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Hi John – happy new year to you too!
I recently purchased an Ultrastar Pro – which is an upgrade to the Ultrastar. I understand that the main changes with the Pro versions are to do with the electronics; faster downloads and lower read noise. And they now come in a blue body!
The Lodestar Pro uses the same CCD as the Lodestar X2 – but that is a different CCD to the original Lodestar. Whether this chip has fewer hot pixels I could not say… You could try emailing Starlight Xpress – they are usually helpful.
Callum
It all really depends on what you want to do – but short focal length refractors are a popular starting point for imaging. The wider field of view will be more forgiving of tracking errors, and many are a good match to a DSLR.
As Paul says – a good tracking mount is essential. And GOTO is useful. If you can get good 30s exposures which you can stack you will find a huge range of potential targets in reach.
Callum
As Shaprcap only works on Windows, I use PHD2 on my MacBook, with my 50mm EvoGuide and ZWO 290MM camera, and PHD2’s Polar Drift Alignment – it works really well too.
15 arc-seconds is pretty impressive, though!
Callum
“No phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus” https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.14305
Hi Grant,
I think the SBIG driver does bit twiddling with the parallel port directly that the converters don’t support.
Callum
There is a guy in the US that made a parallel port for a raspberry pi and updated the Sbig drivers for INDI to use it, and possibly other Linux LPT drivers.
I don’t think he has any solutions for Windoze world though.
Checkout https://github.com/garlick?tab=repositories
Only other solution really is to find an old Win 7 PC.
Cheers,
CallumThanks Ray,
I am using a Mac / Catalina too – and this was posted with Firefox.
I dont seem to be getting your porblem though (i am getting a coiuple of my own!).
We will investiage further
Thanks,
CallumHi Ray,
are you using a PC, Mac, iPad? And what browser (IE, Edge, Chrome, Safari, etc.)?
And are you accessing the site through http://www.britastro.org or britastro.org ?
(if you try the other do you get the same problem?)Thanks,
CallumHi Paul,
I think I just followed the instructions and it worked out ok. I thin I had home-brew installed already though.
Good luck!
Callum
If you are wanting to image planets / Moon you probably need to connect the camera to your laptop.
There is a MacOs version of Firecapture that works well for me.If you want to connect by WiFi you’ll need some sort of computer attached to the camera – something like a Raspberry Pi with INDI or Indigo installed can work if you want to take longer exposures. But does not really work well streaming video.
Or you can connect a ‘standard’ computer to the camera and use some sort of remote access app (like VNC) to control it remotely via wifi.Hope this helps.
CallumMy current favourite star atlas is the interstellarum Deep Sky Atlas
See: www.deep-sky-atlas.com
Its available from Amazon and other places – it is a bit expensive, but it is a really nice, easy to use atlas.
Callum
Yes, they got in touch with my local society too – and one of our members (Peer Cadogan) will be appearing on the piece and be talking abut EB. Unfortunately John Harris (who is also a Cotswold AS member) was away in France at the time of filming.
Callum
Thanks for the feedback Bill & Ronan.
A very enjoyable weekend, I thought, and much thanks goes to all who did the real organising of the event.
And it was great to meet up again with so many astro-pals.
Cheers,
CallumI have aligned fits images using Python, AstroPy and the astroalign package.
If interested email me, and i’ll send a fairly trivial example python script.
Callum
Hi Jack,
not sure where your pics went, but uploaded the ones you sent me and they are now appearing.
Nice looking obsy BTW.
Cheers, Callum
Thanks for alerting us Bill – actually the CPRE got a little ahead of us, as this is a joint BAA / CPRE project that we have been working on for the past couple of months. Helpfully the CPRE kindly offered to host the website submission forms and process the results.
I hope members will take part, and spread the word to their local societies, forums, and encourage friends and families to take part too.
Clear skies
Callum
