M13 and M57 Sharpcap and GPCAM

[cuivenion]

Very cloudy bright skies at the mo here up north, but I had a window last night for the first time in a while. So I set up up for some EAA viewing with my colour GPCAM and Skywatcher 130p.

I still can't seem to get on with alignmaster, but my polar alignment seemed to be good enough. I'm really liking the update to live stacking in Sharpcap 2.9, dark subtraction now works very well and this is great for me as the GPCAM is quite noisy on long exposures. Both M13 and M57 are 12 stacked 15s exposures with no post processing. The only processing is that used at the time of stacking, dark subtraction and slight histogram stretch. They are what was on my screen at the time.

The mount was an EQ5 with AstroEq and I used a 0.5 reducer.

[laudropb]

Very nice images.

[cuivenion]

Thanks!

[RobertI]

Nice captures, great colours!

[cuivenion]

Thanks Robert, being able to see colour has always been the big draw of EAA for me.

[Aaron F Johnson]

Like the livestacking...seems like a great tool, Nice shots...

[cuivenion]

Cheers Aaron.

[Keltoi]

what motors do you use on the eq5 with astroeq?

got same mount and astroeq  with the standard dual axis motors which am sure you know are kinda slow for slewing.

also looking at ordering the gpcam , overall whats your opinion on it?

easy to set up?  possible to use as an EAA,

[cuivenion]

2 hours ago, Keltoi said:

what motors do you use on the eq5 with astroeq?

got same mount and astroeq  with the standard dual axis motors which am sure you know are kinda slow for slewing.

also looking at ordering the gpcam , overall whats your opinion on it?

easy to set up?  possible to use as an EAA,

These are the motors:

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Nema-14-Stepper-Motor-1-8deg-Bipolar-0-5A-23Ncm-32-6oz-in-35x35x42mm-4-wires-DIY-/121684006515?hash=item1c54ee9673:g:35sAAOSw-vlVjiyC

I have to use slower speeds (200x-400x) and the balance has to bang on when using my 200p. I use up to 600x with my 130p. As you can see from the images you can certainly use it for EAA and I'm happy with it. There are no doubt better camera's out there for EAA but you'll have to pay a lot more.

I will say that this has mainly been used on brighter targets, I'm not sure how well it would perform on fainter ones.

[Keltoi]

did you have to make your own brackets up? any thing else needed to upgrade?

i.e  is it just a matter of replaced the standard motors with these or do I need new controller boards etc?

[cuivenion]

8 hours ago, Keltoi said:

did you have to make your own brackets up? any thing else needed to upgrade?

i.e  is it just a matter of replaced the standard motors with these or do I need new controller boards etc?

You will have to sort your own brackets out, the designs are on the AstroEQ site. Those motors work directly with AstroEQ although you will need to wire them to RJ11 6P4C sockets to mate with your cables.

If you go down this route make sure you follow all the info on the AstroEQ site, and don't forget to reset your current limit.

You will of course need to sort gearing out, I'm not sure if you could reuse the gears on the skywatcher motors or not.