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Old 07-02-2019, 02:18 PM
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Stonius (Markus)
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Join Date: Mar 2015
Location: Melbourne
Posts: 1,495
This is mine. It's not pretty, but needs must and all that. At that size, EL panels are not cheap, but not too expensive either - about $100 with 12v Inverter Here's one on ebay

It's incredibly light, too, being mostly cardboard. So far so good, I just need to be careful to keep it out of the dew though.

I did put some lee diffusion filter #216 in there too just in case.

With some gaffa tape and a stanley knife I was able to make it sit on the RC10 tube nicely and even made an adapter that allows me to repurpose it for use on my skywatcher Epsrit 120mm. The light leaks are so minimal I can use it at a Dark Sky site without complaints (I can barely tell if it's on myself).

As mentioned, you need to be careful to keep exposure times long enough to smooth the pulsed nature of the illumination.

Another point, I don't think the exact ADU levels of exposure for the flats is that critical. The important thing is that neither the top or bottom of the histogram is being clipped, so you want to expose somewhere near the middle of your range. Also, since the times will be constant, it's not a bad idea to shoot the flat darks per filter as exposures won't be changing night to night.

One caveat, mine doesn't do well in the red end of the spectrum (maybe get a warm white panel, if you do). Eg, in S2 on my rig, I have to bump the gain to 313 on my rig and I still get exposures of 11.5 sec! Bit of a pain having to wait 5 minutes for flats for that filter, but Ha is half that, and O3 exposures are half a second (being green).

Cheers

Markus
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