Ags

Svbony’s sales blurb makes a point about the eyepiece being well suited for “premium refractors” so that makes me think the curvature is matched for those grab and go apos and not a big newt. I can’t say I’ve seen curvature in my 66 or 90 mm refractors. I love this eyepiece, it gives everything from one degree FOV to max magnification in the fracs, so I don’t need any other eyepieces!

Ah no, forgot. I was racing cloud.

I had a bit of clear sky and tried out the mount with its updated handset. No difference in goto accuracy unfortunately. Added 30 minutes to M51 but then the clouds came back!

Downloaded and tried Graxpert for the first time today. The noise reduction and everything else  works very well for me (standalone Windows version). Why not add sharpening and star reduction as well? You know you want to 😃

I turned the noise reduction dial of Graxpert 3 to "11".

I was using the hand controller, I just never bothered putting a battery in the hand controller or setting up date/time on it - I thought that would all come from the Air... The air does set some info like location, but not all, it would seem.

I object to setting up the hand controller. Having two sources of time and location information is very, very wrong and asking for trouble. But it is what it is.

Now of course I have to babysit the setup through a few meridian flips as by attempting to fix the goto I might have broken the flips.

Thanks for that, I dug out and installed a button battery and set the time and location. The location was already right, the Air must update this somehow as I never configured this and without a battery the handset would not remember anyway. Time zone was also right but time was out by an hour. DST setting was also wrong.

I believe all the electronic stuff for the mount is in the handset… therefore you have to plug the air into the handset. But I’m pretty sure the handset isn’t feeding the Air any info. For example, the Air handles meridian flips perfectly, so it clearly knows where the scope is pointing relative to the ground.

I’ll test @vlaiv theory about skipped steps first. If that doesn’t work I will relent and set the handset. 😃

19 minutes ago, vlaiv said:

Anyway - try setting slew speed to 1-2 degrees

I will try that!

21 minutes ago, Elp said:

Are you sure your location is set correctly on the hand controller and also the time in UTC time format with DST turned off? I find both my ioptrons are quite accurate with goto. A long focal length scope will need more adjustments as it's a smaller FOV so the slightest movement can make a big difference.

Unless I’m mistaken, the handset is irrelevant, all the thinking is done by the Air? To answer the question, I haven’t set up the handset at all…

One thing that puzzles me is that the gotos require so much correction from plate solving. I am almost perfectly polar aligned, so why doesn’t the goto get close. With a regular go to, you expect the target to be somewhere in the field of a wide eyepiece, but the HEM15 and AIR  are not even close. Plate solving papers over the errors, but it is puzzling. 

Doing a mini Messier marathon tonight. I’m shooting 15 minuTes on a bunch of targets, just to see what I can get in a short time. With the full moon and a blustery breeze, it’s not the night for anything seriousI a, going for 30 second exposures so there will be more exposures and more benefit from dithering, and binning 2x to compensate for the short exposure time.

Thanks @Elp! Yet again you have set me on the right path. I raised the plate solving exposure for polar alignment and GoTo to 10 seconds and it is working smoothly now. 

For polar aligning it is 5 seconds. Not sure where else to set it?

Yes, I have been setting to zero each time. The Air calculated 970 mm focal length when it eventually solved.

I got plate solving working last night at a focal length of 970 mm. The trick was to plate solve in the AsiAir Preview mode, and then sync to the target. Plate solving during polar aligning and during object selection still refuses to work.

I'm amazed by the detail picked up in just three minutes with city light pollution and a 95% Moon. The scope was reduced (using my trusty SCT 6.3 reducer) to 970 mm focal length, so it was operating around f6.4.

First light. I think the collimation can still be tweaked slightly but I am pretty happy with this result. It’s hard to judge the star shapes as there was a bit of a breeze, but the scope is clearly functional now. This is one unprocessed 3-minute sub.

There is a lovely group I was hoping to photograph, but my laptop won't boot 🤨

Still, a lovely view in the eyepiece.

The Moon is always worth a look! Another thing to chase down are double stars, they are good regardless of light pollution.

I am waiting for my grandson to fly over with an 8300 mono, so looking forward to finding out for myself if CMOS is really better. In my case the comparison is between and uncooled OSC CMOS with amp glow and a cooled CCD with three times the surface area.  It will be strange to have a camera with a physical shutter!

No, you ideally adjust the primary, secondary and the focuser! But with a smaller chip like mine you can get away with mostly adjusting the primary.

I am having no luck plate solving with the ASI485MC and my RC6 (reduced to a focal length of about 900 mm. The short side of the chip should still span around 0.4 degrees so it should be possible.

I took the scope out to align the finder today, and gave it a bit of a bump… I hope the collimation is still ok 😐

On 18/04/2024 at 20:51, Clarkey said:

Mine is the same. I use a Reego for the secondary

TS sell the same thing, never seen it called a Reego before. It looks however that I can collimate both mirrors with my camera, and I strongly prefer collimating directly with the intended imaging device. The end result is the end result, if you see what I mean?