50ED preparation

[happy-kat]

The super evoguide now comes with a dovetail fitting, and earlier in the year this was not available to get separately from Skywatcher if you had an original 50ED which I do (FLO now stock this new separate mounting bar for the evoguide Link).

I then looked out for and picked up a second hand bar and will be using two fixing spacers, m4 countersunk alan bolt x2, nylock nut and washer to fix the 50ED plate to the dovebar.

In order to fix the plate I still need to drill one hole in it as the existing holes are too close together to use both.

A quick scribble to work out spacer needs with the EVOFF-v2 and realised I would need some and as stock was currently delayed I would make some.

Found some plastic destined for recycling that I could use. I don't need to paint them black as they're not seen by the FF.

I also need to find the micrometer on order to measure the thickness of my home made spacers as I may need to cut some more.

 

 

 

Edited October 16, 2021 by happy-kat
Typo

[happy-kat]

The rings from the lid material are .5mm and the side material ring is .7mm when measured under compression. So I'm thinking +/- .01mm

[happy-kat]

Have made the mount up now, if I find an m5 bolt and plain nut I'll use that through one of the original holes through the camera tripod threaded hole on the bar to ensure everything is as true lined as I can get it.

Two new holes added to the evoguide plate. I may use an permanent black pen to go over the exposed aluminium.

The parts, I bought the bar second hand off here but I did need to buy the m4 bolts and nylock nuts, the rest was in the bits box washers and plastic fixing blocks.

Fitted showing the back.

Topside. With the two grooves in the bar if needed the rings can be repositioned.

[Greymouser]

May I ask why you are sticking with the finderscope mounting for the Evoguide 50? I have the little 50 ED too and mounted it on one of these: https://www.firstlightoptics.com/finders/william-optics-new-slide-base-50mm-guiding-rings.html

Then on a normal Vixen bar. ( Though I think I may have now used that vixen bar elsewhere... ) The fit is not perfect as it is a little too marrow, but it is fine and firm and in my mind, better than the supplied finderscope rings. I will dig it out tomorrow and photograph it, if I remember and if you like.

[happy-kat]

That looks like an alternative, I wanted to use what I had already though I wasn't happy how I had been mounting the 50ED as didn't find it rock solid (I was using the supplied foot in a tiny finder shoe) but the rings were fine hence the solution I went for. I'll have to count the turns on the mounting ring screws to ensure the 50ED is parallel to the bar but given my imaging limitations perfect alignment is the least of my challenges.

[happy-kat]

Last night it was clear for a few hours and as I wanted to test that the flattener was working it did not matter the Moon was pretty full and in the best bit of sky. I used the virtuoso v1 mount with a LiFEp04 tank and a canon 1100d DSLR with the EVOFF-v2 and two of the 0.5mm plastic spacers I had made plus a flocked flowerpot on the 50ED as I contend with 5 street lights, one on my left shoulder North 15 feet away and one to the South 30 feet away so I am somewhere between the two bang on the bright Moon. I used Jupiter to focus on (my quickly made Y mask did not help so will have to make that again as the V was wrongly placed as a prior made one had worked) but getting focus on Jupiter's moons was good enough for testing.

This was taken a few years ago but shows the natural star issues using a DSLR and no FF with the 50ED, 4 second exposure with tracking.

The mount did not play ball yesterday and for this test I wanted to rule out field rotation anyway so took 0.5 second exposures, this is an image made of layering the 9 espousers together. Looking at the corners the stars are pretty good and though the right side is not as good as the left a bit of sigm clipping on stacking would probably sort that out.

As the Moon was there I did a series of images to place the Moon in the middle then corners and then layered each over the centred Moon to expose any drift using the two bright features in the middle (though these were biased to the top half but nothing else was strong enough to use for reference) of the Moon to best manually visually align.

Top right blue corner over middle

Top left green corner over middle

Bottom left red corner over middle

Bottom right yellow corner over middle

All corners over middle

Whilst the Moon images do show slight stretching the individual star images are what count and I am very happy with the flatness the flattener achieves on the 50ED star field and certainly looking at images in Astrobin with a flattener either this one or Skywatcher great results are achieved. 

[happy-kat]

I I'm going to try it next time with just one of my 0.5mm spacers next time to compare the corner stars to see if I can get perfect.

Edit: wrong way, I'll test using

.5 and a .7

3x.5

2x.5 and a .7

4x.5

Edited October 19, 2021 by happy-kat

[TerraC]

Following with interest.  Awaiting arrival of an EVO-FF.    I was planning on fixing my 50ED to my AZ-GTI and trying some widefield and bigger messier objects with my Canon 550d.  

BTW What are the spacers for? Even with the EVO-FF it needs more levelling?  

 

[happy-kat]

The FF I'm using needs 55mm so the spacers are making the distance up from T ring and DSLR as I'm a little over 1mm too close without them, I'm using the Starizona FFv2.

Edited October 20, 2021 by happy-kat

[happy-kat]

Gosh it is very close, Friday I tried 1.2mm spacing (.5+.7), here's the composite from four 1 second images on a AltAz tracking mount. I haven't decided which is better as neither are obviously either too close or too faraway. I will double check that those were the two spacers I used.

 

[happy-kat]

Had the micrometre out again and my T ring measures 10mm so I'm using two homemade .5mm spacers and I've screwed the flattener to the evoguide to eliminate any tilt. Here's hoping for a clear evening to try again.

[TerraC]

My first M42.   Evo 50ED - EvoFF - AZ-Gti in EQ mode - Canon 550d. 

Only 7mins of subs.  a damned tree got in my way for the other 2hrs.  Terrible editing but i'm learning.

