LuckieEddie

Ouroboros - The Augar was £120 for a weekend hire, delivered & collected. Not cheap but less than a mini-digger, a neater hole, and I could get it up the steps in the garden. Alan - No slab. 14" footing, 12" pier above ground. Will be poured in one go with a rebar cage running right the way through.

As I want this to be a 'done once, done right' job and I like astrophotography I felt that I needed to err on the side of caution and allow for future equipment upgrades. This means maybe over-engineering my pier, rather than accepting what others have tried and found acceptable. I bought myself a copy of the Telescope Piers book by Jim McCathren in order to educate myself as to how to design a pier. It's got some good information including typical design choices, compromises, and achievable performance (deflection under load). On the down side it doesn't necessarily travel well being written for an American audience and full of left-pondian terms, measures and standards. Anyway I got some good pointers and adapted the information to my situation. As I'm going to have a fairly tall pier, I need an equivalently deep hole for the footing. It doesn't need to be wide as the loading on a pier is all about angular deflection, not weight load bearing. I hired myself the largest one-man Augar I could get hold of locally. It took a full day, due to having to keep extracting the loose soil and the fitting on the hired Augar being partly broken, but eventually I bored a hole, 14"(355mm) diameter by about 6ft(1800mm) deep. Unfortunately within an hour of finishing I had a small well as due to all the rain the ground water level is high, but this can be pumped out just before I pour the concrete. The hole is deliberately offset to be in the correct location - it's the preexisting floor joists that don't line up.

The first job was (nearly) emptying the shed. This has been my main workshop and wood store for many years, as well as housing all my astro kit, so this was a major undertaking. Luckily my requirements for major DIY projects at home (this build excepting) are largely done with now. The attention has now shifted to helping my children out with their place, so the least they can do is store all my wood. With that out of the way. a serious purge of accumulated toot, repurposing another shed to be the 'dirty' workshop and moving my kit into the conservatory temporarily I was able to strip out most of the benchwork & racking, and get to the floor. Preparation for my pier came next but this isn't a green field/new build so I had to start by cutting out a section of the floor boards between the joists to expose the existing concrete base. I then lined the sides with some treated CLS timber and set to with my SDS drill and breaker bits to knock a hole through the concrete. Once I'd removed that and the supporting hardcore I was about a foot/300mm below floor level by the time I reached undisturbed soil. I'd kept the removed sections of floorboards so I could screw them together with some more CLS to make a trapdoor to cover the hole until I could get to the next stage.

No, not as compact as that one... The shed/future observatory is 4.5m X 4.5m X 6.35m. It's also tucked up against the boundary so I'm limited to 2.5m in height to meet the requirements for not needing planing permission. I want to keep maximum practical height so that: I get the best sight lines/horizon possible. I don't have to duck down to enter or move about inside. Luckily I'm not that tall. Here's a snap from Google maps showing the plot, the observatory is the red triangle.

After nearly two years of planning, preparation and talking about it, I've finally made a start on my observatory build. 🥳 I thought I'd share the progress here as there are a number of "off the beaten track" features involved. The first issue is location. Our urban back garden is not great for astronomy - we're on a corner plot which is triangular, there's a two-storey block of flats to the South with permanently on security lighting, and there's also a street light outside our front garden. The house is towards the NW side of the plot but the NE - SE is larger obstruction free. We're not likely to be moving anytime soon (if ever) and I can't afford a remote site. All this combines to make only one viable location for my observatory - the extreme corner of our rear garden, where my existing shed is located. Given that I built it to last and it's as sizeable as will fit there, I think it makes sense to convert the existing structure. And the problem? Remember I wrote above that the plot is triangular? Well so is the shed.

I run KStars/Ekos/INDI on a Pi4 8GB built into my mount controller. Raspberry Pi OS 64-bit, software built by Nou's scripts. Also PHD2, FireCapture and occasionally Siril. All accessed via VNC. 32-bit KStars is indeed a dead end. The software now uses some stuff that is only available on 64-bit systems.

1st IANAL. I'm an however a lover of and contributor to open source software so I'm surprised by that statement. Can you provide any reference for it please? It's proven (and grudgingly admitted, eventually) that ASIAIR is built on INDI and their failure to meet the requirements of the GPL licence is skirting the limits of legality. They are keeping it closed to keep out other manufacturers. I suspect it's only their position as a prominent manufacturer of other astro kit that the open source community wants/needs to keep supporting that is preventing more action regarding this.

