ONIKKINEN

I meant this one: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4001359313736.html?spm=a2g0o.productlist.0.0.6f047164JGhOx6&algo_pvid=88c7fc7f-59b2-4b58-9bdc-a75b08237944&algo_exp_id=88c7fc7f-59b2-4b58-9bdc-a75b08237944-0 Comes from China directly so VAT for everyone. When i bought mine i was not charged VAT at the checkout but i think the rules changed just after that and now you pay VAT to aliexpress. You never have to pay VAT twice, if you can prove the value of the item and the already paid VAT with an invoice which you obviously can.

You might enjoy Scott Manley on YouTube. He does general space related videos and uploads regularly.

Looks like its going to be a short/unknown length of sudden unforecasted clear skies tonight judging from current weather. Not long enough for me to drive to better skies but since its been weeks since i last saw anything im tempted to set up just outside my flat for a short(?) session at the eyepiece. I find that i have sudden breaks in cloudiness like these far more often than actual fully clear nights and maybe i could use them for observing. Conditions will be: Bortle 8 and no way to hide from local light sources such as street lights and city lights in general since i will be setting up on a fully lit parking lot just outside my flat. The Moon is an obvious target and will be nicely positioned in a few hours, but other than that my knowledge of viable targets are lacking. I guess stellar targets such as doubles (never tried), maybe globular clusters? Open clusters perhaps? Planets have already set for this year, not that they were very good to begin with being so low in the sky. Observing would be done with a VX8 on a Go-to mount.

Including VAT!

Used prices are not really fair as a comparison since there are so many variables. A brand new IMX571 OSC camera is 1350€ btw.

Mono cheaper than OSC? Looks like its the other way around unless i missed something. Edit: i find it interesting that 3 users posted the same observation at the same time.

I would actually rather be in a dry -20 than a humid +1. Thats the worst type of weather IMO.

-20 and windy is where i think again about going outside. Probably will still go after thinking about it.

Lacking clear skies at the moment i figured out an actually decent way to test coma from home. I pointed my telecope to a balcony about a kilometer away that conveniently has Christmas lights put out on a pretty wide area. My 19mm 65 degree Omegon flatfield eyepiece nicely covers the entire line of christmas lights end to end and makes it quite easy to judge coma at a glance. Sure im looking through dirty windows that are far from optically good but better than nothing. I found that its not all that clear what the effect is with small variations. With the adapters i have on hand and just by lifting the eyepiece a bit i found that anywhere from 45-60mm from the corrector threads to the end of the eyepiece barrel is similar. 70mm was clearly not good, as was under 40. Ill have to test again with real stars as even at 44x power the Christmas lights were not point sources. Still good to know im in the roughly right area with the adapters i have. And of course just to test if this method is good at all i took the comacorrector out and there is the normal f4.5 strength of coma even quite close to the center of the field which is to be expected.

Pretty much just that. Just align to an error of maybe 5-10 arcmin and there should be a consistent drift to just one direction in DEC. Run guiding assistant and see which direction the drift is to and set DEC guide mode to counter that. This way in theory your DEC backlash is in check because the gears are touching like in the RA. Also this relies on DEC balance being slightly out. Perfect balance will have your DEC axis wobble between the backlash gap.

Depends on the targets in question if focal length and resolution is a big deal or not. Wide nebulae: sure small scopes and mounts are fine. Galaxies: small scope will be disappointing.

DSLRs are plug and play and easy to learn. Astrophotography has many hoops you need to jump through and many tricks to learn to get going so starting simple is probably wise. DSLRs vary in price quite a lot but not in astronomy-significant specs so pretty much any Canon or Nikon would work. APS-C sized dedicated astronomy cameras start at 1400€ and get rapidly more expensive so not sure they fit your budget.

Guiding will make the backlash issues much worse, if not taken into account properly. RA backlash is mostly irrelevant as the RA axis is under constant motion. Balancing east heavy makes the gears touch at all times= backlash irrelevant. DEC backlash is a problem though. If yours is really bad you nay need to purposefully polar align not perfectly to allow DEC drift to be always to one direction and set DEC guiding pulses to only happen to that direction. You may also need to abandon DEC guiding completely if you lost the Skywatcher monday morning product lottery (i did). Another trick you can do to deal with a dodgy mount is to shoot at higher declination targets. Close to the pole you can get away with a lot of issues in the mount because the sky moves so slowly. Agree with this. My mount is embarrasingly bad and poorly designed.

