ONIKKINEN

2 minutes ago, Ags said:

As long as it doesn't go negative...

It probably will once it settles in to its orbit, but not right now hopefully. Its just gravity doing its thing and the Earth pulling JWST back as long as its "in range".

In the Sun-Earth L2 point the speed relative to the Earth becomes a meaningless statistic really since it is sort of hula-hooping around an invisible spot behind the Earth in terms the Sun-Earth line. JWST will definitely be coming towards the Earth at some point, so negative velocity.

3 minutes ago, malc-c said:

If you connect via the handset, and have the handset in PC-Direct mode you still need EQMOD or GSServer.  All PC-Direct mode does is act as a USB to Serial convertor - much the same was as an EQDIR cable.

Same goes for new mounts with USB ports - it's just an EQDIR adapter (USB to TTL serial) built in.

No need to use PC-direct mode with the USB plugged in to the handset. The new versions of Synscan mounts say in the manual that other than some types of firmware updates (motor controller for instance) you dont need to use PC direct mode. 

Just now, dazzystar said:

Do you not need a driver though or does NINA recognise the hand controller?

I believe its the native Skywatcher driver. Not sure if i had to download it or NINA just recognized it as its been a while. Probably had to download the driver from Skywatcher.

You may also need to download the prolific chipset drivers from Skywatcher if your PC does not recognize the handset. My desktop recognized and auto installed them, but my mini-PC did not and had to install them myself.

This page has the prolific one: http://www.skywatcher.com/download/software/accessories/

The ASCOM driver page has the handset drivers if they are necessary.

On 28/12/2021 at 15:43, dazzystar said:

Thanks very much for the replies. I will be using NINA so do I need to install EQMOD as well or does NINA take care it?

No need for EQMOD if you connect via on-mount USB on the hand controller. Not sure about the control box though. I use my EQM35, which runs on the same Synscan hardware and firmware with NINA this way.

The handset still works this way, so you can manually slew or do GO-TOs from either the handset or NINA.

15 hours ago, kirkster501 said:

 and M82, another 80 hours.

Literally cannot wait to see this picture if it ever gets made. This seems like a very "real" object to image, not that the ultra deep fields are not real, but M82 is a target most are very familiar with so very excited to see JWSTs take on it!

Looks to me like it should with the equipment used, or at least in the ballpark. Planetary imaging requires very different methods and equipment than deep sky long exposure, so you are just too wide for Jupiter to show much detail.

A commonly quoted target f-ratio would be 5 (or was it 6?) times the pixel size for planetary imaging with a colour camera, so for your 700D with 4.3 micron pixels you would want to have an f-ratio of around F21. So for the 200p being an F5 system you would want to use a 4x barlow to get there. If you have 2 different 2x barlows lying around, you could use both of those aswell, although the image quality will probably degrade compared to a single barlow. I got an image of Jupiter this summer using 2 different barlows on top of each other and a 550D in movie crop video mode. Wasn't a very good picture due to Jupiter being so low and probably the barlows/DSLR not being optimal for the job, but it was a picture.

Having said that, how high was Jupiter at the time of imaging? Jupiter is quite low in the sky for UK latitudes so the atmosphere is probably also working against you here.

Looks like the background is gone after your noise reduction, which could be wanted or could not be, depends on what you want. Olly already tipped you on the layer masks and their power in processing, but ill give you one method of easily removing colournoise from the background. Try this method before going for noise reduction tools, it could lead to a more natural look.

Easy to do in photoshop: Select -> Color range and then from the dropdown select "Shadows". Adjust the Range and Fuzziness to values that have all of the background selected (white) but none of the signal you want to preserve. Depending on your image and type of background this can be difficult, so just choose what fits your data best. Then click OK and you have a selection across the screen. Then go Select -> Select and mask and finalize the parameters of the new layer mask. You could put a small Feather effect on this so that the transition between values is more subtle. Could be important for some images. When happy select the Output To mode to be new layer with layer mask.

