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Hello. My EQ8R Pro doesn't want to power my asiair with its power out ports. Why is that and what can be done? My mount gets 5A trough the power cable. Any ideas?

Hello. I own a 250pds (1200fl (f4.7)) and an Asi 485mc (2.9um pixels) and for some reason I cant get it to focus. I am collimated with a laser and the atmosphere was not too bad. I also have enough room with the focuser to move it past proper focus and far out. Though I still cant get the image to look sharp. I get that I am a little oversampled but the stars are huge and the object is fuzzy. The scope was also properly thermally acclimated so I really can’t think of anything that could be causing this. Thanks!

I'm about to order a Redcat 51 and a ASI224mc and i'm just wondering if I'll need spacers and if so what ones exactly. Im very new to this and this will be my first refractor and astrocam. Also will I need a filter? I like in bortle 5 skies and I plan to try my hand at emission nebulae and of course planetary with this cam although it will mostly be used as a guide cam as I'll be using my unmodded nikon most the time.

Hi, I've recently gotten into astrophotography. I've been using a Nikon D7200 on my dad's Sky-Watcher telescope which came with a SynScan mount and version 3 handset. I've seen that there is a Camera Control function on the handset. In the manuals it's telling me I need an 'proper shutter release cable'. Anyone know where I can get this cable or an adapter? - Multipurpose port to Nikon's shutter control port? Thanks!

Hi, there will be plenty written on this but I’d be grateful if anyone could point me in the direction of a well written beginners guide. I am awaiting delivery of a 10 inch Dobs (250p classic) and although will be primarily for visual use I’m interested to see what would be possible astrophotography wise (planetary) using my Celestron Skyris 132C cam. I assume something along the lines of the drift method - I’m not expecting miracles given the set up here but any advice or tips on this would be appreciated to help get started. Clear Skies AD

After a few months of getting used to my new 8 inch beast, I decided to start astrophotography (luckily today is Black Friday in most tech shops in my country). So I decided to drop the idea of buying a DSLR and started thinking about getting a webcam. The thing is that I want to try deepsky AP, so i was wondering, is there a webcam that could get me good results for DSO AP? Don't worry, I don't want anything too fancy because I'll be happy with entry-level images. (i saw some nice Andromeda pictures with 20GBP cameras on this forum so I'm confident that it would work). My budget is ±100 GBP, which in my opinion is more than enough for a good webcam . So... is it worth getting a webcam? Or is there something better? Should I wait and raise more money for a DSLR? Thanks a lot! Astrid

Recently I had belt modded my HEQ5-PRO and last night i gave it a full run and i was absolutely stunned to say the least about the guiding results I achieved. I was left wondering if its even too good to be true! Below are Before and After images of guiding.

I really want to buy this as I have a old sky watcher and its not great for astro photography. What kind of mount goes with this? And what other accessories will I need to think of .

Hi All I am starting this as a baseline to find out Cons and Pros for the difference, between standard focuser and all the way to the electronic top? up to max £3k. I mean : practical : i would like not to worry about rotating and focusing at all., so paying big bucks will give me this reassurance? - i guess? yes? - one focuser for all!!!! I have a short list for all: refractor /reflectors,/newtons Moonlight FT, ASA AAf3", RotoFoc 3, Nitecrawler 3, Optec TFT-53, Integra 85, Finger Lakes Atlas (FLI).. . Esatto (expensive - but complains) i am sure there is more good stuff out there... I am using moonlight 2" on my small triplet and FT 2" on the 2nd one. I was thinking to upgrade and open up to 3" electronic- Integra 85, or - just find out that ASA is still making their AAf3 My tele will be fast APO 100mm and on coming 10-14" barrel... i guess RASA doesn't need one? Please all experience welcome. Kindest Regards Greg

Hello, Inspired by https://www.astrobiscuit.com/, which advocates astrophotography on a budget, I purchased a SVBONY SV305 camera. Despite the positive posts on the web (also on stargazerslounge), I can't manage to get any decent image. As capture software I use AstroDMX, to only option I have since I'm running Linux Debian. But which I doubt being the problem. Here's what I tried to no avail: SVBONY SV20 80mmx400mm refractor: target Venus SV305 camera settings: format: raw 16-bit resolution: 1920x1080 output format: SER color mode: raw not debayered gain: 24 % gamma: 10 % contrast: 50 % 50 frames saved at 9.91277 frames/sec Result: a tiny light blob, where with some goodwill one could see a crescent, but not sharp at all Meade 15cm Newton reflector: target: M82 SV305 camera settings: format: RGB24 resolution: 1920x1080 output format: TIFF exposure: 30 sec/ frame number of frames: 50 gain: 70 % gamma: 10 % contrast: 50 % saturation: 58 % Result: in the life view, the galaxy was a white light bulb, with some red (noise?) around it, some stars, on an extremely noisy reddish background; I did take some darks, flats and bias frames, but the stacked result (I used siril) was ridiculous - but for that I blame myself SVBONY SV20 80mmx400mm refractor: target: Moon (1st quarter) - I did not capture any thing, as the life result was nothing but a hazy white light blob; nothing but white light, where one could see that it was a round shaped object SV305 camera settings: format: tried raw 8-mono, raw 8, raw 16 and rgb24 exposure: tried anything between 10ms and 25ms gain: anything between 4% and 10% the rest I don't remember, I was too disappointed result: I have now a dust bulb on the censor ... I live in a very lightpolluted area (see uploaded image). My final question is, is this camera broken or is it me that is utterly stupid? Any help, greatly appreciated! greetings, AstroRookie