I've used a Fuji X-T2 with a Skywatcher N200/1000 newtonian on an EQ-5. I run it at ISO800 using kstars/Ekos/Indi. The only real issue I had was the unusual XTrans CFA requires proper handling. Shoot in raw. I use Siril for stacking. You can see some of my results on my telescopius page - equipment used is listed on each image. The other comments are spot on - I similarly found the 200/1000 was too much payload for the EQ-5 and have now upgraded to a larger mount.

Hi DT, Welcome to SGL. I can't comment on an AVX as I've never used one, so this should only be one input into your decision process, however... I have an old EQ-5 that I converted to an OnStep belt driven system - DIY not an Terrans kit. I rarely use it any more as I've moved onto a Losmandy G11 (also using OnStep). I used it with a SkyWatcher N200/1000 which is definitely too much payload for the EQ-5 but was just about practical - it would be fine for a lighter / shorter FL system such as yours. You can see what I managed imaging wise on my Telescopius account. Most of the images there were taken using the EQ-5 unguided - the equipment details are in the descriptions. I've found OnStep to be great. The system itself, the resources and support around it, and the people behind it. Drivers are mature and full featured. I never auto-guided the EQ-5 but do guide the G11 via Indi / PHD2 and it works fine. A couple of things to be aware of regarding OnStep: The system design and code is Open Source. There are businesses, such as Terrans (and others), that have taken this and made a commercial product around it. This is okay and in keeping with the licenses. However they are not renowned for the best technical support. There are often customers of these commercial kits seeking support on the OnStep forums and the community, quite rightly, is not especially happy to provide free technical support to these companies customers. There are other sources of kits active on the OnStep forums that do feed into the community and provide good support (in particular see https://graydigitalarts.com ). OnStep reached maturity (generally) in the 4.x release series. 4.24s is the current official release. However, for a couple of years it has received only bug fixes as development has switched to OnStepX. The older OnStep codebase reached the point where the author (Howard) felt that it deserved a ground up rewrite to make it more maintainable, extendable and all round better. (A bold step that many software projects could learn from.) OnStepX is still in Beta and not yet officially released, but it's stable enough for most users. It's just that the development of new features is still progressing and so updates are frequent.

I recently got a definitive answer regarding the MLX (which I'm planning to use myself). The standard 'A' package TO-39 varient is sealed to IP65 so it should be fine exposed to general weather. Just make sure you seal the body of the can to your housing and don't jet-wash it.

I tried these a while ago. I found that on my 8" Newtonian they did almost eliminate the diffraction spikes but in doing so spread that extra light evenly around. This meant that the stars went from tight points with sharp spikes to softer and larger without spikes. For me I considered that a failure.

As an alternative you could get a sleeve of brass with an internal bore of 2.6mm and an external diameter of 6mm and bond it onto the 2.5mm shaft with Loctite 638. Then you could just use an easy-to-buy 6mm - 6mm coupler. This would be a one way journey though, you wouldn't be able to remove the sleeve without a blowtorch. I could knock up the sleeve for you for cost+postage. Message me if you want to go that route.

2.5mm is a challenge to find - are you certain that's correct? I've found 2mm -> 6mm & 3mm -> 6mm on AliExpress but nothing for 2.5mm. You might have to go for a 2mm and bore it out.

Looks like a good candidate for an OnStep conversion to me. You can go full DIY for around £100 or there are ready made kits available for more cost but less effort - still well within your budget. This class of mount is well supported, there's lots of existing conversions. I OnStepped an E-Q5 - works well.

Hi all, I've written an INDI driver for OCS. This is an open source hardware and software observatory controller project from the author of OnStep. The driver is at the point where it's feature complete but has only been tested by myself on one set of hardware. If any other OCS users could test it out that would be great. The driver is available in my indi-3rdparty fork in the indi-ocs sub-directory. Full documentation is in there as well. Note: The driver requires OCS V3.04 (or higher) for full functionality as some new commands were recently added to support the development of this driver. Please post any bugs/issues/suggestions as replies here. Thanks Ed P.S This is cross-posted in the OCS groups & INDI forums as well.