licho52

I think it's not that simple. What matters most is QE which in 585 is higher and noise which is a bit higher per area in 585. The rest is sampling which can be taken care of by binning or otherwise resampling in postprocessing. I wouldn't take pixel size as a detriment for AP, in fact in some cases it can be an advantage. For example, smaller pixel size in 585MC can be attractive in wide-field APOs (like Redcat) where it lowers the sampling from 3.13 to 2.2, but also in certain applications like shooting small planetary nebulas and globular clusters with mid-FL OTAs like the ever popular f/4 Newtonians. Excellent for lucky imaging techniques too. I am a big fan of such amazing affordable sensor. I wish they were available when I was starting out. PS I used to own 533MC so I know that camera well and now I own a 585MC as my 3rd camera in addition to 2600MM/MC combo.

533 is often misunderstood, it has a few things going for it, like lowish (but not low by any means!) price and clean sensor that doesn't need much calibration and hides hideous corners from cheap optics well because it barely covers the middle of the image circle. That said a tiny square sensor is absolute anathema to serious photography. The 585MC at its cheap price is absolutely amazing. It does tiny sensor right - gives you less area but it's actual usable area to make a worthwhile picture with proper format. It doesn't really need cooling. After you exhaust the 585MC, step up to 2600MC. If you think it's expensive, ok, wait with the upgrade.

I wouldn't go to 533 from this camera, completely not worth it.

The picture of the Jellyfish he seems to be so proud of is actually a perfect illustration of "newb-with-5k-RASA-setup" so I disregard his highly smug and opinionated tone. Yes the filter has some halos but I don't think they're are excessive. In any case he'd need to put a lot of time into learning processing before halos become the limiting factor in his astrophotography. Sorry for harsh tone but I found the clip highly disagreeable and detached from the reality.

Yes it works well on oversampled images, same with NoiseX. It used to always be better to apply traditional (currently deprecated) deconvolution on non-binned images and it's the same situation now with BlurX.

DOA at these prices as far as I am concerned.

The IDAS wasn't too viable as it had a very wide bandpass, to the tune of 30nm IIRC. I use both 2600MM and MC and I know very well what OSC is capable of, as well as its limitations in narrowband domain. This should be a very good product in my opinion, and long overdue - it will however be very confusing to people who process these straight out of debayer without channel separation. I expect some hilarity in "beginner" sections of AP internet.

Just get a HEQ5, the difference is enormous, even for a 400mm, which is well outside of gti's capabilities in my opinion.

Why are you quoting me? Did I say it has anything to do with either of these things?

This scheme clashes with AsiAir and the whole ZWO kit. It only would look good on some ioptron mounts and qhy/dslr cameras and no AsiAir. Big miss for me.

Loss of exposure time due to (excessive=unproductive) dithering.

It's neither, it's about having enough shifts in a sequence, I want about 20 shifts (which is quite conservative). If plan 60 exposures and want 20 shifts then every 3, no matter what length. OTOH if you're shooting 15-minute frames then you want to dither every time. Typically I do 60x5min a channel and dither each 3. If I go 60x7 min then 2. Dithering is not costless, it's a tax on exposure time and there's a tradeoff of losing SNR to either insufficient or excessive dithering.

My former mount worked best with 0.5-0.7s exposures. There are some disagreements about the "chasing the seeing" theory which sounds plausible but then there are practical results and for my old mount the short exposures and corrections worked the best. This is likely also be the reality for the new ZWO AM5 owner who will need to guide with below 1s exposures on account of the huge oscillation amplitude of harmonic motors. That said my current EQ6-r is more stable and likes longer exposures and does fine with 1-2s times. But it has about 1/3 of the PE of the old one.

Enable subsampling in the camera settings of PHD and see if that enables quicker fps.

I am impressed how nice it looks.

Works quite decently with narrowband too, I may do more with it but as the sky-time is limited I just have other, more compelling projects at the moment. It does make for a decent guider in the meantime. Cygnus Wide Field - from Butterfly to Tulip ( trans-at ) - AstroBin Coma Star Cluster - Melotte 111 ( trans-at ) - AstroBin

I have the FMA135 and bought it more as a guider and a novelty. It's ok, doesn't have CA but stars in corners are not great on 2600MM but perhaps can be fixed with backspacing tweaks...as it's a side project I haven't bothered with it yet. No problem mounting 1.25 or 2" filters in front of camera sensor so the aperture isn't limited. The wide views at 135mm are nice, FMA180 and 230 are trounced by Redcat's optics.

I really think 10" is about the most that the seeing supports unless you can put it up some mountain. I am using the 8" and I feel I am already hitting the limits with it.

Yeah, I think logically, since all CMOS sensors are mono to begin with, why would the availability of mono sensors not continue? Such suggestion in the other thread was preposterous and wide off the mark. Props to @Adam J for standing up to logic when that nonsense was suggested originally. I was surprised some "expert" got so many people to agree with him.

There won't be any more mono sensors, it's all osc now....they said...

Before I sold it I was able to use 533MC as both planetary and deep sky. I would definitely use a barlow to reduce pixelation and drizzle in postprocessing to further enhance resolution.

I am quite happy with the performance of mine, found that using 2mm filter the backfocus is 6.1mm. I might fiddle more but tbh, not really. I can safely say I've never had a better scope.

One more thought about processing with L-Extreme: one basically is getting ready for mono processing as we end up with H, O and RGB layers. In some ways I feel I should just go for 2600MM....as there's hardly any ONE SHOT left in my OSC.... 2 things are stopping me: the cost of the wheel and finding proper filter sets and just how good the 2600MC is at broadband Gain 0 setting.

This is unfinished both in nebula(adding 5-6 more hours here) and star layers (new scope, was still looking for the right flattner setting, not quite there at the time of this shot), but I set this up to make sure I can control Sadr and not have it ruin this field. Now that I was able to replace all stars from L-Ex in a satisfactory manner, I know this is worth pursuing further. Sadr with L-Extreme absolutely ruins this field, you can see many examples of people who just sort of leave it there which IMO is so ugly it mars the picture completely. Note that StarNet leaves remnants of halos and how far one goes in manually fixing them is a personal choice I think, my rule is that if I don't see it without zooming, it can stay. There's only so many hours in a day...

I get the donut on the brightest stars, it's not really an issue as you wouldn't include them in the photo in this aperture. Can't say anything about the shadows though, never had a problem with it. Did you check the effective focal length you get with the reductor? At 8cm it's the rated .75x.