ONIKKINEN

This is the case for me as well. I am always driving to a location rather than setting up at home, so knowing what to expect there is important.

I think the mount is aware of the RA worm gear position, there is a small notch in a washer attached to the end of the worm gear, which is read by a sensor when the notch rotates over it. I have not used EQMODs PPEC, but from a mechanical point of view i think this is how the mount knows what part of the cycle the gear is in. So as long as you dont go and rotate this system manually somehow (impossible without dismantling the mount) it should be ok. Could be wrong though, someone who uses PPEC might have more info on that. There is another option to periodic error correction, and one that will require no extra work or recording of the error. That would be the Predictive PEC algorithm in PHD2. This will record the periodic error as you guide, and gets increasingly more accurate the more you run the mount. This data is gathered directly from guiding performance, so i think has a chance to be more accurate, and i can confirm it works really well with my AZ-EQ6 that has a very aggressive peak twice per worm cycle. It does take a while to get accurate, about a few cycles worth of guiding per night. But chances are your early night data is not perfect anyway due to the scope still cooling down (if you set up fresh with the scope indoors before use), so there are no practical losses per night when using this. Not sure if the prediction data stays between nights when using the same calibration, as i recalibrate each night.

My whole imaging rig, including camera and mini-pc has been rained on twice now. The mini-pc seemed particularly bad since it has vent holes on the top, which is basically a direct route for water to find its way to the motherboard. I did the rice thing for the PC, but not sure it actually did anything other than give me some peace of mind. Its been more than a year since the last water incident and everything still works. Maybe i got lucky, or maybe a slight drizzle on electronics is not so catastrophic, in any case just dry everything as best you can and dont power anything up until you are certain things have dried down.

+1 vote the camera under the OTA advice, really no downsides to doing that. Easier to balance the system since the rather heavy imaging train is now closer to the center of mass. Could make a noticeable difference if stability is suspect.

The typical advice for an "ideal" focal ratio for lucky imaging is in the range of pixel size in microns x 4-6. So for your f/10 scope, i think a 2 micron pixel camera like the 678MC would do nicely without a barlow. You can image the Moon in RGB too, it just takes some effort in the colour processing part to make an image where the colours are nice and balanced enough to look at. With mono you can use filters like a solar continuum or an IR pass filter, so some choices to be made on what you really want. Although many OSC cameras also have decent sensitivity in IR so you can also use the IR pass filter with a colour camera to get a monochrome image - likewise with the solar continuum filter, although now only half the pixels are doing any work so half the sensitivity.

I've managed to not make any new purchases in what, maybe a year? Before that, since 2020 when i started i had a package at the parcel locker every month, or so it seemed. It helps that I'm broke at the moment, think i would be making purchases if that were not the case. I think i am fairly content with what i have now, and there are no major "need to have" type purchases lined up. Imaging rig works, so no point in trying to change things up, and my visual scope and binoculars give me views that satisfy that itch. Poor weather definitely gives too much time to do some window shopping rather than actual time under the stars, can relate to that.

Just how long is your adapter train, can you grab a picture of the setup with the camera attached?

I have the old version the River 2 replaced: The river 300. The River 300 has some longevity issues, which ive barely started noticing now 3 years in so not a deal breaker - but apparently the new one has different battery chemistry, and different "native" voltage ( River 300 is 28v, River 2 is i think 12.6v). So cant say what the new one is like, but can say that my River 300 has exceeded expectations, so i have confidence in Ecoflow as a brand.

I do mobile imaging only, by traveling to a darker location just under an hour away so there are always time losses to setting up and just getting there and back. The average night is somewhere around 50% efficient, with my best and longest nights probably not more than 70% - by this efficiency i mean i leave home at 23:00, return and finish post night maintenance (drying things, recharging batteries and such) by 07:00 and of those 8 hours spent working only 4 get put into a stack. I dont really get many surprises or other new technical issues with kit, but the basic operations just take time.

This is what i would do if i were the OP. Manual stacking ensures you get the best image out of the hard work spent capturing the data. Siril is very close to being SSD write speed limited for registration and image analysis, at least on my system. My biggest stack was 1519 subs at 300mb each, to a total of 455gb and took a few hours, but not as long as 4. With an old HDD some stacks might take a while, but shouldnt ever run into multi-hour stacking ordeals with modern PCs.

Yup, a shadow from a mote of dust. Most likely on the sensor window, or if you have a filter somewhere close to the sensor then on that. Flats are the cure.

17 billion solar masses, 500 trillion times the sun's luminosity, 7 light year accretion disk, eating one solar mass of matter every day. The numbers are so crazy it hardly makes any sense! What an unimaginable beast. Thanks for posting, very interesting.

