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Heritage 100p f/4 (Mini Quattro) EAA experiment


Chris

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I've had one of these little 4" fast parabolic mirrors previously, and did wonder at the time if you could do any imaging with it. Fast forward three years and the thought crossed my mind again, so order placed yesterday with FLO. It arrived today and a quick indoor test looks promising. The focuser is mid travel with the ASI120MC, and it's picking out some lovely detail in the little windows of the front door 30 feet away. 

The plan is to stick the 100p (mini f/4 Quattro) on my 5SE mount and see how it does for EAA. I think if all goes well it's short focal length and fast mirror might be just the ticket for the ASI camera. 

To be continued.

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What a very clever idea Chris! I had no idea the little Heritage was F4, that's a surprise. And it's closed tube and has a R&P type focuser rather than the helical focuser of the 130P. I guess with the small chip of the ASI, no coma corrector is required? Has a nice FOV too for springtime galaxy imaging (see below). Look forward to seeing thne results. :) 

 

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Thanks Rob, the FOV you've shown above looks great, and it will also give 2"/pixel which is bang on for our skies. I'm hoping the small chip will get around the f/4 coma but we'll see. Fingers crossed for some interesting results :)  

p.s. your Ipad needs charging ;) 

Edited by Lockie
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1 hour ago, Lockie said:

Thanks Rob, the FOV you've shown above looks great, and it will also give 2"/pixel which is bang on for our skies. I'm hoping the small chip will get around the f/4 coma but we'll see. Fingers crossed for some interesting results :)  

p.s. your Ipad needs charging ;) 

 Down to 5% now, will go to bed when it finally shuts down! :biggrin:

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1 hour ago, DorsetBlue said:

I have one of those and have successfully used it for some astrophotography. Focus is an issue though and difficult to counter, as the primary is fixed.

Which camera did you use with it?

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  • 2 weeks later...
12 minutes ago, Demonperformer said:

Just wondering if you have had a chance to try this yet and how it went if you have.

Thanks.

Cloud, wind and rain since I posted I'm afraid. Forecast for tonight is patchy rain and brisk winds also :( I guess it doesn't help that I have a small window of opportunity from 9pm when all the kids are in bed, and 11pm when I ideally need to be going bed for work. 

If I didn't have to be super nice to people all day at work I'd go bed later :grin:

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Not surprised you haven't managed anything yet Chris, the weather has indeed been awful around here. My increasingly miserable record of observing sessions so far this year has been:

  • January - 5 sessions
  • February - 2 sessions
  • March - 0 sessions
  • April - 0 sessions (so far) 

And the garden looks like a lake.  :undecided:

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2 minutes ago, Lockie said:

Oh dear, Rob :( At least my garden is ok due to being on a high spot.

Thanks Chris, fortunately I have some patio that I can view from, so all is not lost, but it's a squelchy pain! :smiley:

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Late to the party as always, I now know why you bought that little dob.

This makes great sense and use of your present available mount and camera, nice thinking.

Hope the sky gods play nice soon, because if they do I can get out and play too!

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1 hour ago, Lockie said:

every night there's cloud rolling in over the east coast :clouds1:  

Can even see the cars headlights across the fields the cloud is so low here - its b@@@@@y depressing - must be suffering from SAD

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15 hours ago, stash_old said:

Can even see the cars headlights across the fields the cloud is so low here - its b@@@@@y depressing - must be suffering from SAD

I read in the papers this morning that it has rained or snowed (the latter 16 times) here in my part of 'sunny' Spain for 78 out the first 100 days of 2018..... I did manage a couple of sessions in January though. Nothing since.

Martin

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On 26/03/2018 at 09:58, DorsetBlue said:

GPCAM v2 (Canon DSLR cannot get to focus):

 

Well done, looks good to me :)  Seems pretty decent for EAA with a small chip! Question answered, which is a good job because it might be a while until I get the chancet to try!

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Finally a clear night! though I had real trouble aligning the goto using two star alignment :(  It said it was successful each time, but clearly way off the mark when slewing to M82, M51 etc. Tried again twice more using different alignment stars but no luck. Worked like a charm last time I used it so I think it was some kind of user input error.

I ended up just pointed the scope and camera at Polaris to do a focus and optics check, then gave up and stuck the 100p back on it's little Dob base for some visual. My neighbour popped out as he heard my scope slewing about, so I took the opportunity to show him a couple of galaxies (m81/82), and after a little training he was able to pic them out. Not bad for a little 4" f/4 shaving mirror :) 

Bit frustrated that I couldn't actually electronically view M82. When an imaging night goes wrong I always want to give up and just look through scopes instead! 

 

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4 hours ago, Lockie said:

When an imaging night goes wrong I always want to give up and just look through scopes instead!

Well, I guess that is better than wanting to sell-up completely.

Also, you got an additional star on the right of the pic (HD 5914 - m6.46?) - I suspect the dot at the bottom is a hot pixel as it also appears on the way-out-of-focus shots. Don't know what your exposure time was like, but I would guess that it was not particularly long for focussing on Polaris. So that would be promising.

I used to try to use my 6/8SE mount with a refractor and found that (for some reason I could never fathom - don't you just hate those?) it would only align if I put the scope into the mount facing what I always considered to be backwards. If I put it in "the right way round" it would always say it was aligned and then head off in precisely the opposite direction. Sounds as if it might be a similar problem? No guarantees, but if the same thing happens next time you try it, you could try removing the ota, turning it round and putting it back on the other way round. Stranger things have worked! [This is assuming that the "last time [you] used it" was with the SE scope, not with this one]

Edited by Demonperformer
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