first good night under the stars in 6 years.

[AlexN]

Well after some trials and tribulations since getting back into astrophotography I'm please to say I'm back in action.

After buying a 2nd hand heq5 pro that was stiff, tracking poorly and full of backlash and a scope that was just absinthe too much for the mount I think I have it all sorted.

Stripped mount, cleaned everything, replaced the tapered bearings, performed a belt drive modification and re-greased the lot... Now making sub pixel guiding and subs out to 10 minutes.

I moved from an 8" to a 5" newt and thus far the setup is humming along like a dream. To make things better, the seeing tonight is quite stable in Brisbane.

Can't wait to assemble the images from tonight.

[ozstronomer (Geoff)]

Nice to see you Astro imaging again Alex, good skies tonight.


Cheers Geoff

[DavidTrap (David)]

Good to hear! Bit of cloud around now though...

DT

[AlexN]

Thanks guys. I've had the odd cloud drift through but nothing serious. Seems my guiding goes a little haywire if I image too far south of the celestial equator.. Not sure what the go is but I'm going to assume it's a balance problem in declination. Imaging with newts is always a little painful in that respect.

[DavidTrap (David)]

And gone....

DT

[AlexN]

Clouds shut me down at about 1:30 but that gave me a chance to do a preliminary stack of the data. A bit of a sprint rather than a marathon. I didn't even get the mount outside until after 9. Getting the kids off to bed first etc. Then setup, balance, drift align, etc. I'm not as proficient as I once was. Setup took a while as well as cable routin.. Remembering how robofocus works... Haha.

At least after tuning the mount it posed very little drama and ticked along doing its thing for the most part. The belt drive mod got rid of some very disturbing action I was noticing in Dec guiding and cleaning out the machining swarf smoothed out the rest.

I'm yet to get the mount under eqmod control but Ive got a us to serial adapter here that I'll wire up soon and be back in action.

[codemonkey (Lee)]

Glad to hear you finally had a good one, Alex; with all of the troubles you've had, you certainly deserve it!

[rmuhlack (Richard)]

I had a ball with that scope, so im very glad to hear that the 5" is working out for you. I reckon its a perfect size for the heq5.

[AlexN]

It's definitely a good match for the heq5. Only requires one counterweight with the self guided camera..

Looking like it will produce good images for me, half the reason I bought it was seeing what it did for you.

Looking forward to the next time I get it out. Hopefully tweak that collimation a bit better and spend more time on one target.

[AlexN]

I think to take better advantage of it I really need a bigger sensor. Might look into a Qhy8 or similar somewhere down the line