Ags

Just a little orange adapter to connect a finderscope to my Canon EF to T2 adapter.

My ASI 178 MM has opened up so much for me - EEA, planetary and lunar imaging, DSO imaging too. Another good‘un is the 6.3 Reducer for my SCT - better for photography and eyepieces work better too. Not many mentions of eyepieces but the pick for me would be my ES 6.7 82 degree.

That’s a great setup you had there!

Mars is always very small as its diameter is only twice the Moon’s in absolute terms and of course it is much further away. Despite that, on a good night you can still pick out dark regions like Syrtis Major, the bright spot of a polar cap and even hints of clouds at the limb. It does take patience and careful observing though. I also have a 150 mm SCT and one accessory has been very good for me - a 6.3 reducer that reduces focal length to 945 mm and lets the scope show much wider fields. I used to have a Celestron 25 mm plossl and it was a very pleasing eyepiece.

@vlaiv That's the best equation I have seen this decade! Does it have a name?

I think I simply remounted the shoe on the other side - are there no screws on your tube to move the finder over? The way you have it mounted will confuse the tracking I think - but you can download firmware for EQ mode and right arm mode.

By the way, the Fi C6 weights 3.3 kgs without diagonal and eyepiece.

That's right - my RDF is at best 0.5 degrees out of alignment with the scope. I am used to the issue now which i treat as a feature. I simply mentally correct for the offset 🙂

Just spotted this thread. I have a Fi 6 OTA and it seems the same as any other SCT. Annoyingly the finder shoe won’t let me align the RDF with the scope. Optically it is excellent, and mechanically flawless - zero focus shift. It sits nicely on an AZ-GTi so I am sure the C5 would be fine.

Fantastic detail!

Surely that's gotta be Galileo?

I saw the canals nearly 40 years ago in a 26 inch refractor. My memory isn't the best but I do remember fleeting glimpses of linear structures. No, I don't believe they were really there and it was of course some kind of cool optical illusion.

I am happy with my SLV 6mm. Planning on getting the 2.5, 4, 5 and 20mm and a turret!

Mars from 2020-11-12, 6ms frames at 126 fps:

Still working on this. It is now morphing into a board game, with the premise of being lost in space and needing to gather resources and find a home planet. So the game flips between the map above showing the individual solar systems and a map showing the interstellar view. I have come up with this map style:

Very good indeed!

Mars from 2020-11-03 :

This is what I went for in the end: Explore Scientific dob counterweights with an M12 bolt. I did try a longer piece of threaded rod instead of a bolt but felt it vibrated too much.

Thanks, I think i can do much better - I could have made the RGB sequences at least 4 times longer for example, and I am not sure I really got best focus with this run either.

Had a break for a bit as I got side tracked by aquariums. Started up again last night with Mars. Cloud was coming in fast so I shot just 2000 6.5 millisecond frames each of R, G and B around 23:00 UTC. Processed in AS!3, Registax 6 and Gimp.

Agree Maks are a bit sharper. I really see the difference on double stars.

I expect it would be hard to tell the views in a C6 and Skymax 127 apart unless you had them set up side by side. The C6 would just be a small incremental improvement over the C6 in terms of light gathering and resolution. The main argument for the C6 is it is the biggest aperture you can put on an AZ-GTi.

3.8 kg is an often quoted value, but that seems to be the weight with a diagonal and random eyepiece. I have weighed just the OTA and I measure 3.3 kgs.

Thanks! Yes it is barlowed slightly. I measure the focal length at 2400 mm. Equally importantly, the camera is mono with small pixels.