Imaging through a Goto Scope

One more question Dave, Sorry to hijack your thread John!

Would you recommend ( not condone mind you, dont want you to get blamed for any broken equiptment!!) opening the CG5, or any mount removing the so called grease thats there and regreasing? Ive heard on cloudy nights from some folks that the grease in a lot of mounts is akin to bluetack! would this have any bearing on tracking at all?

Would you recommend ( not condone mind you, dont want you to get blamed for any broken equiptment!!) opening the CG5, or any mount removing the so called grease thats there and regreasing?

Fintan,

I did exactly that with my old CG5, but in truth the original grease is nowhere near as bad as some make out. It is a little thick but it's nothing like bluetack. It's about the consistence of car engine grease. Not perfect but I don't think that alone made much of a difference to my mount. What did make a difference was re-aligning the meshing of the gears (particularly the DEC axis), I was able to significantly decrease the backlash in declination by better aligning the gears. This was a simple matter.

Unless you have loads of time, I wouldn't worry about the grease. I would definitely adjust the backlash unless you are sure its good enough already.

Hi John

I have an Atic 16ic (mono) canera and I am imaging with an lx90 in AltAz.

I find that depending on the position in the sky of the object, I can get exposures of up to 30 seconds easily before field rotation sets into the subframes. I have been able to get a minute exposure the last time.

I stack the frames in DSS and take as many exposures as I can.

It is important that you get your allignment as accurate as you can before you start. The alignment and tracking may be just fine and dandy for visual work but when imaging over half an hour say you can find the target drifting off the centre of the field of view. The chip is really quite small so this is crucial.

Also an SCT usually has a long focal length. Mine is F10 I presume your cpc is similar focal length. This will have the effect of making slight movements such as tracking wind etc much more obhious. The solution is to use a focal reducer when imaging. I have the atic focal reducer which is cheap and chearful but works. You can get good quality mead or celestron version.

Some of my pics are at www.flickr.com/photos/bertthebudgie/ with details of exposure times and other info.

DB

I was checking out DSS on another site earlier today. It looks great.....specially for those of us who wanna do AP but dont webcam.

Those are great shots David. Obviously a lot of careful work went into these. Im not too well up on the hi-tec side like wavelets and lrgbs???. I have a toucam and have only managed to image fuzzy orange blobs where Jupiter should be.
Beginning to think that I blew 5 grand on the CPC for nothing.
Thanks for reply and giving some hope. Will try out your techniques next clear night.