ONIKKINEN

Thanks stu, it was indeed a very rare night with how steady it was. I dont expect to get these very often. A couple of months and the planets are observable in more palatable times of day so there should be more chances for "normal" sleepers as the year progresses, i on the other hand go to sleep at 4-5am anyway so not much sleep lost on these odd hour sessions.

Thanks, yes the Pentax eyepieces are fantastic. Not sure i can go back to other eyepieces once i have gotten used to them... I have this great value TS 2.5x APO barlow:https://www.teleskop-express.de/shop/product_info.php/info/p55_TS-Optics-Optics-TSB251-2-5x-Barlow-Lens--1-25-inch---apochromatic-triplet-design.html I have mixed feelings about this one., but mostly because i like it and would love to like it more. Optically and mechanically its very nice, both the eyepiece side and telescope side are well machined and this thing holds orientation sturdily. But the telesocpe side lacks filter thread, and the barlow element is some weird proprietary thread, so i cant screw that onto anything else. Its also quite short and requires a bit of in travel of the focuser so not all setups will reach focus with that one.

Well ill be damned, looks very familiar!

I already complained in the what did you see tonight thread about saturday night, which was ruined, but as a very positive surprise the next night just now was crystal clear and with good seeing! The 8'' newton (that was once a VX8) and an AZ-EQ6 in my car and off i go. Started at about 1am local time with Saturn that lies at 14 degrees above the horizon. The scope was still cooling down at this point but i gave it some time and eventually the boiling stopped and i could pull the cooling fan plug to stabilize the view. And to my surprise i was welcomed with skies that allowed the Pentax XW7 (in a 2.5x barlow) to show more than an XW10, so 321x instead of 250x. Not sure i have seen more than a handful of skies like this, certainly not while the planets were also around to be seen so very excited at this point. Also i just wanted to use the new to me XW7 so it was staying in the barlow whether it was the best eyepiece for the job or not 😆. Saturn showed me the best view i have yet to see, with the cassini division along with some very low contrast banding to be seen on the planet itself. I am left wondering how much better the view would be if Saturn was just a few degrees higher as i am only getting temporary windows of calm with the low altitude which it resides in but that is a discovery for another year at my latitude of 60N. Before moving on from Saturn i threw in a camera in the barlow and took some recordings, and the rest of the session was about 50/50 recording and observing. I dont think the recordings turned out great but im absolutely not going to sift through that pile of pixels tonight. Off to Jupiter with the XW7 and i am greeted with a very obvious great red spot, almost in the middle of the disk. Best view of the GRS i have yet to see for sure, the couple times i have seen the GRS it was not that "great" and obvious, but this time it was impossible to not notice and sort of staring me straight in the eye. The main atmospheric band was serrated and at times swirly across the entire disk, edge to edge with uncountable minor "pockets" of detail to be seen here and there. The smaller band was also quite obvious, but here there was less to see around the edges and just occasionally did some kind of structure peek through. Closer to the poles from the bands i saw many very delicate and low contrast bands with what appeared to be "spots" on them. Not well resolved, but these kept popping in and out of my periphery when observing, i would guess these are some kind of mini cyclones between the different bands. Overall Jupiter appeared very busy which was sort of new to me. At this point i am considering wrapping up as its coming around to 3AM, but since Mars has just crossed the 20 degree altitude mark i decided to just have a look at that too, still with the XW7. Did not expect anything since its still less than 9'' in diameter (according to stellarium). At first didn't see anything really. It appeared as a not quite round very bright and compact disk. Atmospheric dispersion was extremely obvious with separated colours at the extreme ends of the disk and that coupled with the extreme brightness made me almost give up and call it a night. But i figured i would try a #25 Celestron Mars filter and see if it shows me something in the disk. And to my great surprise this filter that up until this moment has been almost entirely useless worked GREAT with Mars. I actually almost straight away spotted some kind of surface detail on Mars. I think it helped with the atmospheric dispersion too, since only deep red light is getting through. Nicely dimmed the image down also, which i feel like helped immensely, perhaps i could have pumped up the power to ludicrous X to also dim the image, but i ran out of glass to do that. Did not spot any light features, but some kind of dark band in the shape of a sideways letter Y was very apparent. Too apparent to be some seeing anomaly for sure. I just made a quick sketch in MS paint that represents what i saw although much smaller in the eyepiece: I then tried to take off the filter and see if i could still spot the structure, and i kind of did now that i new where to look, but it wasn't nearly as well defined when its hiding behind dispersion and a very compact bright disk. The Mars filter is definitely seeing some more use after this experience! Very satisfied with the night, first time seeing anything at all on Mars, and the best views i have seen on Jupiter and Saturn so far. The takeaway here was that Mars really does need a deranged amount of power to give anything at the moment, but given the right circumstances it actually can!

