licho52

I am using the L-Extreme and it's great, however there are 2 things that come with it, first, to really get star colors it's important to capture an additional broadband stack with color stars to put in place of l-extreme's star field. Second, some stars are just too bright and their halo is can only be removed by hand using Photoshop or another program like that. Sadr or Alnitak come to mind. I essentially throw out all stars that come from l-extreme. I don't even care so much if there's some frame with elongated stars, they get removed either way.

I would leave it as is and upgrade from 1600 to 2600. The field will be wider and QE is 50% higher so that will get you the speed of acquisition. And 2600MM will last you a decade. Given that you already have RC8 /ED80 combo I don't think there are any low-hanging fruit out there. I am pretty sure 150mm newtonian isn't it. Last but not least, it's the last chance it seems to sell the 1600 for a good price. Next year they will tumble due to being completely outclassed by the 2600, the word is out.

The picture is fine as it is but drizzling can reveal more and can also improve star shapes and increase SNR. It's especially apparent in undersampled material, as I remember when I had 294MC with its relatively big pixel. Once I started using drizzle it sort of became mandatory for me to do it due to the noticed improvements. The downside is of course the fact that it's computationally intensive and can take long time and disk space. The picture really makes me tempted to purchase a Redcat. I am just worried I won't use it enough as I have 2 other telescopes and there's already not enough clear nights to use them.

I am wondering if (assuming you dithered your frames) you could use drizzle integration to get more detail out of the picture, considering that Redcat and 294MC give you about 4"/pix. With my combo that had 2.8" I recovered a lot of detail with drizzle, it really works wonders.

There's nothing better than a well collimated RC, makes me feel like a real astronomer. With a way more expensive refractor I am merely a photographer....

With the cheap RC and I now have the 8" version, at some point I consider it to be "close enough" I found that if I don't I tend to make it worse and then spend another few hours playing with collimation screws....while mumbling foul words incoherently. I think you've reached the "close enough point." Trying to be a perfectionist with these scopes is self-destructive!

61 EDPH II has a botched native reducer/flattener with large CA. The scope itself is ok.

IMO that's probably good enough for 50-60mm category, much better than the 1st. If you're going to zoom corners on most telescopes you'll see some funny stuff. The full picture looks good.

Dithering is mandatory.

It was tremendous: "we test all telescopes to perform optimally and seal them in box from factory" It is probably a bit better in the U.S. but in E.U. they don't care.

If you're not lucky and request a replacement it might just turn out to be worse than original. My story. Wasted 2 months and tons of aggravation. Sky Watcher point blank refused to fix it. The replacement had the following feature:

Same thing with my Esprit 80 which I returned for that reason. Haven't found any replacements but there are so many problems with them I'd only consider buying them if able to test myself. The downfall of Esprit QA over the last year or two is a mystery but I'll let them sort it before I touch them again.

I can recommend the AzGTi as a quite capable mount for its size and price. It can handle 80-100 refractors and 127 Maks without any problems. I am also able to use it as a portable astrophoto platform in EQ mode.

Once purchased the powerbox should serve its purpose for however long you intend. You can change the pc, the camera, the software etc. With ASIAir you're in a box, so to speak. And there will be AsiAir 2.0 in 6 months, 3.0 in 2 years.... With your own PC you are in control.

I am itching to borrow my friends Mak 180 for some extra detail but I am not sure I'd dare to put it on the GTi. It would end up on my EQ5. Maks are great for planetary imaging. Also for visual but they benefit greatly from a GOTO mount as the FOV and the f-ratio makes it challenging to find stuff by hand. It's doable but just wearing me out over time. So Mak127 and AZ-GTi is a good match imo. The image quality can't be beat for the price. The only thing missing are big FOV starfields...but it's always a trade-off with the telescopes.

I went to Esprit 80 directly as I felt that the 80ED (which I considered) wasn't such a great value especially concerning its focuser. I exactly expected to hit the point you did with your 80ED and ending up looking to upgrade....so I just got the Esprit, no regrets.

For me it's quite good. I use it in EQ mode now but it worked in AZ too. I think 127 does benefit from balancing it. This is with ASI290MC, 1min recording, 700 out of 9000.

Bottom line we're in a very CPU intensive area which might start getting also coded for use of graphics card engines. As long as the apps are multithreaded (AS3, DSS and PI are) then getting as many threads as possible is the best way to go. If price were no object I'd get an AMD Threadripper with huge core counts. At the same time I am getting no material over the last month and a half so it would just sit there anyway...

Benchmarks are very relevant IMO. Most picture processing (outside of some PS procedures) is multithreaded and thus multicore CPUs are a great upgrade for astrophotography work (big bang for the buck). Disk drive speed is only relevant up to some point and buying overpriced Samsung NVME is paying twice for miniscule differences. Also graphics cards are becoming relevant as nVidia CUDA units are being used by StarNet.

In DSS and PXI I get pretty much full usage on all 12 threads of my 10400. My guess is that they will take all the threads one throws at them. My next upgrade will be 8C/16T CPU. If the weather was better and I was getting more subs everyday I'd consider 12/24. In your case instead of 10600 I'd go with 10700. Difference in price is small but 8/16 is worth it. The software and picture complexity/size only grows with time and I really don't like to wait while processing images. AMD offers some hefty 12/24 CPUs and I even think it may be worth taking them into consideration for heavy use.

Here are some benchmarks that might give you some idea: Astronomy software performance tests with different CPUs - astrojolo