again and I have reassembled the scope. Thanks so much to this wonderful community for all the suggestions (and warnings! because I was tempted to crack that optical assembly open!) Ed

Turns out there is a small bag of desiccant in each and every covid test strip we have (and we have a couple of boxes full!) Seems like I left my UVC lamp in my other jeans, but the ziploc and desiccant is working a treat, I can see the fogging clearing up nicely and in time I might be able to forget about the fingerprint

Cheers all. I have the cell isolated now, but I have not taken the cell itself apart so the lens elements are all as they were. I have the dew band on and it does appear to be working, I am less than pleased to note however that the massive fingerprint is on the inside of the lens cell and is not one of mine! Anyone know where you can buy desiccant, or even what a domestic desiccant might be?

Hey all. Over the weekend I had to travel up North and whilst I was away my scope cover broke free of its restraints in high winds and left my rig exposed to the elements for a couple of days. Electronically its fine, I have dried everything out and reassembled it inside and N.I.N.A can see and connect to everything, the mini-pc is fine and all the cameras seem to be OK. The concern I have is with the scope itself, obviously when it came inside I got a significant amount of condensation developing on the lens unit, I have wiped this down and left it to dry out overnight. The scope is a Skywatcher Esprit 80ED Pro and now I have removed the focusing module and the hood so I can see just the lens element it seems to be very "foggy". I have never stripped it down before so I have not seen this component in its "pre-incident" state so I don't have anything to compare to. I don't want to do anything to it, for example clean it with some sort of cleaning agent, until I know whether this is as expected, whether this is something to do with the lens coatings. I will add some images in a sec, started writing this on my work laptop and I can only add images from my personal machine! here we go. this to my untutored eye does not look like a clean and happy component... that said this is looking directly through it at a light bulb with a DSLR flash, so it would never get that much light through in normal usage, I dont know, I think probably it needs to go for a professional clean, This is the component, I can break this down a bit more and remove the tube foot section leaving only the lens unit. this would give much better access to the lens and would let me clean it with a DSLR sensor cleaning kit or some other recommended kit.

Quick one - I cannot seem to locate a button or menu that takes me directly to my personal gallery. Is there such a function? I can hit up "gallery" and see all the recent public uploads but not go directly to my personal space without using a saved link. Also, am I abusing the gallery feature by posting loads of images to it? is that what its' there for? Ed.

I appear to be blessed with another clear night, 3 in a row, and I am debating whether to gather more veil data or move onto a new target. I am up to 8 hours or thereabouts on narrowband and I have these two images, slightly different processing, not entirely sure which I prefer, to be honest I quite like both. Anyhow, if I rack up another four or five hours do you think it would be worth the time investment or am I chasing diminishing returns? Would you add some RGB subs in? more narrowband data or call it a day and move on to a new target? I am also debating a multi-panel job using telescopius to work out better coordinates and get more of the region, but that's a different question. Ed.

Are you proposing to mount the scope and the DSLR on the star tracker mount? Just looking at the weights, the star tracker has a capacity of 5kg, the camera is going to be about 1 - 1.5 kg, the Williams scope is 2.2kg, you don't have a huge amount of headroom for additional kit. Have you considered a reducer to widen the field of view on the Celestron for DSO's? have a look on astronomy.tools. I have never used one so I dont know what the impact is on exposure lengths. What is your current setup? do you have the Canon attached to the viewer of the Celestron? Ed.