Looks great, much better than i have got with a 200mm scope so far with Saturn at 10-14 degrees of altitude.

If you rack the focuser in and out, does the laser dot move on the primary? If it does, that is a big problem and means your focuser has some sideways movement when in different focus positions. If that is the case you have to try and place all collimation tools at the focal point of the scope, where the collimation matters. Also, try to flip the scope so that the focuser points upwards and just let the laser sit on it by gravity, dont tighten it or anything. Is the position different on the primary this way? If yes, there is some tilt introduced by whatever attachment your focuser has to an eyepiece and that too has to be somehow removed.

My money would go towards a windows 10 mini-pc. Even the cheapest versions will be more capable than the PI4, and you have all the options for software to use since its a windows platform. Not that the PI4 doesn't have good options for software, but more is more. I run my WIN10 mini-pc off USB-C "fast charge port" hooked to a powerbank and connect to the thing with remote desktop using a tablet. If i want the highest framerates i plug the camera into a built-in USB3 port and not one from a USB hub. I get 120fps with my IMX571 in a 500x500 ROI in 8-bit raw mode when imaging the planets, so the PC is definitely not holding me back. The cheapest beelink one sold at FLO looks about equivalent in specs to what i have, perhaps even a bit better so that will definitely work great.

First time out with the 8'' for almost 4 months, goal was to do some Jupiter and Saturn observing/imaging. Drove a bit out of the city to a decent location where i am on a small hill overlooking some fields and forest, so outside the urban seeing. Forecast for the night was fully clear with no clouds anywhere, of course we all know where this is heading now. As soon as i had set up and roughly polar aligned i saw clouds on the northern horizon, making their way towards me. Quickly managed to have a look at Jupiter and Saturn, but the views were terrible as the big gun had not cooled down yet, not even close really. Boiling surface and hard to tell if the scope was in focus or not so quickly threw in the imaging train in place of the eyepiece to try and get something out of the night before the clouds ruined it, but i just went through the videos and they too are junk (not surprising). I did manage to confirm that i had not broken my mount over the summer when i rebuilt it, so its not all a waste at least. An average session really 😬.

Just lightly cleaned my OOUK mirror and the coating looks pretty much exactly like it did 2 years ago with a few (user error) scuffs here and there. That 2 to 5 years per recoat sounds very aggressive to me, doubt that's actually necessary. I dont overthink the cleaning process, not that i need to since it wasn't really all that dirty. Puffed away all the surface dust and particulates with a blower, brushed the not-so-mobile particulates off with a camel hair brush that came with a camera cleaning kit, then few drops of lens cleaning fluid which i swirled around without applying any pressure with a sealed lens cleaning paper (single use). Then finally sprayed the mirror with a small amount of water and removed whatever was left of all that drying up with a fresh microfiber cloth. Didn't even take the mirror off the cell, overall took maybe 5 minutes but again this was not a mirror that "needed" cleaning, i just happened to have the mirror off so might aswell clean it. This looks nasty, how old is the coating here? I assume this is some significant magnification under a microscope, but still looks ruined.

The EQ5 is a plenty capable mount for many types of astrophotography with a 130P, so no worries there for now. Try with the tracking on and with a short exposure (couple seconds at most) and see what you get? The live view in my 550D is quite temperamental, i think it represents only very short exposures, like 1/4th of a second or so. At this speed the seeing will distort the image randomly to every direction and you could get a funny star shape here and there. 2 seconds and above is where the seeing generally averages out and you get the "true" starshape what your mount can deliver. But with untracked a 2s exposure would be hopelessly distorted also, so bear this in mind.

Its hard to say from these images. The first one shows obvious trailing, so perhaps not the best image to troubleshoot sharpness from. The second is just distorted for some other reason. It could be seeing, bumping the scope, the mount rattling, wind, many reasons really. Could also be out of collimation, but really it is difficult to advice really. Which scope is it? If you are trying untracked astrophotography you should try to focus on some obvious unmoving target, or better yet, a slowly moving target that has obvious surface features (the Moon!). Recently i took this image: Of the Moon with an untracked mount. The easy method of taking an image untracked is to try to spend as much time as possible focusing on some very obvious feature, which in this case was the Moon and its very obvious craters, and then hope the focus stays when fiddling with the camera but for deep sky you really want to have a mount that can track the sky. For planetary you could maybe get away with not tracking, but this will be very annoying and tedious to do. I have tried it and its technically possible, but needs more patience than i have available! Below is an attempt of Jupiter with a 90mm refractor untracked (dont know what the circle artifact is to the top, its not real detail):

It is. I use it with the H18 star database on my mini-pc which has never been connected to the internet and so far platesolving has never failed if the frame was decent.

