raadoo

I may be mistaken but it seems that all three cameras above are colour; so you’re right that it’s 4 times more gradations … per channel. 4*4*4 = 64. Bit depth is probably not that important for planetary but for lunar I would always go for the most bits I can get. If nothing else, it gives one some added flexibility in post before things start to visibly posterize.

Not sure what the SV89 is - I'm assuming you mean the 205? Like @AstroMuni said, it depends on what kind of telescope you plan on pairing with the camera. When it comes to planetary, it all starts with the aperture of your telescope (focal length actually doesn't really matter as much as one would think). Once you know the aperture of your telescope, then you can look at what kind of pixel size your camera of choice should have. The equation does change if you plan on using a Barlow, though. But, of course, you can calculate it the other way around, starting with the cameras. This should be a useful exercise if you're planning a rig from the ground up and don't even have a telescope yet. I've put together a quick table outlining the differences between Svbony's planetary camera offerings (or what little info I could find) and some examples of telescopes that match. This is all assuming no intention of using a Barlow, by the way. SV105 SV205 SV305 Resolution 1920x1080 2592x1944 1920x1080 ADC 10bit 10bit 12bit FPS 30 15 20 Pixel Size 3 1.4 2.9 Price $50 $90 $142 Rec. Aperture 7" 6" 7" Ex. Scope Skymax 180 Explorer 150PL Skymax 180 If I were you, I'd go for the 305, based on the ADC alone (12bit is 64 times more colour gradations than 10bit). The 205 may seem appealing because it's got more pixels, but those 1.4μm pixels are tiny and the 15fps much too slow for lucky imaging.

I'm interested, as well.

AM5 just went up on TS’ website. Seems like that initial $2000 price tag is maybe just for the US as TS list it at €2845 for the full price, with a €210 discount for preorders.

For some (I imagine most?) people, yes, you're right, losing the CEM40's extra 4kg in mount + 4.5kg counterweight aren't going to be worth another €1000. For those of us with medical conditions that impose weight limits, every gram is worth it. You were one of the nice people who helped me make a decision in moving on from my AZ-GTi and the CEM40 was on my shortlist because it's one of the lightest in its class, counterweight included. But for me there's no denying that those 2kg less (what I saved by moving to the RST-135) make this hobby that much more enjoyable and allows me to take the rig out any time, all the time (bloody weather permitting, of course). To be clear: I fully agree with you. A CEM40 (or even a 26) is plenty mount for most.

The way I see it, we are fortunate to have such vast choice in terms of mounts to suit our individual needs: For those who value portability and (lack of) weight, the RST-135 is unbeatable and its price tag is fair (I'm one of them). For those who value capacity and precision at long focal lengths (and are fortunate to have skies with excellent seeing) their 4k could be much better spent on a CEM120EC (or a G11T, or an EQ8R Pro, etc.). If I may be permitted an analogy: Mercedes make a G Class (off road) and an AMG GT Roadster for about the same price (130k) but they serve vastly different needs for different audiences and I venture to say it'd be unfair to compare them to each other based solely on price.

Around 30" - but just like the Hobym (and one can only assume both the Sharpstar and ZWO) - it varies depending on load and where it's pointing in the sky. In terms of guide performance I've only had about 30min to play with (it's been cloudy over here for the past 5 weeks straight) but it's been around 0.9" RMS on a night of poor seeing (5" - 6" FWHM) and intermittent clouds. As others have stated, guide exposures must be kept under 1s - fortunately, I can do that with my ASI120MM Mini and OAG through an FRA400 with reducer, without trouble. Both here and on CN there are RST-135 users who have been able to beat the periodic error even at 2000mm by employing a good guiding strategy (and hopefully future AM5 users will benefit from this as well): < 1s guide exposures a guide camera with big pixels and / or binning infrared (or even a simple red) filter

It never ceases to amaze me how in our time we have this vast scientific knowledge, at our fingertips, to tap (sic!) into and explain phenomena such as this in a most rational manner both superficially and in great depth, while our ancestors from millennia ago would have only their imaginations to work with and come up with fantastical explanations of spirits and otherworldly creatures or omens of good or bad times to come.

