Quote:
Originally Posted by codemonkey
lol I had forgotten about your hot pixel guiding.
I asked about focusing and guiding because in my experience these are critical to get the most out of your scope and if there was any question there, I'd be focusing (pun intended) on those before even thinking about a different camera.
Maybe you're an expert turner of focus knobs, but personally I could never manually focus as well as a properly-configured auto focus routine can do. In addition to that, if your stars aren't looking like little squares at 2.48"/px with a Tak, I'd be guessing you're probably not getting the best focus that you could. You're too undersampled for them to look perfectly round (in single subs, prior to drizzle integration).
As for guiding... it's common to assume that if your stars are round, your guiding is fine, but that only suggests that both axes are equally good (or bad). I can very easily misconfigure guiding to significantly increase my FWHM while still getting round stars. In my experience, solid guiding is the next most important thing.
If there's any question on either guiding or focusing, I'd encourage you to to investigate those first.
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Zero issues with guiding or mount. Maybe my focus isn’t exact but I am not a fan of adding yet more bits on. Been there with AF before, didn’t float my boat - I like actually being out with my scope doing stuff. Automated to me takes away most of the fun of astronomy, and besides, not in it for image glory and fame.
Only reason I was considering a small pixel cam is because of my typical low total time data sets. I am happy with my round stars as is, and if only slightly under sampled given our typical good to excellent seeing here, I can live with it. Better than being over sampled
As Marc said, make the best of what you have.