Just a first test though so see if I could do it and the FF was all ok..    Waiting on another clear night.  

Look forward to seeing your results.. 

 

[happy-kat]

Looking good your FF nice stars to the corners

Made a Lord Y mask today, compass, protractor, ruler, card, black pen and tape. This'll help get fucus right. The sleeve is a good fit over the tube no white shows, through prior white homemade Y mask worked.

 

[happy-kat]

What to do on a very wet day... sort what I'm doing.

Virtuoso v1 and connected the skywatcher wifi dongle. Works a treat. Connected the camera to DSLR Controller app on the mobile and connected the skywatcher camera trigger cable to the mount. In testing I discovered that for the virtuoso to trigger the camera after sorting focusing I'd need to just remove the camera OTG lead from the mobile. Synscan pro camera control works a treat as an intervalomter once the DSLR has been setup in manual mode.

Next to sort SkySafari Plus talking to the mount at the same time. Once I changed the port number this worked too and could switch between this an synscan pro, perfect. Just need the weather now.

 

[tompato]

I might be missing something but I'm not really sure why you need spacers at all with the EvoFF V2 (55mm back focus) and a DSLR (Canon is 44mm and a standard T Adapter should make 55mm). I have that setup and I just have it connected via a T Adapter and it's fine.

Also there's some 3D printed stuff you can get for the 50ed like a Bahtinov and tube clamp rings for a sturdier mounting than the supplied rings.

Here's a couple of snaps from the other night.

Edited January 9, 2022 by tompato
Correction

[happy-kat]

My T ring using a micrometre measures 10 mm hence I made some spacers but I will try next clear night without the spacers. You've got some great images there.

[happy-kat]

Clear last night so got to try focus and the FF without using my DIY .5mm spacers.

The cardboard baktinov mask worked well, though I had not thought to save an image from the DSLR to the phone to view in gallery if I had I would have spotted I was slightly off centre. Here's a crop of the spikes, the only star last bright enough was Sirus, while it was clear it was very cold, moist and murky.

[happy-kat]

Yet to build an image layering the 1 second files to check the corners against the previous test image to compare the effect with or without my DIY spacers on the FF.

50ED, EVO-FFv2, 1100d, Virtuoso v1

M44 nice starry Beehive cluster, 2mins 54 seconds of a mix of 1 second (as testing FF), 5, 10, 15, 20, 25 and 30 seconds only 21 lights. Moon was somewhere... 4 degrees, cold, moist and murky. DSS, StarTools and HLVG run in Paintshoppro and saved down in IrFanview to jpg. I did use flats (and dark flats) but they were prior to the great whopping 4 dust bunnies from last night.

Edited February 11, 2022 by happy-kat

[TerraC]

Have you tried your 50ed with a 2x barlow, evoff and dslr by any chance? Considering trying it to get closer on bodes galaxy but not had a clear night for a while. 

Ray

 

[happy-kat]

No I haven't, I have a 1.6x shorty barlow by astro engineering. I did notice that when focused there was only say 4mm or so of available inward focus travel left so I don't know if there'll be enough with the barlow as well.

[happy-kat]

This is my star overlay test with the two 0.5mm spacers removed. This looks good to go and makes it easier to setup, I screwed the EVOFF straight to the 50ED to eliminate tilt. 6 1 second images and 2 5 seconds there are enough stars to show the trend I think of the corners and any slight none perfect stacking would round with kappa clipping.

I should probably repeat setup test with the ASI camera to know what bits to use with that.

[happy-kat]

The Y mask is working great, it's surprising how little focuser travel there is either side of seeing the spikes.

Last night the sky was clear but the quality was very low.

I had wanted to try the 1.25 CLS-CCD filter but even though the EVO-FF v2 was expected to have a 1.25 filter thread the filter actually sat inside of it there wasn't any thread bite. Will have to look into this as I'll need to use a filter with the other camera and the shorty barlow uses a thread too.

[happy-kat]

As I had a new processed image (though work in progress as will process it again) from using no spacers in my setup thought to add it here for reference too. As I use an altaz mount the final dimensions are driven by stacking on intersection.

50ED Evoguide | EVEFF-V2 | Canon 1100d | ISO 1600 | Virtuoso V1 | 117 lights | 121 flats | 115 dark flats | 26 minutes 13 seconds | predominantly 15 seconds

 

Edited March 16, 2022 by happy-kat

[happy-kat]

Went to look outside yesterday and the sky was clear but so murky Regulus was barely visible so abandoned that. Another clear night tonight and an improvement on yesterday, though pretty murky still. Setup as a test of getting alignment working for me. Usually I'm hampered by choice of star that I'm offered for the sky I can see with two star alignment but I got around this by using one star alignment. Chose the star Denebola, crude RDF sighted the star and fine tuned using the camera which was left setup in the evoguide and a nice big view on the 7" tablet connected. Then did another one star and chose Procyon, the slew had it quite close to the centre of the tablet screen just needed a slight tweak. Repeat and choose Denebola again and almost perfect, repeated Proycron and it was spot on, as was Denebola. Since switching to using the wifi dongle and now this method I've cut setup time significantly and goto was subsequently spot on certainly in the 120 degree span of the sky I can use. 

[happy-kat]

 

On 26/02/2022 at 09:06, happy-kat said:

,...... Had wanted to try the 1.25 CLS-CCD filter ,.,........ will have to look into this as I'll need to use a filter with the other camera and the shorty barlow uses a thread too.

I've got the ZWO 1.25 filter holder and a canon sized clip in filter holder so using a filter with the FFV2 is sorted now for either camera.