alocky
17-04-2017, 01:18 PM
You'd think changing OTA on a well tuned mount would be relatively painless, but Murphy's law and O'Flaherty's corollary definitely define one of the fundamental truths of the universe.
The balance point of the OTA is about 2" away from where I need it to clear the dome shutter motor, the new ASA focuser won't sit still long enough for the SGPro autofocus routine to work, the mount doesn't like slewing at a speed over 1 deg/sec with the larger load, and of course it's cloudy.
So without autofocus, and with slightly dodgy tracking I managed to get 80 minutes worth of 2 min Luminance subs on M83.
I need to re-do the flats - as this lot haven't done a great job and I've had to clip a lot of the fainter parts of the image, but the scope shows a lot of promise. Damn, it sucks the light in - in 40 minutes it went considerably deeper than my older 10" at f8 managed over a couple of nights, and the initial sub length of 5 minutes was far too long.
Anyway - if it was easy I suppose it would be boring!
Higher res at astrobin:
http://www.astrobin.com/292123/
cheers,
Andrew.
The balance point of the OTA is about 2" away from where I need it to clear the dome shutter motor, the new ASA focuser won't sit still long enough for the SGPro autofocus routine to work, the mount doesn't like slewing at a speed over 1 deg/sec with the larger load, and of course it's cloudy.
So without autofocus, and with slightly dodgy tracking I managed to get 80 minutes worth of 2 min Luminance subs on M83.
I need to re-do the flats - as this lot haven't done a great job and I've had to clip a lot of the fainter parts of the image, but the scope shows a lot of promise. Damn, it sucks the light in - in 40 minutes it went considerably deeper than my older 10" at f8 managed over a couple of nights, and the initial sub length of 5 minutes was far too long.
Anyway - if it was easy I suppose it would be boring!
Higher res at astrobin:
http://www.astrobin.com/292123/
cheers,
Andrew.