I knew Sharpstar were coming out with their own [first] harmonic drive mount, but I wasn't expecting it to be more expensive than Rainbow Astro's! At least Rainbow Robotics have 10 years experience with these kind of drives. Neither ZWO, nor Sharpstar can make such claims. Probably the only positive that everyone can agree on is that we have more choice in regards to mounts now.

@Hogarth over on CN, someone from ZWO posted to confirm that it will support ASCOM and conversely that the ASIAir will continue to support third-party mounts. Quick errata: Yannick (Cuiv, The Lazy Geek) had the Hobym Crux, which he sent back. Not the Rainbow Astro.

You lot will be death of my wallet! 😄 Early Christmas present from the missus came in the very red shape of an RST-135! 🥰 Guess she was well sick of my indecision. 😆 We all love a good setup shot, so here's mine after re-cabling, troubleshooting and general tinkering: Early reports are that everything works as expected with 0 hiccups and 0 problems. The little RST-135 may not be premium in some people's eyes but having fondled the thing in and out for the past 24h, it definitely feels premium to me. With no use for counterweights (there's no backdrive with my setup), this whole setup ended up weighing 2kg less than my previous, AZ-GTi + Berlebach Report, setup, so definitely a win for both portability and my back! 🤘 Big thanks to all of you for the help and planting the seed of the RST-135 firmly in my head. It was undoubtedly the right choice for my needs.

Fundamentally, all data is flawed by one thing or another. Even the best data we can acquire from Earth is flawed by the atmosphere. Personally, that helps me psychologically because it means my data is just slightly messier (sic!) than others'. And even if it's not the best outcome in the world, it's your time, effort, knowledge, skill and passion that were poured into making it, so never let anyone say it's bad, especially not yourself!

The second to last (R and B swapped) is really quite pleasing! 👏

Hi Daz, I have the 178MC and it's an excellent performer if you're looking to do planetary, lunar and solar imaging. For DSOs (nebulae, galaxies, globular clusters, etc.) however, I'd urge you to look at a cooled camera. The 178MC only comes as non-cooled and would yield significant thermal noise when pushed for long exposures. If you want to stick with ZWO, the 183MC Pro is their least expensive cooled option and as luck would have it, I have one of those myself! It too is excellent, but not without its caveats (strong amp glow, needs a dew band if you live in high humidity locales, not the best QE or full well). Still, for 900 buckaroos, it's excellent value for the money.

I tried my hand at cleaning it up: I intentionally didn't resort to either Topaz, Astronomy Tools Actions or any of the myriad of other add-ons one can employ with Photoshop and instead focussed on using just the default toolset. I also attached a screenshot of what the layers panel looks like, for reference. The basic approach Although noisy, the original image has some pretty clear separation between the Veil's nebulosity and the background. Initially, I thought this contrast may be stronger in the green channel, but it turns out to be fairly similar across all three colour channels. As such, the approach here is to create a separation between background and nebulosity via a mask based on luminosity. So I grayscaled the original and used that as a layer mask to separate background from nebulosity. This mask needed further levels and a low powered Gaussian Blur to achieve the right level of separation. Edits With the background and nebulosity separated, I approached each of them in a different way, but using the same Adobe Camera Raw editor to keep it simple. For the background I lowered the contrast and highlights, upped the shadows and blacks, desaturated slightly, lowered the texture, clarity and dehaze sliders all while adjusting the expoure slider to try and maintain the same black level as the original. I also ran a quick noise reduction while in the same ACR module. Essentially this step is about reducing detail in the background as the only detail to be found here is noise. One must be careful not to go hog wild on this, though - you're right that using a solid colour for the background would look off and certainly isn't in line with your (and mine) keep it natural philosophy. For the nebulosity, I also resorted to ACR, but this time paying attention to just the Veil itself. So this time it was about increasing contrast, upping the highlights and lowering the shadows slightly, increasing saturation (slightly) in the reds, oranges, yellows and greens and reducing the saturation in aquas, blues, magentas and violets, increasing clarity and texture a smidge, all the while toggling the defaults (\) to make sure I'm keeping true to the original luminosity and colour. I spent maybe 10min on this, so you can certainly expect even better results from taking the time but hopefully the way I approached it helps. It certainly doesn't help that I edited a compressed JPG 😆