Then on that new adjustment layer just drop saturation by as much as you want. -100 will make the background monochrome and looks out of place in my opinion, but experiment on the exact value in your image. Since you selected only the background, only the background loses saturation and the interesting bits should remain whatever colour they were. Sometimes all it takes is desaturating the colournoise instead of trying to fight it away, but often it takes a bit of both.

Dark site trips for both imaging and observing are definitely on my list as well. Visited family in a Bortle 3 area just over 2 hours drive away over Christmas and had a quick look at the sky with binoculars through some intermittent cloud cover. There is so much more to see it doesn't look like the same sky anymore and i definitely need to have a look with my VX8 to see if i can spot things that are completely invisible in brighter skies.

Goals for the upcoming spring would be to image the Coma cluster of galaxies and Markarians chain in Virgo, which i missed this year due to technical difficulties. Couldn't really image these far southern targets at all with my unsuitable mount so gave up . Hopefully by then my AZ/EQ-6 has arrived and most of the problems will be sorted. Might have to compromise and only shoot one of these though, since the time window to shoot these from 60 degrees north is just a couple of months long and who knows how many clear nights there are?

24 minutes ago, alacant said:

Had a go at the stars. Maybe have a look at polar alignment?

Looks like the elongation is along the RA axis, which means the exposure was too long and affected by periodic error.

30s exposures would probably be more reliable for unguided. The only way to get rid of this limitation is to guide.

Just updated both the hand controller firmware and the motor controller firmware. Both were i believe one of the earlier versions of this model of mount so looks like my unit has been sitting in storage for quite a while before i bought it. Motor controller firmware was 03.00.32 and is now updated to 03.15.32. I wish i had a recording of the sound my mount made when slewing before, but it sounds COMPLETELY different now.

Previously it was 100% power the instant you press a directional button or initiate a GO-TO, now there is a built in spool up period and it is a lot less jerky and sudden. Doing dummy tests indoors at the moment and GO-TOs appear to be going to at least the general direction of the object and not 90 degrees off. Time will tell if its fixed or not.

I am not an expert but pretty sure mount electronics dont like occasionally being shorted. I have always used this cable so its entirely possible it has been shorting intermittently for a long time now. Wasn't this obvious, but as i yanked the cable a bit it appears to be completely exposed with a maybe 1-2mm airgap in between. Who knows what happens to the motor controller logic when shorted a bit, maybe even running backwards, going the opposite way or some other bug? Would conveniently explain why it only happens sometimes...

Still doing the firmware thingy just in case.

2 hours ago, newbie alert said:

What mods have you done?

Maybe modifications was a bad word to use. I did a tear down/regrease and polished some surfaces to decrease friction in the hopes of getting better performance. No bearings in the mount so polishing the bushings/sliding bits (dont know what to call them) could help. Didnt improve much, but it is easier to balance now so didnt make it worse. Also marked a few bits and roughed up a thread inside as i didnt have any instructions for the tear down, so im not comfortable sending it back. That one is my fault.

As for the other things, i suggest you re-read my previous comments. Not meridian flip/NINA/Date and time/location/PC-control related.

I find that every degree below -20 adds an exponential risk of failure in moving parts. Focusers seize, maybe the lubricant gets sticky inside the mount, electronics either dont work or work slowly. USB connections especially become very fiddly and weak.

But -43? Way too cold, not that we get those temperatures anyway. Shame, since i have also found that extreme cold also brings extreme dry and with it good transparency.

1 hour ago, newbie alert said:

If it's under 2 years old and within warrenty I'd be looking to send it back unless a firmware update didn't fix the issue...  

How do you mean it slews the wrong way... when the mount flips it looks like it takes the long route sometimes, but it can't flip going the wrong way 

It is as stupid as it sounds, the mount just does not do what told. Not meridian flip related by the way.

An example from the previous case when i was on a purely visual session: GO-TO for M51 from M81 so shouldnt be that difficult of a slew, goes the opposite way and says its there. The "show position" command in Synscan is aware that the mount is not where M51 is and correctly shows the coordinates of wherever the GO-TO slewed. So the mount knows its not at M51 but still went there.

