LaurenceT

Can you give us some more information? What mount are you using to begin with?

Our dog loves going to France, fortunately he's a good traveler in the motorhome. You'll have to be prepared to shell out cash for the obligatory Animal Health Certificate which costs us about £180 each time although that is variable depending on where you live. Also you have to take the dog to a vet before you return home which can cost anything from 30 to 60 Euros.

Not wishing to hijack the thread but possibly something that may be of interest to the OP. I am a novice for information, I also have the 533mcPro camera. Should I choose to use different filters during an imaging session can these be integrated in software such as Siril or APP? The reason that I might want to do this would be to eliminate star bloat in a certain refractor and also bring out nebulosity by using an Astronomik L3 and an L-Enhance in the same session. If I'm talking out of my rear please put me right!

I find the campsite lighting in club sites very distracting so we spend more time these days using club Certified Location farm sites. They are only allowed to have 5 units on site, have minimal ground lighting and have much more space being situated in fields.

I set up last night in the usual way, Evoguide 50ED with dew strap in place, asi224mc with uv/ir cut filter on an Az GTi using Stellarmate. After the usual Stellarmate nonsense I got images of things like the globular cluster in Hercules just fine but any attempt on a gaseous or planetary nebula was an utter failure from an image point of view. Whereas in my last session a few weeks ago I was getting lovely images of these objects very quickly but not last night, just a light fuzz to show I might be there. Target acquisition seemed perfect and bizarrely I got Jupiter dead centre and although no more than a large dot I saw 3 moons and Jupiter surface features. The one thing I noticed was that everything was quite wet and a quick check showed that humidity here was 93%. Could this have been a factor?

This is exactly what I have done, fitting the Skywatcher electronic focuser enables almost vibration free observing. However it's not that easy to fit the focuser but a chap on YouTube called Vasco Ribiero in Portugal has a solution which I bought from him and it works perfectly.

I have both the Baader zoom and the Svbony zoom. I only bought the Svbony zoom because it fitted my mobile phone adapter. Although subjectively the Baader is 'better" I use Svbony now with my Mak127 to get the planets in view before imaging and it's absolutely fine, if it were my only eyepiece I'd be perfectly happy with it.

Thanks, I don't think a bigger aperture scope is on the horizon, apart from the cost there is the weight to consider.

Well, I'm something of a novice in planetary photography so I would say that you would get an image but I'm not sure it would be a good one. I'm using a telescope with a focal length 3 times longer than your lens, a dedicated planetary camera and a Barlow of 2.25x magnification and the resulting image is just about large enough for post processing.

It's possible, why do you think it may be the Barlow. It's a pretty good quality one if that makes any difference. Possibly a Powermate would be better?

My Domestic Financial Controller would kill me 😀

Yes I am imaging Jupiter quite high in the sky, I'll take a look at my colour balance technique in Registax.

Thanks for the replies everyone, most encouraging. I think my video images were too dark to avoid blowing out the highlights. Looking at YT tutorials their images were brighter. @Cosmic Geoff, I'm not clear what you mean by getting the clouds belts horizontal and de-flipping the image. Would an ADC help with the blue fringing? @Kon, I started looking at some YT tutorials for Astrosurface, thanks for the tip.

I made my first image 2 nights ago which I won't show😄 but I made some more last night which were much bigger video files. If possible I'd like some critical feedback. Equipment: Mak127, ASI224MC with Baader Hyperion barlow, Az GTi mount. Processed in PIPP, AutoStakkert and Registax, finished in DxO Photolab.

When setting up for an imaging session and giving the refractor time to cool down when should dew heaters be turned on, while the tube is cooling or when imaging session starts?

Thanks for that. I'll play around with a few of those options.

I'm really keen to broaden what I do with my little Askar FMA180 but I've had constant problems with attaching accessories like guide camera, Asiair etc. Although it's not had first light this is the rig I've come up with includes a mini EFW and my Asiair. I suppose I could without the filter wheel and just use that on my WO ZS61 rig. Be grateful for advice.

Thank you for a very detailed report, excellent images.

M27 is superb!

I've discovered that I need to show a little more patience and understanding using the Stellarmate app. Once I'd twigged that last night was more rewarding. @PeterC65 is definitely correct in that I need to understand the correct filters to apply to different targets so I'm going to configure my mini EFW for this. Just one image from last night I quite liked, NGC 6823, the final image in a stack of 6, slightly sharpened in Topaz Sharpen AI. Colours all wrong I know but the star weirdness disappears when I let things settle down and take a longer imaging run.

Yes sorry, I do mean that but it was only 4 or 5 images stacked before some weird artefacts were seen. I was hoping to try again tonight but with a filter this time but it looks cloudy. I think I might add my mini filter wheel to the train so I can use different filters. Edit: I've amended the number of stacked images because it was obvious that some background extraction had taken place so I had another look at the images on my iPad.

The Stellarmate app continues to frustrate, had to stop and start several times and some images showing weird star artefacts as seen in the Andromeda image. Possibly because I was experimenting with power sources for the Pi and discovered I was under powering it for about 30 minutes so may have corrupted the app, re-installed it today. Also forgot to put a uv/ir filter in front of the camera 😢. These images taken with the Askar FMA180, ASI533MCPro this time. All are single six second exposures with no post processing. Didn't appreciate the satellite streak on Andromeda 😄. Andromeda galaxy, crescent nebula and a nebula whose name I've forgotten!

I'm looking forward to using the FMA180 but I've had to do some lateral thinking in connecting it to my 224mc planetary camera, extension rings to get back focus. What app/system do you use for the stacking?

I think it's the third frame in the sequence, I was using 10 second exposures. Thanks for the comment, I was really surprised at how quickly such bright images showed on the iPad.

After a pretty frustrating first attempt at Stellarmate EAA with Live Stacking some months ago following Cuiv's YT video I decided to have another go. So last night I set up and was surprised that everything worked most of the time. I wasn't able to download a stacked image so this is just one of frames: Skywatcher Evoguide 50ED, ASI224mc, Az GTi in alt az mode. I was pretty astonished at how quickly the images showed up on the Ipad and how bright they were. I need to do more work of the focussing obviously but this little scope has a bit of history with me, I'm going to try it next with my Askar FMA180. No post processing has been done. IC 342, a spiral galaxy in Camelopardalis