dmki

Really nice work!

I am not.... i am suggesting that luminescence is where we perceive detail, so keep your existing mono ccd to capture luminescence and get a cmos osc to capture rgb... reducing your image capture times.

unfortunately we have an infestation of men with guns looking to bag about 80 bodies... so the night park wanderings are off for a while. I think this is the answer to anyone with ccd thinking of jumping into cmos, keep the ccd for mono to grab the detail of the image and get a cmos osc to quickly grab RGB to colour that detail.

sky background, is that the stuff that lets me walk around my local park, a mile or more from the nearest lamp, any time of night unaided? thanks for the heads up about the 294, its on my list of sensors to consider.... when i feel ive learnt enough to do AP properly and what the implications of moving from a bortel8 can see where i am going by skylight day or night to a bortel10+ city are going to be. @newbie alertThis is yes you can take loads of short exposures with ccd, the question is should you? ccd's favour long exposures because the cells accumulate very little noise vs cmos.... but make up for that with much higher read noise. by taking those short exposures with the ccd you are accumulating an awful lot of read noise in the stacked image. and as for satellites; those businessmen, as forum rules prohibit the language would normally use, have only just started deploying their low earth orbit satellite comms constellations and i fear that soon, a great deal of astronomy is going to be impacted in an attempt to make a few pennies for a very small number of people.

direct drive means that the mount/telescope are driven directly by the motor, with no gearing or pulleys between them. in principle very simple, but you need to have a closed feedback loop for the drive electronics, thus you need encoders with a very high level of precision... which is a specialist item. an interesting question would could you replace that encoder with synthetic encoder created from a combination of plate solving and star tracking? to be honest i would be more tempted to build something out of, perhaps used, harmonic gears... high torque and low backlash But best of luck with this, i am very interested in how it goes

true storage is cheap, but you would be courageous to put all that time and effort onto a single hard disk... mirroring help, but its not a backup, so you can be looking at maintaining 2-3 copies of that data... which does start to add up. That cmos is optimised for many short exposures vs ccd, is a step change almost as significant as the move from film to ccd. all those techniques used by the planetary astrophotographers start to be come very practical for deep space, loose an image to a shortcoming in your mount, a satellite, a patch of particularly poor seeing and you can toss the image and just loose a few minutes of exposure.... rather than the 10's of minutes of ccd. And this is going to feed into the data storage requirements, just store the best% of your images and toss the rest. Speaking personally, as some one just getting into the subject, I would not consider getting a ccd new or secondhand at any price, simply because of the cost of purchasing the necessary mount to get the best out of it. And for that dream setup I am thinking cmos lets me take money out of the mount and put it into improving field of view/acquisition times... if i already had a ccd, if i could sell it for decent money i would do and move to cmos, failing that I would keep with ccd until there was a compelling cmos sensor on the market or i got annoyed with satellites, or short weather windows making complete image collection a painfully slow process...

i was thinking specifically of the 294 camera which use the Sony IMX492 and IMG294 sensors for mono and colour respectively. by default the are supplied bin 2x2, providing 11mp, however the mono version can be un-binned to 47 mp with a corresponding loss of wheel depth and dynamic range. I must admit that ive assumed other sony sensors based on the same construction would also provide an un-binned mode... and we all know what assumptions can be wrong:). Another difference between osc and mono, is the rgb filters, which tend to proper data filters with sharp crisp bandpasses are that RGB, whilst those in osc tend to march the crap band passes of human rgb retina dyes. I suspect that there is a reason for osc filters to work this way and its probably something to do with rendering an image which is as close to what we would see in the flesh. which feeds into that our photos consist of three influences, the data(object reality), a desire to make a thing of beauty, our perception.... what that unique to you visual cortex does to the data as its converts it into sensation. In the case of that latter influence, there is a horizon program that goes into the detail Horizon Do You See What I See Part 1-4

That's a very tempting combination

The 0.7 reducers are for the Celestron EDGE series telescopes, which have different optics to the other Celestron SCTs which use the F6.3 reducer.

Then we have that quite a few of the higher end colour sensors each colour pixel is a 2x2 binned under the mask, so the mono version can be run a 4 times the resolution at the cost of well depth and bit resolution. And i guess for the right set of circumstances this could lead to a decent change in image quality.

The other issue being that you get multiple listing of the same advert. suspect compared to machine vision and security astronomy sensors are a small market, cmos is where those markets live and thats the commercial driver sending us to cmos. then obviously the lower read noise allows shorter exposures to be stacked, meaning a less demanding and therefore lower cost mount... and i guess the possibility of taking lucky imaging to deep space. I think now the only people using ccd are those who already have them and perhaps people getting into a few niches like photometry or spectroscopy. i've got a 183 based osc and 178 mono camera for guiding and some optics experiments im doing. It occurred to me that an addional experiment that could be interesting, assuming i cannot just look up the answer... we tend to see resolution as luminescence rather than colour. so how much detail would you loose using a lower resolution RGB data to colour higher resolution lum. Just do both would be a fitting end to this debate

That looks great, I like the focusing mechanism, its an interesting alternative to using a timing belt with matching ring

Musk talks about it openly man, I don't think it's political. The only thing up for debate is the word "suicide" which I, probably like you, would disagree with but certainly worth debating. We know enough to know there's going to be damage to humans on the way and when you get there and that they're more than likely to shorten life, at least speculatively, coupled with a "one way" trip, whether or not that qualifies as suicide, isn't that fair game? Dave, you have a point, to describe billionaires as having wet dre4ams about the deaths of their employees is wrong, a more appropriate word would be indifferent. recent times have given lots of examples of this behaver, amazon, tesla and dyson to name a few, where employee well being has been given a lower priority to achieving their aims be it business expansion, profitability or anything else they might want. Personally if amazon's founder were to send people to mars does anyone here think he would have any more concern for their well being than he would for his warehouse and delivery staff? is this political, i guess it is but that's only because the old given of the 'duty of care' we have to each other has become a tribal political issue. As for suicide mission, I would say that any high risk project where the end of mission crew survival was not the first design and project priority would at best be a sacrificial and at worst suicidal mission. I guess this opinion is guided by seeing being careless with your life and suicide being side of the same coin... though i appreciate that many would disagree.

You have a point, but i think it depends upon how important 'weaselling out' is to the company's business model. rather like the difference you see between the full service, low cost airlines and out there in a category of their own Ryan air. Its worth going to which? to get their consumer reviews of insurance companies, as this lets you see who are the full service insurers and who are the Ryan air wantabe's. I think quite a bit of the weaselling coming from the insurer and the customer not having the same understanding of the risk's being insured, so nothing quite beats being very upfront and descriptive of what you want, as in: This great description and more or less what ive done when trying to get non standard insurance, it allows the sales team to find a risk pigeon hole they have already have. Or failing that; help the actuarial identify set of risks in their risk lists and data, from which they can tell the business what the risk they are agreeing to is. if the business sees risks that cannot quantified; you get a refusal to cover or a large premium to offset that unknown risk.

manned missions to mars are going to be fabulously expensive, even if you go for a billionaire's dream of employees on a suicide mission, i don't think the wealth available to even the richest of our current crop of vein billionaires have a fraction of the cash needed. That leaves political projects to mars, I don't think there is a country on the planet that does not have sufficient domestic government funding issues that would not make diverting cash to a manned mission to mars a toxic political project. I would be shocked if we did a manned mission to mars this century