Googling around i found that others have had similar issues that were unsolvesd or solved with firmware updates. Thats my next bet.

I bought the mount from Astroshop and have modified and damaged quite a bit of it so wont be sending it back. Learned from this and the next mount is coming from a domestic shop. Will be thoroughly inspecting and testing before making any changes or maintenance.

2 hours ago, Starflyer said:

I don't know the mount but are you using EQMOD as the ASCOM driver?

I know with SGP and EQMOD there should be no pointing model and sync in EQMOD should be set to Dialogue Based otherwise plate solving will fight with the pointing model, you get all sorts of odd results and the mount will never centre successfully. I guess NINA's centering functions in much the same way.

I'd clear out any pointing model, check your location, time and timezone in all places.  With this done, a decent polar alignment and a decent zero position your first go-to should be close and plate solve / centre should work as expected.

Irrelevant to the issue, since it also happens without PC control. Zero position doesnt matter and shouldnt result in the mount doing a GO-To to the ground when sent to park. Ill see if i can reset the firmware to factory defaults somehow.

But i am using the Skywatcher driver and controlling through the hand controller with a USB cable. Dead simple and both the handset and PC can issue commands. 

My Skywatcher EQM-35 sometimes slews to the wrong way than what the GO-TO ordered, and today was the 4th time this happened. This time with a GO-TO issued by NINA and my astrophotography mini-pc. Previous times have been without computer control, so just handcontroller issued commands. Previously i was able to get rid of the problem by just restarting the mount and doing the initial date/time/location things from scratch but this time it didn't work.

The confusing part is that the mount reads the coordinates correctly, it just doesn't follow any commands correctly. I have a target at around DEC 73, and the first GO-TO is not even close (never is, not the issue). Well then platesolving kicks in and tells me that its pointing at DEC 71 right now and that its outside tolerance and will re-slew. All good, except that it slews to DEC 69. This keeps going on until my max tries setting kicks in and NINA just hopes that its on target and presumes the sequence. Well its not and i cant get it to go to the target no matter what i do. I tried to restart the PC and the mount but this went on and on. At one point i was on target, but then started platesolving to get my camera rotation correct. Once rotation was correct and i tried re-slewing to the target the same circus of going backwards happened. Astap platesolving works like a dream, as it always does btw. Not that it matters in this case since the problem happens with or without platesolving.

Then i just decided i have had enough and sent it to park. Which sent the scope towards the tripod legs and pointing to the ground. Also, at this time NINA correctly noted that i am indeed at below 0 degrees in altitude but still went on with it?? Ripped out all the cables, cursed the thing in unprintable ways, packed everything and headed home.

Any clues? I will assume this is mount hardware/firmware related since it can happen with software and without software assisting the GO-TO.

The mount is under 2 years old and with the new USB on mount handset and control box. All date/time/location settings set correctly etc. Anyone run into similar issues with this model, or some other synscan mount?

A few nights out in -15 or colder temperatures i have noticed that the Baader diamond steeltrack becomes "springy" like the stock focuser in the fine motion knob. Its possible to work around this by carefully adjusting the friction screw to a point where it almost, but not quite slips but its a bit of a faff. It gets better once the entire setup has properly cooled to ambient temperatures, but during cooling i will have to keep an eye on the focus and adjust if necessary. Much better than the stock focuser of course, but if anyone is wondering how it performs in difficult situations i thought i would mention that its not perfect.

But in all fairness, nothing that is supposed to move seems to work properly in cold temperatures, so shouldn't be a surprise for someone who is used to that.

5 hours ago, wimvb said:

That answers the question I had. If ZWO would drop support of other mounts, they could as well discontinue the ASIAir.

What also surprises me, is that this is the second harmonic drive mount I've come across within this last week.

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005003408574030.html

Thats a pretty significant price difference... Although more in line with the RST-135.

I wonder if we are heading to a new era in mount designs? Maybe the old worm drive style of mounts is an ancient relic in 10 years now that we are seeing many new harmonic drive designs, assuming one will end up working and be manufacture-able for a decent price?

