First proper nights observing with with my very basic setup.

[Jules Tohpipi]

And my apologies for the thread de-rail. It was all becoming so exciting with the reading I could'nt  stop myself from asking you all if jumping now was OK.

[PeterC65]

2 hours ago, Jules Tohpipi said:

Well, thank you very much for the great comments everyone. It's really reassured and encouraged me to start right away. So much so the order has been placed now for the ZWO version of the IMX 585 along with a UV/IR filter that FLO recommended.

A UV/IR cut filter can sometimes be useful but there are plenty of objects that benefit from the extra light that the camera will capture without it. I generally find that galaxies look better with no filter. The AP crowd sometimes recommend a UV/IR filter to reduce star bloat at the edges of the field of view but I've not found that a problem when doing EAA.

[LaurenceT]

It seems that I've finally almost tamed the very unruly Stellarmate app. The first few times it was extremely slow to show the different targets available, so slow in fact that I'd thought it had frozen but it hadn't. Someone had suggested that I tried a USB SSD for the Stellarmate OS so I bought one but that was just as buggy. Reverting to the micro SD card as if by magic the bugginess had gone and it worked almost perfectly.

Last night I had about 45 minutes of clear skies and I was able to observe the Iris nebula, Bodes Galaxy, both very small and faint, but spent a long time looking at the Hercules Globular cluster. The Hercules seems to be the best target from my garden at the moment and it's beautiful. At the moment I'm not taking images for processing, the observing is satisfying enough but I will perhaps try and get a screen grab on my Ipad.

[LaurenceT]

On 04/05/2023 at 11:15, Ratlet said:

@LaurenceT did you save any of the images you got?  I'd be interested to see what you are getting with your setup.

Haven't been able to do much recently but spent the last week struggling to get anything using my Startravel 102/ASI224mc combination with the Stellarmate. Can't seem to get any image but it works with Sharpcap. Anyway, last night reverted to the original Evoguide 50ED setup and got a simple screen grab of the Globular Cluster.

[M40]

Looking forward to your next pictures 👌 I  love the simplicity of the straightforward telescope plus camera arrangement on a goto for eeva. I have a similar fov to you in your 102mm/224mc combo with my 85mm/290mm combo so I will be stealing a few of your targets 😉. My challenge at the moment are the high clouds which smother everything except the brightest stuff and even then the target can still be just a blur. Enjoy