ONIKKINEN

I followed the astrometry.net pathwway down the rabbithole and found lots of interesting faint fuzzies! https://www.legacysurvey.org/viewer/?ra=210.8357&dec=54.3581&layer=unwise-neo6&poly=209.4818,54.0860,211.8538,53.7734,212.2074,54.6149,209.7887,54.9339,209.4818,54.0860 Some have redshifts greater than Z=0.1 which places them somewhere in the 1-2 billion lightyear range! Not much more than single pixels of course but i almost cannot believe an 11 year old DSLR can capture any pixels of something like this...

Thank you very much! On another thought, i wonder what the faint small fuzzies are dotted around the picture. Stellarium is not very helpful and the platesolve function in SIRIL did not annotate them.

245x60s of exposure Taken with an OOUK VX8 on a Skywatcher EQM-35PRO and a Canon EOS 550D. Guided with a 60mm F4 guidescope and an ASI 120mm, controlled by a WIN10 minipc remote controlled with a tablet. Guiding was not great, hence the 50% resize. I think the RMS was somewhere around 1.5-2.5 most of the time. Bortle rating of somewhere around 6-7. This is old data that i have been sitting on since late april when this was captured, i have been processing it every now and then but never thought that its "finished" yet. I think this one looks pretty good. I took around 7 hours of 60s subs on M101 during three nights just before the spring season ended, this shot consists of 245 one minute subs as most of them are ruined beyond use, or just good enough to stack but will produce extra noise. This was my 4th actual DSO imaging target with a GO-TO mount so definitely a work in progress. Problems that are difficult to fix now but easy to avoid later would be to take proper flats in situ and not later. Slight changes in camera angles ruined some of the flats and led to unnecessary gradients. I think i also collimated the scope and still used the same flats afterwards, which obviously in hindsight is not a very good idea. Processing in SIRIL and photoshop. Nothing fancy in PS, some masked saturation adjustments, lightroom tweaks and denoising in topaz.

Finland is probably the most desolate country in Europe, outside "big" cities there is nothing but forests and unlit rural roads so i definitely know what you mean, but i think you might have missed the point. The point was that someone will have broken headlights, someone will wear dark clothing with no hi-vis strips in the dead of night and think that "that car sees me, i mean im crossing the road they must see me", some cyclist will cycle without lights in the dead of night, but this is an issue only in cities with higher traffic (also where there should be lighting). Road lights remove most of these issues. Of course it doesn't make sense to light up every road everywhere, if some rural road sees 5 cars per hour then its probably not a good use of money to light that empty stretch of road. Nobody out there is seriously planning on covering all rural areas with city lights, its just that rural areas are disappearing pretty fast around the world.

Just one accident that is even vaguely related to dark roads is enough to permanently bury this idea, at least that's what i think. All it takes is one stick carried by the wind or a piece of plastic broken off someones old busted bumper on a road and a motorist dies. Dark roads are deathtraps and its perfectly reasonable to want every road to be fully lit at all times, including midnight. If roads are not lit drivers will need to rely on high-beams or external lights, which are also dangerous for other people. Some amateur astronomers somewhere complaining about city lights will be forgotten as soon as safety is concerned. If all cars had working headlights, if everyone used high-visibility clothing outdoors, if every cyclist had a light it would be possible to dim city lights but since this is not at all true i doubt it will happen in any big urban area in any part of the world.

Fingers crossed they don't increase the amount of satellites in higher inclinations, The current 53 degrees mean that they are never anywhere near ideal imaging altitudes in Finland. One of the rare bonuses to living higher latitudes i guess.

You will always have to polar align an equatorial mount for tracking to work. For go-tos to be accurate you will have to star align on multiple stars. Also, sidereal tracking for stars and planets, lunar for the moon and solar for the sun.

I wager its somewhere just under 9kg/19lbs with every gadget/cable/guiding gear on top. I win a bit of room on the counterweight bar by mounting the OTA upside down. As you can see i cannot dither in DEC with how it currently works, too much backlash and stiction. You will probably have better success with the lighter setup. The mount doesnt know anything about dithering, it just does what the guiding software tells it. Dithering in RA only is not as effective but still better than not dithering at all, especially with DSLRs. If you start seeing similar issues after a dither (runaway DEC) then look into adjusting backlash and/or turning DEC dithering off if you cant get it to stay put.