Hello, and welcome to SGL Looks like the diffraction pattern from your bahtinov mask indicates that the scope was well out of focus. Below is an easy visualization: The diffraction pattern really does need to be dead center, otherwise the shot will be out of focus. I actually find it much easier to ditch the bahtinov mask and just focus visually looking at star sizes, or better yet, looking at reported HFR values using some software (i use NINA). But also, untracked images will be smeared no matter the focus. Which scope are you shooting with? The focal length (and pixel size) will dictate how quickly shots become obviously trailed, but with most telescopes this will be less than a second easily.

Actually no, the long march 5 did not use hypergolics. So maybe not so dangerous after all.

Those rockets use hypergolic fuels which are extremely toxic. Im talking hospitalized if a drop touches your skin kind of toxic. Probably better to have someone come and dispose of whatever survives to the ground. Its incredibly stupid to let the core stage to just re-enter with no control as its not that difficult to do safely. All it takes is a few m/s of delta V to deorbit the core at will...

Contrast of the display used for viewing the image is up to the viewer to see to but i dont think there is a set in stone right way you can try to please everyone by stretching just the right way. RE: Colour: I have had many monitors over the years and most of them display colour differently and really only the higher end ones with sRGB built in do a good job. This is something that can be "objectified" by calibration of both the image and display, whereas the contrast issue IMO is not (because most dont care, some view in daylight, some in darkness etc). Photometric colour calibration of the image takes the issue out of my hands and most importantly my eyes.

I can see the fainter parts fine with both of my monitors (and phone), the blown up version looks like it had a bit too much stretch, true. Maybe a compromise between the very dark first image and the third one would work best? My primary display is has a factory set sRGB mode, which i have not tested nor probably will bother to since i think it looks great. My secondary monitor is a cheaper one with no such setting and it looks fine on that too, but i never use the secondary monitor for actual processing because it has a very slightly different output of colours. In my opinion an image that has the right colours will look good in any monitor, but just better in the better monitor. What i will say about the visibility of the fainter stuff here is that the image is quite oversampled and would benefit from binning, especially for these faint areas where the noise grain has started to come up due to too much stretch.

I wonder if these "ED eyepiece" models from TS are the same ones as the BST starguiders? Sure look similar. 8mm as an example: https://www.teleskop-express.de/shop/product_info.php/info/p4934_TS-Optics-1-25--ED--eyepiece-8-mm---60--flat-field--long-eye-relief.html

Ah, i see. Give https://siril.org/ a try then, its free and sort of easy to understand for beginners. When opening a file you can choose to not debayer the image, in which case you would be shown a monochrome image with a checkerboard pattern over it like Alacant described above. Clicking the debayer option when opening a raw file will most of the time result in the green image you had already seen. Normally colour calibration is done after you have stacked all of your images but you can do it for just one file too. Give the tutorials a patient look while using the software for the first time as its easy to feel lost when using a piece of astronomy processing software for the first time.

Everything is working as intended when the image comes out as primarily green. This is because you have 2 green pixels for every red and blue pixel so really it would be weird if the image is not green. Are you trying to process a single image or what is the goal here?

3D print the lathe? 🤣

I can definitely recommend the Rising cam ATR3CMOS26000KPA (lmao, thats the name) also better known as just the IMX571 OSC. But the price is not such a clear cut winner anymore and actually the Omegon version might be cheaper. Also Altair, TS, Omegon, Lacerta, Rising Cam, Explore scientific and others all sell the same camera with maybe slight changes in what comes in the box and exterior design but in the end all of them are made by ToupTek and from a specs point of view would be difficult to distinguish from eachother.

You can sort of extrapolate this kind of metric from forum posts and pictures taken with said mounts. Nobody seems to be doing high resolution work on EQ3 class mounts, few are doing so with EQ5 class ones and some are doing OK with EQ6 class. Pictures taken with mounts bigger than EQ6 or tuned EQ6 mounts seem to be consistently better than all the rest.

Have you given thought to the darker skies side of things when it comes to reaching a decent SNR? If you visit a bortle 4 area (should be reasonable) you can get a vastly superior image in just one night compared to your current multi-week projects from bortle 8. Actually you might get 2 finished targets per trip, depends on how bad in the B8 end you are now. This one was quite demoralizing to realize for me. I got 2 hours from a B4 area and compared it to more than 6 from B6-7 and, you guessed it, the 2 hours from dark skies slapped the 6 around like it was a cat toy. More effort though, so not a completely fair comparison but nothing is.

4 weeks left at 60 degrees N.