A couple of weeks from now the Moon is going to occult M105: And that got me thinking about what are some of the techniques that one could employ to image this phenomenon? Clearly a single camera can't handle the fact that the Moon is just going to drown everything out. But what about having a lunar rig (Mak + planetary camera) do the Moon imaging while a DSO rig (Refractor + cooled DSO camera) chips away at M105 as it clears the Moon? Could one then combine the two resulting images to [sort of] match reality? Would even the best lunar glow / light pollution filters be able to cope with imaging a mag. 9 galaxy like M105 so close to the Moon? Curious if anyone's tried anything like this before with and especially without success. 🤔

Looks like focus wasn't quite spot on coupled with guiding errors leading to the kind of polygonal look to the stars. The larger ones all show this kind of lopsidedness towards the top right. With your setup especially (uncooled camera), you'll appreciate the kind of magic that calibration frames bring to the table. If not from a flatness of field point of view, then definitely in terms of getting rid of noise. Though you may very well already know this 😀

Indeed, portability is key. On top of that, payloads over ~12kg photographic are not relevant to my use case (bad back, have my own weight limits to take into account).

I'm finding it quite difficult to consider the SXP2... Vixen Rainbow Astro SXP2 RST-135 Payload 17kg 18kg Weight 11kg (head) + 3.7kg (cw) 3.3kg (head) + 3kg (cw) Price € 4,300 € 4,500

When you get a chance to test the reducer, compare star shapes with and without it. I'm getting severely bloated stars with the reducer on; it could still be something different (i.e. dew / frost) but it'd be worth hearing from others with the FRA400.

That's exactly the kind of experience I'm looking to learn from, thank you!

It's a fair point and one I've personally made to others in the past as well. We do need to define a few parameters before moving forward with this thread: Long-term Mount: I'm thinking 3-5 years. Past that, I'd be looking at what I call a Forever Mount (e.g. 10Micron) We can always extend the idea of if I'd only been a bit more patient more and more. And with it, budget. But a line must be drawn. So I'll extend that waiting to your proposed 6 months and up the budget to under €4k. That being said, I have very little knowledge of that market or what's reliable / flaky, so any recommendations and ideas are very welcome!

@vlaiv You're one of the people here whose experience with their iOptron swayed me towards the CEM40! 😃 I've purposely only mentioned the head weight for each mount above as I've been well sold on Berlebachs ever since I got my Report - but am planning on using an Uni for the new mount. I am aware that planetary doesn't need guiding - that would in fact be one of the worse things I could do for my lunar images! 😁

After many hours spent tweaking and playing around with my AZ-GTi for the past year or so, I'm ready to move up to a more long-term mount and plead the wisdom of this fine group for some considered recommendations. Things I care about: Equatorial GoTo Imaging, guided for both DSOs and planetary Portable, so low weight is paramount* Minimum imaging payload of ~10kg** Good track record of reliability, both hardware and software I'll continue to be using my AAP for a while so software compatibility is important < €2.5K I've got a shortlist which looks like this: iOptron Vixen iOptron CEM40 / GEM45 SXD2 CEM26 / GEM28EC Payload (sans cw) 18 15 12.7 Weight (head) 7.2 8.8 4.5 Price 2400 2600 2430 Comment Seems like the best option, on paper, at least. Portable enough with payload that'll last me a while and generally seems like I it's unlikely I'll get a lemon. Not the greatest payload to weight ratio, and the priciest of the bunch, but there's an assumed inherent quality, it coming from Vixen. In their EC variant, the 26/28 reach the same price as the 40/45 series. I'm going to guide anyway so wondering if that RA encoder is worth it? Lightest of the bunch, but also flimsiest from what I read. But I'm very open to other options, so please do recommend! * In an ideal world, I'd go for the RST-135 in a heartbeat. But it's near twice my budget so it's a non-starter, sadly. ** A C8 equivalent is the heaviest I'll ever put on it. Not because I don't want to go heavier, but because my bad back would have words with me if I would dare huck a chonker around.

Regardless of target or filter used, you should aim for the recommended gain of 120, as that's the best compromise between dynamic range, read noise and full well capacity.