The graph here is with 60s exposures, dithers every 3 frames (gray stripes are dithers). Ive since dropped DEC guiding as it does some wild trips to arcminute error territories for a pretty long time after a dither sometimes. Working on making one directional DEC maybe working if its at all possible. 60s is really all i need and overkill for some targets with 200mm aperture in light pollution so i don't feel the need to take longer subs, but as you can see the spikes in RA (blue) are within a couple of seconds of eachother so any exposure can be ruined. These spikes i believe are the result of mechanical flexing of the mount itself somewhere along the counterweight-RA axis. RA tries to correct, but vibrates/flexes "back" in the next exposure and PHD tries to fight a drift that is not real or consistent. I did take some 3 minute subs for a test once but had to throw them all out, any small gust of wind will knock the giant light newtonian tube off course. This was also taken quite near the meridian, where balancing is key and the biggest problem, its not quite this bad somewhere else in the sky.

The stiffness goes away with a bit of use. Or you could loosen up the nuts holding the axis together, its very sensitive to tiny changes which is why i believe they slightly over tighten it in the factory. I would be very happy with a guide graph like that, but then again my mount is grossly unmatched for my OTA. Mine looks like a seismograph.

The app is only necessary for toggling "x-boost" on or off, and it stays in whatever its set. X-boost is the 1200w AC output mode and it does work, i ran my fridge with it as a bit of a test during a blackout but not much more than a gimmick in my opinion. The powerbanks display shows your remaining time estimation if the output remains the same, it also shows you power usage in watts. The smaller model is 288wh and its enough for a night with my kit. My kit which is a Mini-pc, Cooled IMX571 camera, guidecam and of course a GO-TO mount will run for at least 6 hours at camera temp 30 below ambient and a lot longer if the cooled camera is set to a warmer temperature. I dont need massive dew heaters since i have a newtonian, so i cant comment on how much big strips for refractors or SCT corrector plates would draw power.

Doesn't sound like an issue if you cant see any obvious damage. Even scratches or dents in the mirror are pretty much impossible to notice unless they are a significant fraction of the mirrors diameter. All newtonians have a giant obstruction bang on in the middle of the mirror: the secondary mirror and its holder. So if the damage is small enough that you don't know that its an issue, it probably is not. You will probably want to collimate the scope if its been banged around, but you would probably want to collimate after transportation anyway.

Stay away from the EQM-35 PRO with anything other than a very low weight and focal length scopes if you wish to do reliable long exposure imaging. The payload ratings are just the maximums the motors can be expected to slew without slipping, i would place the EQM-35 PROs reasonable payload range at no more than 5kg, ideally less. Really what the mount is meant to do is to hold your typical 50-80mm short refractors or camera/lens setups. Pixel resolutions better than 2 arcseconds/pixel are probably not going to happen reliably tracking-wise with larger scopes. Its not impossible to use for astrophotography as im imaging with a technically within payload limits scope and can get some results, but only if there is no wind (at all) and i still have to throw out most of my guided subs. But if you have a choice to not buy the mount, then get a better one. Overkill with mounts is really not a thing, a better mount will be a better mount, with any scope. 115mm refractors are pretty long and hefty, which effectively reduces the mounts payload capabilities. I dont think the HEQ-5 is overkill, especially once you mount cameras and all other astro gadgets on top. It might actually be underkill.

I am continuing my rant about this class of mount here, and will do so in every thread i come across. The EQ3-2 (and EQM35) are a class of mount that is suitable for almost no-one. Its only 2 selling points are the price and the weight. When you factor in the heavier counterweights included in the EQ5 (a MUCH better mount, no comparison possible even) even the weights are very similar. I cannot recommend you buy these mounts if you wish to do long exposure astrophotography of any kind with any other than extreme low focal length systems, which the C6 is definitely not. The design in the EQ3 is simple yes, but it is hardly improvable. The electronics and transmission are simple but not the main problem, and with good meshing of the gears these problems just go away, belt or no belt mod. The main culprit of the design is the weak, entirely bearingless design of both the RA and DEC axis and the quite sloppy tolerances of the worm gears themselves. You will NOT be able to remove backlash, especially from the DEC axis. There is a point where the mount starts to be very sticky and binds but you will still have backlash and play in the axis. Imaging with a C6 even at F4 will be dodgy at best, and you can forget about arcsecond accurate pixels. If you want to drop DSO imaging from the feature list, it might be a not so bad idea, but... Spending just 200e more gets you the EQ5, which is a much better mount that can handle the C6 and other types of telescopes you may want to buy later. The next mount up the hierarchy would be the HEQ5 which is a bit more expensive, but will work with lots of telescopes with good success rates. Take it from someone who fell down the "affordable equipment" rabbithole, the weak mount is not worth the money and you will want to upgrade anyway. And if resale value is something you're worried about then its definitely not a good idea to buy the EQ3-2. Its just not a desireable mount.