I have some unused spacers and a 2 inch to 1.25 inch threaded adapter so sounds easy enough. I also have a few different types of eyepieces so i assume these could have slightly different placements of the focal plane as well. I would also assume that its not a millimeter science for visual as it is for imaging. I can tolerate coma somewhat in visual but not at all for imaging, so a somewhat uncorrected field might not be noticeable.

I think there is a pretty big difference between the 16 and 32 bit versions. I don't see nearly as much "separation" of values in the 32 bit (not at all really) whereas the 16 bit version has clear lines where one brightness part of a nebula jumps up to the next one. You have really good data here and i would be very happy to have captured this! I threw this through my processing routine, which changes every time so this might not apply for every project, but it goes like this: Siril: 1)crop, 2) background extraction, 3) Photometric CC with a manually set star magnitude to something that i believe is reasonably well captured in the data. In this case i just chose mag 14 as these stars are still pretty good in your shot. Export to 32bit .fits while still linear. Astap: Bin 2x2 to improve signal to noise ratio. Not sure if this was necessary or beneficial. Still, i see ne obvious negatives so hey why not. Siril round 2: Asinh transformation, full 1000 whatever units they are. Histogram transformation with the autostretch function and then dial it down a bit to preserve stars. At this point the data is stretched and the precision is no longer needed and i convert to 16 bit. Photoshop: Create starless and just stars layers with StarXterminator. Stretch the starless layer, saturation on the starless layer (just the iris blues pretty much in this case with the select and mask tool). Camera raw adjustments to texture/clarity/dehaze on the starless layer. TopazDenoise denoising and sharpening to the starless layer. Then on to the star layer which requires usually less work: Saturation until star colours are nice but not nuked, slight stretch to brighten a bit (i did not stretch enough in siril round2, ohwell) and then finish the layer with just sharpening to the only-stars layer with TopazDenoise. Combine stars and the nebula layers and done! Im just about to turn into my second year of astrophotography so not an expert so these might not be the best tips or methods but thought i would "think aloud" on what i did. Here's what i got: As a mainly galaxy imager i had to scour the image to find at least one faint fuzzy and i found just one: UGC 11678 in the top left, close to the "tail" of the Iris!

I have a TS Maxfield 0.95x comacorrector in my VX8 that advertises a 55mm working distance for the backfocus to a camera sensor. But which part of the eyepiece is the 55mm to, if it even applies to eyepieces like it does for sensors? The corrector does not advertise visual use in any way but i would assume there is some way to make it work. Just thread in an adapter or two and something to hold the eyepieces and should work?

This thread has piqued my interest. Most often i am stargazing from a B6 zone, would you folks say it makes a big difference to get a UHC filter on applicable targets? Mostly i just avoid fuzzies because its a bit disappointing from the skyglow perspective.

Having played plenty of Kerbal space program and being at least novice-level familiar with the topic i can say that this will definitely work. Thing is, 17 000 mph is nothing and the projectile they are using (i think it was an anti-tank round if i remember correctly?) is very light. Physics will win and the asteroid will accelerate probably fractions of a mm/s^2. If this is measurable it will be a success. Its all about F=m*a. In this case the force and mass of the projectile are tiny while the asteroid is large=acceleration will be very small. In Kerbal space program i have slammed several hundred ton-mass spacecraft at orbital speeds to comets and they simply do not care. The orbit is virtually unchanged because of the insane masses involved. So a realistic significant redirection is not going to happen any time soon but this will be an interesting real world test and proof of concept.

The newer creative cloud version is only 12€ per month. You get all the usual apps like photoshop, lightroom, canera raw, bridge etc. I dont really see how saving 12€ a month is worth the effort of piracy and using outdated software. You dont have to have the creative cloud app open or be online for photoshop to work and you also dont have to update your apps when new ones roll in.

I noticed that the raw stack you posted above is in 16 bit mode while still linear. Its very likely you have lost a not insignificant amount of signal to this! Stacking in 32bit mode takes a lot more processing time and power but you should still always do this. I have noticed that stacking my 26 megapixel frames takes around 1 gigabyte per sub with SIRIL. Easier and less straining on your PC to do in DSS, but SIRIL stacks a bit better IMO. If you have no extra harddrive space to free up, try stacking in DSS to get the 32bit result as i think it would be better?