No 10 billion dollar fireworks! Lets hope the space origami works out.

Third (or thereabouts) the price of the RST-135? New product? No available user experiences publicly available?
I will expect that the first buyers of the mount end up being beta testers, and i certainly wont be one. If it really ends up being a decent product, rainbow astro has to adjust their price accordingly. Also, a bit worrying if it ends up being the case that the RST-135 is priced so high "because we can". Competition will be good.

But, if a fair bit of experience in the car industry has thought me anything its that no new product is ever released in a finished state. The first model of every new car is always faulty in some way that only gets fixed in the second iteration while the early adopters are really out of luck and have to fight the dealer to fix the issues. Might be wrong but will be pessimistic for this product too.

1 hour ago, Enigma_RL said:

That being said this is only my second image ever taken in astrophotography so still trying to get the hang of things but overall I am really pleased with the end result.

You've hit the ground running, amazing for a second try!

I would upgrade the laptop to a selfbuilt desktop PC. If assembling a PC is off the table, look into non-branded desktops. General brand name desktops are the worst moneysinks there are (HP, acer etc). Gaming PCs built by a dedicated gaming related store would be the best choice to look for less bad prebuilts.

I have an I7 6700K, decent speed 16GB DDR4 ram , GTX1080 and SSDs for storage.

Yesterday i split stacked 800 subs, 50mb each of OSC data into monochrome RGB stacks with Siril and Sirilic. Took about 3 hours and 400GB of storage, while a previous stack i did with APP in mosaic mode took maybe 6-7h for only 300 subs. Maybe siril is faster so give it a try?

Split stacking includes first calibrating as 32bit files and saving the calibrated files for later use. Then splitting the colourchannels into 4 different subs with no debayering (1R/B 2G). Then stacking those into mono RGB stacks. So the 800 subs turns into 3200 subs which are then stacked. Should give you an idea for how much faster you can get with a better PC. If you buy newer hardware it would be even faster, so definitely look into that!

I think a laser is a lot more intuitive to use for aligning the secondary-primary axis since you can see it from the back of the telescope. Or if its very off you can just look in the tube and see where the spot is in the primary.

I use a TS concenter eyepiece to center the secondary mirror straight under the focuser, then use a laser to align the 2 mirrors. Then the concenter goes back in to check how the secondary moved during the laser adjustments and re-center. Rince and repeat until its good. Once its well aligned, either the concenter or a laser can be used to check collimation very quickly. I prefer the laser for checking since its easy to do in the dark. I personally think the concenter eyepiece does everything a cheshire does but much, much better. If you plan on imaging the secondary being exactly centered below the focuser will become a critical issue, where as in visual use maybe not so much.

17 minutes ago, Rodd said:

I don’t agree. I can’t take a 30sec lum sub without blowing the frame on most nights. If I take subs of 10 seconds often they are hard to align due to few and very blurry stars due to lack of signal 

Well that i dont believe, there will always be starcores visible in any kind of condiitons. I image mostly from B6-8 type skies (depending on Moon, transparency, direction of imaging etc) exclusively with 30s subs and there are always stars. Also imaging with an 8 inch F4.2 newtonian and an OSC camera. Also, i have an in progress project where i try to image IFN from the afore mentioned conditions. At 5 hours in i can separate the IFN from the background but it is obviously very noisy and requires at least double or triple the exposure to reach a decent result. You can do the math yourself how long that would take for a hard Bortle 8 location and figure out why people dont do that. But not impossible.

Honestly i think you're trolling here. You have been given evidence left and right and it just seems that you want to move the goalposts so outrageously to your favour that nobody can actually prove their point to you. I mean you can see extremely faint signal in your own profile picture (assuming you took it yourself) that would be impossible from your arguments.

17 minutes ago, Rodd said:

Show me ifn taken from bortle 8/9 using lum filter. That is all the convincing I will need

Why dont you try taking a picture like that yourself? Nothing impossible about that, just takes very long to get the SNR of the faint IFN to produce a nice looking image.