Remember to pull it out after a while, being in a sealed environment is also not good for electronics. I wonder however if the AAP is designed to handle dew in every nook and cranny since it will only ever be used outdoors? Probably is. Might not be worth the trouble if the temperature difference isnt so extreme.

I had my mini-pc running for 5 hours in 95% humidity when it was barely below 0 at night. No frost or dew anywhere near it even though its very low power. Anything else was covered in frost though, including the inside of a newtonian. What is a problem however is bringing stuff back inside. Youre going from low temperature to high temperature so dew will definitely form. Depending on your house and the temperature difference it could be trouble. Lock sensitive electronics in a ziplock bag when outside and only open once warmed back up to ambient. I pretty much soaked my mini-pc coming from -23 to +23 unprepared. Still works but wouldnt risk it again. This kind of temperature difference pulls pretty much all of your indoor humidity to whatever the cold object is.

I dont think it matters that much if you have a comacorrector, spacers and maybe filters etc between open air and the sensor. As long as you install everything without dust on the surfaces there really shouldnt be a place for more to enter. Only place that can have dust is the inner lens element of the comacorrector which is probably at least 100mm away from the focal point so the shadow the dustmotes cast is really out of focus when it reaches the sensor. I know i have dust on the first lens and it doesnt show up in flats so i dont worry about it.

Thats a real nice result for a 4th try. I also processed the stack, just for practice as im still quite new and certainly not an expert in processing. I don't do any kind of star reduction so im not sure i improved on yours. What i will say is that the image has an overpowering blue tint to it, so colour balance seems a bit off. I used SIRIL (free) to do the initial processing, including background extraction, color calibration, and histogram transformation. Exported to photoshop for some final saturation and denoise touches. Also resized the image to hide problems in both my processing and maybe the data itself. I try to go for a very natural look with my shots, which is why i like the stars to remain bright, as they are several times brighter than the galaxy is supposed to be. I noticed that you have some walking noise that is also in the direction of your star trailing, its difficult to notice but its there and its not simple to remove in processing. You can get rid of this by dithering! Especially important if using a DSLR since there will be a lot of all kinds of noise. You can dither even without any guiding setups, just manually move the camera a few pixels every now and then. The more you bother doing this the better it works but every bit helps.

I tried to adapt my TS-optics 50mm finder to a guidescope with an adaptor and hated every second of trying to work with it. Difficult to focus and even then not very good because of the F-ratio being around 3.2. I ended up buying this:https://www.teleskop-express.de/shop/product_info.php/info/p7073_TS-Optics-Deluxe-60-mm-Guiding-Finder-scope-with-micro-focusing.html Its a bit of money but worth every penny. Its also lighter than the 50mm finder i had at first. Doesnt have to be this exact one but a dedicated guidescope is imo money well spent. For the scope i would advice to get the smaller one. 200mm newtonians are wind magnets and require a lot from a cheap mount. Less trouble (note less, not no trouble) with the 150.

You could buy a decent mount and some gadgets for your current setup with that kind of money. Skies are full of objects that are suitable for your field of view. Most of a beginners budjet (if not all, at first) should probably go towards a sturdy mount. The mount is the only piece of kit that can and will ruin everything if its not good enough. You can always buy a telescope later, if you want to so buying a mount with some room to grow is a good idea. For focusing there are these kinds of things: https://www.teleskop-express.de/shop/product_info.php/info/p11969_TS-Optics-Microfocuser-for-Camera-Lenses-from-50-mm-to-100-mm-Diameter.html Havent used one myself but i understand the pain of trying to focus a telephoto lens that is not specifically made for at-infinity focus operation. Also a bahtinov mask is pretty much a must have to take out the guesswork from focusing. Dont do what i did and try to buy everything as a budget compromise, it just wont work. Mount first, everything else is less important imo.

Cheap models suffer more than others too, with the influx of lockdown astronomers in the last year and a half looling to buy beginner equipment. I bought my EQM35 for 750e about a year ago when it was in stock. Havent really seen it in stock since and the price has hiked up accordingly. I was looking at the PDS models of Skywatcher newtonians but decided not to buy one since it was out of stock everywhere. I dont think this issue is going away any time soon. I waited several months for a few items a while ago and then just decided to order things that aro shown as in stock for now.