The best place on the internet for discussion related to the hobby i would say. I dont actually recall a case where a question or issue i had with kit or something else was not resolved, or an answer could not be found. I never planned on posting frequently when i joined (no idea where that post count came from!), it just kind of happened. Safe to say i like it here. Also want to say that i greatly appreciate the likes of @vlaiv and everyone else who offer their detailed explanations of even the most obscure subjects in discussion here, and for free! Almost everything i know of astrophotography was learned here, tip of the hat for everyone who fuels the learning by posting here.

I was thinking more about things we cant help, like a gust of wind which will now scrap 18 minutes of data instead of 2. Agree with your reasoning with the other things though, there is no difference in a 3 minute or 30 minute guide duration if we dont have external disturbances. Getting quickly off topic now though.

I think you kind of skimmed over this point as if its nothing, but lets be serious here this is a major issue if we are aiming to use an f/15 scope. Say we are imaging under decent skies with an f/5 scope and we swamp read noise x5 with a 2 minute sub, well now with the f/15 scope that turns into an 18 minute sub. How many off the shelf mounts can do that reliably even if we know how to make the most out of our guiding gear? I agree with you on binning making up for speed and do that with mosaiced images every chance i get, but taking the focal ratio to an extreme is not at all as easy as just using a "faster" scope.

I think your very dark skies are to thank for the ease of use, since most broadband light pollution is strongest somewhere in the green to yellow range. All my OSC images are strongly green under SQM 20.77->21.35 skies. This is with an IMX571 sensor, which has significantly less QE for blue and red compared to green.

I would love to see a naked eye supernova, however i am not too thrilled about the effects it will have for deep sky imaging and observing. It will be very bright, about a full Moons worth of extra light pollution year round until it dims. If it does go boom, which i dont think it will soon, i do know that i will be placing an order for a monochrome camera and narrowband filters immediately. Those will be all sold out as every deep sky imager on the planet will want to mitigate the effects of the added sky brightness.

Im imaging with an 8" f/4.4 newtonian with a paracorr, bringing the effective focal length to 1018mm at roughly f/5. With my IMX571 and its 3.76 micron pixels i get 0.76"/px, which i have not been able to make use of fully even under very good seeing. So for me its a bit too much resolution, but honestly im getting pretty close with BlurXterminator if the seeing was good so not a complete daydream to work at that resolution. I think a 1 meter focal length newtonian would work very nicely as a galaxy scope with your camera. Need to tend to its needs though, particularly in the stability, collimation, and coma correction department.

Is it this thing? https://www.firstlightoptics.com/sky-watcher-mount-accessories/sky-watcher-synscan-usb-adapter.html You dont need this to connect the mount to a computer, like it says on the page: Note: Sky-Watcher mounts with a built-in USB port do not require this dongle The eqdir cable you have ordered will surely work, and is the most common method for connecting a mount to a computer, but i am not at all sure you can make that work in alt-az as i am pretty sure the EQMOD software is for equatorial operation only. What you could do, and what i assumed you to be doing in the first place, is to bridge the hand controller to your PC with a USB cable. The connection goes like this: Hand controller to the handcontroller port on the mount, and then a USB printer cable to the bottom of the hand controller and the other end to your PC - this way you can control the mount from both the handset and the PC so you should have full functionality. You can also skip the hand controller with this kind of printer cable, if you just plug the cable to the mount itself (hand controller can not be used in this case - also not sure about alt-az functionality as it needs to be set up by the handset).

What kind of dongle do you mean? You only need a USB printer type cable to bridge the hand controller to your laptop

Tricky target in that case, if both are of similar brightness so difficult to say where the M63 tidal parts end and the IFN begins.

Legacy sky survey browser: https://www.legacysurvey.org/viewer#m 63 Click the "more surveys" button and select the SFD dust map. There are loads of different surveys to pick from there as well.

I'll wait for the livestream of when black holes start to evaporate due to Hawking radiation. Betelgeuse is an odd one, it often comes up in discussion from non astronomy folk i meet when i mention that im in the hobby. It seems to me that most people think that it will go bang any time now, no doubt due to clickbait articles that translate "perhaps in the next 100 000 years" to "next tuesday".

SFD dust map is quite weak around M63: For comparison, here is the dust map around M81/M82 with much stronger signal: I think there could be a tiny bit of IFN around M63, but unlikely to be shown in significant amount due to its weakness.

My tube spent around 6 months on its way from purchase to delivery. There was some brief e-mail discussion a few times during the first couple of months because he originally quoted 'a few weeks' for delivery so i asked if there was any progress. He did mention that the painter, which is another person, was ill and so tubes were delayed for a few months so i left it at that, this was also during Covid so very understandable. One day it arrived and it was well worth the wait, i just kind of wish he would give a realistic estimate in the initial discussion, and wouldn't mind at all if he just said "sometime next year" or similar. Its like a gift from past me to future me that way 😁. He is probably overworked, since he also supplies tubes for the TS ONTC newtonians, which are somewhat popular and those tubes take a while to build. Would be a real shame if he decides to retire as the tubes are immaculate and exactly the dimensions you order them (and actually not too expensive for what you get), but obviously understandable if there is just too much work for one person.