I notice price fluctuations with mounts a lot. In TS the EQ5 was under 800 eur for a while and now it is back to 879eur. Supply shortages: the movie, part 2 electric boogaloo all over again? Or just price updates for other reasons? Who knows, everything is too expensive anyway 🤣.

All of what you said of the EQM35 is marketing fluff and hearsay. The 10kg payload is based on the fact that if you slide the counterweights all the way to the end the mount is technically capable of slewing a 10kg payload and nothing more. It is NOT suitable for astrophotography with such payloads. The true imaging payload should not exceed 5kg and ideally the imaging payload would be 0kg. The greater precision part is partially true. It does have more teeth in the RA axis to potentially reduce the effects of periodic error, but this does not matter since it had NO BEARINGS to hold any weight. The moment you introduce guiding you notice that the sticky besringless RA of the EQM35 will not do the job. In this case the 3 and 35 are very similar where as the 5 is clearly superior. Dont even get me started on the DEC axis with 1-4 seconds of backlash, tight spots, loose spots, stiction, flexure. The modern design consists of: an EQ3 DEC axis (junk) and a slightly improved RA axis that still does not tackle the main issue of no bearings. The mount will have unfixable mechanical weaknesses unique to the EQ3 class of mounts. Didnt mean to attack you specifically but the mount in this case, so im sorry if it came out like that. It just really grinds my gears seeing people use the same justifications to save 50€ as i had when buying mine. The fact is you dont get 50€ less mount, you get perhaps 300€ less mount (comparing 35 and 5).

I don't think 500 eur is going to be enough for any astrophotography mount, unless you find what you're looking for in the used market. 500 eur is just barely enough for a Skywatcher star adventurer or Ioptron sky guider pro. Neither of these come with a tripod, so you would have to use the current one (which is not great, since its falling over?). These are also not really meant to be telescope mounts, but just trackers for a camera and a modest sized lens. These have a motor in them to track the night sky as the Earth is rotating. With these you will still need to manually find the targets you're shooting. If you have a DSLR and a decent lens, getting either the Star adventurer or the Sky guider pro and a better tripod is probably the closest you can get to your budget. The under 500eur EQ5 you were looking for is the version without the motors and motor controlllers, so just a fully manual equatorial mount. This will not be helpful for astrophotography as the tracking is what you are looking for. This is the version with the motors GO-TO capability at 879eur: https://www.teleskop-express.de/shop/product_info.php/info/p3800_Skywatcher-EQ-5-PRO-SynScan---equatorial-GoTo-Mount-with-Tripod.html . The EQ5 is actually a decent mount and will definitely hold your DSLR and lens (with a few bits in between as adapters) or a telescope at somewhere around 5kg comfortably. It will also hold a slightly heavier telescope but things will probably get more difficult with each added kg more, so probably not a good idea to go much over 7kg. The EQ5 with the synscan GO-TO system will aim itself towards the targets you're looking for (after an alignment procedure) and then track this through the night. Equatorial mounts also require you to polar align them first, so that the tracking will be aligned with the Earths rotation. Buying a mount smaller or "worse" than the EQ5 is not a good idea, the cheaper ones (EQ3 and EQM35) are significantly worse than the EQ5 for not much money saved. You might think you can get away with using the cheaper mount and just "work it out" but take it from someone who made the same mistake: It will not in fact work out and you will end up hating the thing. Saving just a bit more money gets you a much better product!

If the lens hood was on for the lights, it should be for the flats aswell it could have an effect too. You can actually just retake flats now/anytime later and stack again. Try to have the lens on good infinity focus and the aperture/iso as it was for the lights. Wont be perfect in terms of dust on the lens but otherwise should work. Many folks reuse flats taken months ago so it will probably be fine. I used to take flats from a computer monitor on the day after shooting and as far as i know they were at least decent.

Looks very bright, although it is difficult to judge from a picture. Too bright flats can be bad and not capture properly because the exposure time is so short. I suppose there could also be internal reflections between the lens elements and the ipad surface that are different from your lights? Try putting something in between and/or reducing brightness. A white t-shirt folded in layers and tightly rubberbanded on the lens would work. Also light leaks from the area you are shooting from to the lens surface could be an issue, but i doubt it would leave such a perfect circle. The top left bright spot looks more like that and is not that big of a deal.