Having come to the conclusion that the EQ3-2 just wasn’t up to the demands I was making of it, I’ve finally bitten the bullet and bought a HEQ5 Pro. I’m hopeful this will allow me to make more progress with my imaging.
It’s already pressed into service, here with the PST on board:
The EQ3-2 won’t be gone forever, but I’m planning on stripping it down and possibly doing an AstroEQ conversion to allow it to be used as an imaging platform for lighter weight telescopes or just cameras and lenses.
Having spent all this time modding my PST I really needed to do some imaging with it, so here’s my first attempt at a solar Ha image. It’s not brilliant, I’ll grant you, but it’s mine. I’m still experimenting with the camera settings for my ASI120MM. There’s still plenty of work to do here.
Unfortunately the sensor on the ASI120 is not quite big enough to fit the entire target in. I’m going to have to resort to mosiacs (or buy a DMK41, the expense of which fills me with horror).
To avoid the use of a diagonal I turned up an adaptor from a piece of aluminium that takes the PST eyepiece unit and allows a camera to reach focus without a diagonal, so there’s nothing else in the light path. I shall use this for my imaging, though I’ll revert to the diagonal for visual. I’ve been fortunate enough to obtain a second eyepiece unit, so I don’t have to keep swapping them over. Here’s the adaptor:
And here’s how it looks in place on my modded PST:
I continued the thread for the eyepiece unit all the way down the inside to try to prevent reflections reaching the camera. Now I shall paint it black using heat-resistant barbecue paint.
Over the last four or five years we’ve taken an incubator and chicken eggs into the childrens’ school for one of the classes to have in their classroom for the whole of the incubation period and perhaps a couple of weeks after the chicks hatch.
They have to be kept in a pen under a heat lamp until their feathers are well-developed (usually when they’re about six weeks old), but here are some photos of this years chicks on their first weekend in the outside world.
Yes, two more Messier globular clusters to add to the collection. These, M10 and M14, are the last for the time being. I have a few other things I want to try out now.
A change of target for the next imaging session. Having got as much as I felt I could out of M3 and M5 for the time being, I moved on to some new globular clusters. This time M53, M12 and M56.
I think M53 and M56 have much more potential, and it surprised me how relatively “open” M12 appeared compared with the others.
Messiers 3 and 5 have become something of a fixation in my attempts to do some DSO imaging with the 127 Mak, but this night they were joined by the second Messier cluster in Hercules, M92. I think these may be my best so far.
Someone suggested to me that Munsen rings might be a good way to fix my PST to a dovetail. As they looked far more straightforward than having to turn some fittings from solid aluminium I thought I’d give them a try. I managed to find a pair of 54mm brass rings on ebay which though slightly too large in diameter were perfect once I’d lined them with sticky-backed felt. Here’s the end result on the dovetail:
It seems as though sometimes you just can’t keep these people out of your images…
The same details as my previous attempt the day before, but I think these ones are a little better. Focus is sharper, I think, and the colours have come through better.
