jacko61

Asteroids not Hemorrhoids Graeme

On top of the advice given above, I would recommend stretching a white T-shirt over the scope before taking your flats. This will give a much more even light when the tablet is switched on. Graeme

Well that's annoying. The old version was showing me a lovely clear night on sunday. Now it's back to cloudy Mind you, the BBC say it's going to be clear all night. I guess I'll revert to my 'look out of the window' method. Graeme

The drop down works fine on my home Dell laptop. Win 10. It wasn't dropping down on my work Surface pro also win 10. both on microsoft Edge. However, Many things get blocked by our work security protocols although it works fine on the old clear outside platform. Graeme

Had to enter the lat/long to get it to find the address. on the old version, just entering the postcode brings up the right location. Graeme

You'd only have to do this once to find out the characteristics of your scope then you'd know which direction is east/west for subsequent viewing sessions. A couple of hours getting used to your scope before you start to use it in anger are hours well spent. Graeme

I can't get the location to move away from Flo headquarters in Devon. Good to see your forecast is as bad as mine though Graeme

I've just bought one for my 6inch Altair refractor. spec'd a shorter (1m) cable and 2.1mm power connection instead of the RCA plugs as I have RVO's 12v offerings. used it for 5 hours last week and it kept the objective clear of frost. Can't ask more than that. Graeme

Here's a couple of images I captured on this week's incredibly rare cloud free Tuesday night. M81(bodes galaxy) with M82(the cigar galaxy) and about half of Markarian's chain. Bother are 2 hours of 3 minute subs captured using an Altair 15EDF, ZWO ASI2600MC pro and Skywatcher EQ8r-pro. Guiding with a 60mm SVBONY scope and ASI290mm mini in PHD2 with total RMS error for the whole night not exceeding 0.31". Next clear night I'll swap to my ZS73 to capture the full extent of Markarian's chain. Graeme

Clear outside was surprisingly accurate last night. I was out from 8pm till 2am imaging. Plenty of frost on the kit by the end of play so I'll need to go out later to give it all a good wipe down. Graeme

The OP only got this telescope at Christmas and already he's being advised to ditch it and spend more money buying something bigger and better. It would be far more useful for him to spend some time getting used to the kit he's got then spending 15 quid on a smartphone adaptor and seeing what results he can get with his current set up, even if it's just a few snaps of the moon or the Orion nebula. Skywatcher do a very basic adaptor - Skywatcher SmartPhoto Smartphone Camera Adaptor - Rother Valley Optics Ltd Graeme

I ended up going for the 6 ink Epson ET-8550. I'm printing on Epson premium glossy A3+ and I've been very pleased with the results. Mrs J has said she'd be happy to mount a few and put them on the walls which says more for the quality than online reviews ever could. Graeme

What paper do you use Olly? Graeme

Here's my attempt from last night (13/2/23). First clearish night since the thing arrived BUT I had a lot of passing cloud so out of 2 hours imaging I only managed to salvage less than 30 minutes of 60 second subs. Altair 150 EDF and ZWI ASI2600MC pro. Stacking in DSS wasn't anywhere near as straightforward as the youtube examples suggested so there's some stacking artifacts that have stopped me stretching the image fully. If I get another chance I'll stick the 0.8 reducer on the scope and hope for clearer skies so I can capture a lot more data. Graeme

Last night, Clear Outside told me there would be 0% cloud cover from around 6pm until at least 3am. I went outside around 6pm, rolled the lid off the shed and connected everything up to my laptop secure in the knowledge I'd get an hour on the comet and 3 or 4 hours on the Christmas tree cluster. Right up till midnight ClearOutside was telling me there was no cloud and right up till midnight, there was zero visibility in the sky. Other contributors to the astronomy scotland facebook page had exactly the same experience. Clear Outside? Nope ! Graeme

yes. Graeme

I'd ignore that diagram - it's for the FLAT 73 R reducer. You have the flat 73A flattener.. If you check out the WO page for the flattener - New Adjustable Flat73 for Z73 - William Optics you'll see that you need a backfocus of 66.2mm from the back of the flattener. As most DSLR set ups work out at 55mm from the sensor to the front of the T ring you would need to dial in 11.2mm on the flat73a adjustor. Graeme

Out of interest, what does NINA give you (or improve on) that APT doesn't? Graeme

No. He's using Pixinsight which I can't afford. I have Startools, Starnet ++ and GIMP When I get some time I think I'll download SIRIL and see what I can achieve with that. Graeme

Yep, I have a tilt issue that's a well known problem with the ZS73 focuser drooping with the weight of the flattener and AS2600MC. I'm not too bothered about star elongation in the corners, it's more the fact that they just don't look real, especially the main stars in NGC2244 at the centre of the nebula. Sterrenland got exactly the results I'm after in his rosette -

I've had similar with my EQ8R pro and APT. Sometimes if I connect the mount in APT it appears to stop tracking even though EQMOD says it's SIDEREAL. It's as if APT is overriding EQmod when it starts up and stops the tracking without informing EQmod. Stopping and Starting tracking in EQMOD has fixed this. ( Eqmod itself starts up under Stellarium so maybe there's too many cooks spoiling the broth). Graeme

Thanks for the tips Olly. I'll have to figure out how to blend more convincingly in GIMP as I don't have photoshop. I'm sure it should be possible but at the minute all I've got to grips with is adding a star layer over the results from STARNET++ and I'm not finding the results very convincing. This is an earlier attempt on the Rosette and I hate the look of the stars - they're more like paint spatters on top of the image than nice points of starlight. Obviously I still have some way to go Graeme

We had a remarkably clear night up here on the 16th Jan so I was out and imaging from fairly early on. First was m31. 50 x 90 second subs taken through my Zenithstar 73 with 1:1 flattener. ASI2600mc pro and Skywatcher EQ8r pro. Guiding with a WO 50mm uniguide and asi290mm mini using PHD2. I've recently changed the uniguide rotolock for a ZWO Helical focuser which has made getting nice sharp stars in PHD2 so much easier so guiding never went above 0.3 total rms error. Processed in Startools with a bit of star reduction courtesy of STARNET++ and GIMP. The second image is my latest attempt at M42 and the running man. This is about 3 hours worth of 120 second subs using the same kit as above. This is my second go at processing the data - I tried to do some star reduction (as with M31) but wasn't at all satisfied with the result so this version is pretty much how it came out of Startools; I'm very impressed with the HDR module in startools - it's tamed the trapezium area very well without compromising the rest of the image. Graeme

Here's last Thursday's attempt at the Orion Nebula and surroundings. 3 hours of 180 second subs taken through a WO ZS73 on my ASI2600MC pro. captured and processed in APT,DSS,Startools, STarnet and GIMP. Whilet I'm happy with the nebula, I'm really struggling to get the stars anywhere near some of the results other folk get. I've tried a couple of methods to seperate stars and nebula but whenever I merge the two layers in GIMP the stars always look as if they're painted over the top of the image. More research needed I think. Graeme

This ^^. It's a bl**dy expensive mount and should be perfect straight out of the box. graeme