Both of the EQM-35 versions in your pic are in the "reduced mode" where the DEC axis is removed. The example on the right uses star adventurer accessories (dovetail, counterweight) for some added stability. To be fair the mount is rock-solid for just a camera and lens in this mode. I bashed the mount pretty harshly but i think its a bit unfair to say that it allows a 72mm at most. Technically you can mount an 8 inch aluminium newtonian with cameras and guiding on top, its just not time-efficient and you will never get to arcsecond resolution accuracy. Pictured below is the monstrosity that is my setup and a sample picture. Youll notice that the counterweights are not at the end when the OTA is mounted upside down. RA is workable while DEC i have abandoned completely and rely on polar alignment. Sure the picture is not anyting special and nothing most people havent seen before, but just wanted to make it clear that it is NOT impossible to use the mount for higher payloads. I would just never recommend it as it is a waste of time, most of the time.

The dec axis is very weak and will have backlash that is only partially adjustable. You can tighten everything down as far as possible without binding and still have play in the gears or the mechanics of the mount itself. This is more noticeable with higher payloads, but not fixed with smaller ones. Backlash will ruin guiding, especially if it is not consistent (it isnt). 60mm aperture refractor might be an ideal load with the mount, so maybe not entirely a wrong choice. Most products in the affordable astro gear markets are manufactured by some single factory in china and sold under different names and sometimes even wildly different prices. Doesnt mean its all bad, just takes a bit of research to know what youre buying. The modular part of the mount is its strongest point as it removes its weakest point: The entire DEC axis 🤣. This way its an extra sturdy camera tracker with RA go-to and periodic error correction. That would be a direct upgrade for a star adventurer, but imo a bit of a gimmick. EQ5 and EQM35 look quite similar but are different instruments and have mechanical differences. The specs dont really mean anything for imaging, they are just marketing fluff. The real payload for imaging purposes is around half of the stated one, if you want to have a consistent mount.

Double the payload? No. Payload of 10kg is false advertising and only applies to visual use, and even then it is not a good idea. Ask yourself what you want to do with the mount: Carry a camera, small refractor, medium to large focal length telescope? Rule out everything but the camera and small (fl less than 500mm) refractors if you want to remain relatively frustration free. I am imaging with a technically within payload limits telescope and i throw away somewhere between 50-100% of my 60s guided subs. Most of the issues are not fixable due to the bearingless bushing design. The DEC axis is unfixable and you will almost certainly have to guide in one direction or not at all in DEC. I would argue that the EQM35 is more expensive than for example an HEQ5 since you will probably want to upgrade soon after anyway and getting rid of the mount is not guaranteed for a good price. If i could go back in time i would pay more for a better mount.

The camera is here, a bit over 6 workdays until i got it in hand including customs. Pretty fast delivery all the way from china. Total cost for me ended up being 1380 euros including Finnish VAT of 24% and DHL shipping which was 40 euros extra. Im not a huge fan of DHL but i will gladly pay 40 euros if it means UPS doesn't throw my package off a cliff several times, and "try to deliver but the recipient wasn't home" I ran a Sharpcap sensor analysis with HCG mode and "low noise" on. Even illumination with the camera attached to my newtonian covered by a t-shirt, 2 sheets of paper and a tracing tablet as a flat field panel. Looks about the same as others have reported with gain 100 (lowest value) as the best overall setting for imaging. . Sharpcap has limited functionality with the "direct show" toup tek drivers and full functionality with the ascom touptek drivers. N.I.N.A works just fine with both, although the settings are in different places. The cooler appears to work pretty fast, cooling down to below 0 in a few minutes from room temperature. Although i noticed that it overdoes it at first and goes a bit below the target temperature. Give it a few minutes more and it appears to be stable at whatever it is set to. Changing the gain mode will cause the cooler to "search" for the temperature for a while again, although i don't know why you would want to change it mid session. NINA reports the temperature in increments of 0.2 and it is mostly stable, with the occasional jump to one way or the other. The camera comes with a 30?(32?)mm T2-M48 2inch barrel adapter and a T2-1.25inch adapter which i will not be using. I will need some adapters to fit this to my coma corrector with 55mm backfocus. Also i will probably need an IR-cut filter since i bought the full spectrum AR glass model. Really didn't plan on it arriving anytime soon so i wont be imaging with it for some time.