Hi there, I am relatively new to astronomy, as well as this forum so I'm sorry if anything seems obvious that I don't pick up on. However after using a very basic set up to capture some photos of the moon I wanted to invest in some astrophotography equipment. Ideally I am looking to spend around £800 - £900, and I wanted some ideas on good mounts as well as scopes that can be used to take decent images of the moon along with other celestial bodies in the solar system. I have been looking at the Celestron Nexstar 6SE as well as the sky watcher explorer/evostar series attached to a EQ-5 Pro GOTO Mount but as I said I am relatively new to the hobby and have no idea what's good and what's bad. I would also prefer it if the mount is suitable for deep sky astrophotography along with planetary imaging as once I get the hang of planetary imaging I would like to take a stab at deep sky astrophotography. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Ryan

I'm trying to get a photo of Jupiter and Saturn with my Nikon D3000 DSLR but I can't get anything clear. I attached the kind of photos I'm getting with my camera. They end up being too bright and no distinguishable features show up. Is it even possible for my Nikon to get photos of planetary objects like Saturn and Jupiter?

Hi, As a newbie in AP I recently discovered that astro imaging isn't as simple as I imagined, it's not just "pointing and shooting". The main point is that I need a tracker that will follow the sky's movement. But after seeing the prices at which decent trackers are sold I decided to see if I could build one myself from spare parts at my workshop. Turns out that I can, using two planks of wood a hinge, an arduino, a stepper motor, etc. So I decided to get to it, I have built the connection between both planks of wood with the hinge, but have now discovered a problem. After some investigation, I realized it's quite commonly named the "Tangent Problem" (the rod forms a 90º angle with the bottom plank). So the solutions offered vary from curved rods to involute pieces of plastic and tilting the rod. I also saw another solution that was adjusting the speed at which the rod moves, and since I'm going to be using an arduino-driven stepper motor, I decided that this was the way to go. The problem is that I don't know in what ratio the speed has to increase over time to compensate the "Tangent problem". That's why I decided to pose my question here as I'm sure someone must have done it already. Sorry for my bad english, it isn't my first langnuage. Thanks in advance and clear skies, S

I just got into observing and would love to be able to take a picture of what I'm seeing. I got an old Nikon D60 from 2012? laying here still working perfectly with multiple lenses. I did some research and found I should buy some kind of T-ring as an adapter between the telescope and camera. Is this the only thing I need to take an image ? Thanks in advance!

I'm pretty new to this whole astrophotography thing, specifically the whole image resolving and stacking part. I've been using registax 6 to edit the videos, and I think I'm pretty much done with an image of Jupiter I've been practicing on from a video of Jupiter I found on the internet. I was wondering what I should do to get rid of those weird ring things around the edge of Jupiter and maybe clean up and sharpen the edges all together. Any other tips you have that could make the image cleaner are very much welcome. Thanks!

Hello, we are glad and proud to announce that a new version of Siril has just been released and is now available to all users: Siril 0.9.5. 1 - Presentation: Siril is meant to be Iris for Linux (sirI-L). It is an astronomical image processing tool, able to convert, pre-process images, help aligning them automatically or manually, stack them and enhance final images. 2 - How to install the release: Each new version is produced with several packages for most OS we handled. We try to build maximum of packages and cheer you to check if a package does exist for your OS at this page: http://free-astro.or...php/Siril:0.9.5 Remember that Siril is a software for UNIX-like system, in consequence it does not work on Windows. 3 - New features: Siril 0.9.5 is a stability and minor improvements release: it contains several bug fixes and some improvements over to the previous version, Siril v0.9.4. Implement a graph interface to display quality registration information and photometry data analysis New documentation: online and pdf Better integration in MacOS (waiting for approval in homebrew repositories: could take some times (https://github.com/H...ience/pull/4657)) Export sequence to MP4 (on very very new distributions) Fixed an issue where no X and Y binning value could lead to errors with fwhmg Retrieve Bayer pattern from RAW file Added ComboBox for registration interpolation Take reference image as normalisation reference Statistics do not take into account black point Fixed interpolation in global star registration that gave blurred results Fixed FreeBSD intltool compilation fails Fixed erroneous created sequence in registration with unselected images .... One last thing: now the way to install Siril on OS-X is very easy. You only need to download homebrew (http://brew.sh/index_fr.html). Then the command: brew install siril --with-openmp will install siril. We sincerely hope you will enjoy using Siril and you will produce nice shots. The Siril development team