Posts Made By: ANJAL SHARMA

My older ASGT mount which I bought about 2 years ago on astromart, started acting weird a couple nights ago. It would be anywhere from 90 to 120 degrees off the alignment stars. I did a quick align next, and asked it to go to M31, and it slewed and pointed to a section of the sky which was in Scorpius!! Tracking works fine, as does the arrow keys to manually slew to objects, but the alignment and GOTO functionality is completely kaput. Any thoughts or suggestions to try and fix this problem would be greatly appreciated. I should say that this is the first time this problem has shown up. It has been a stellar performer up until now.

Hi All,

I want to use my Digital Rebel in conjunction with the Sky 90 II and the dedicated Sky 90 focal reducer/flattener to do astrophotography. How do I go about attaching these to each other? Anyone out there who has done this in the past? If you have a picture showing the attachment with the parts labeled and can post it, I'd greatly appreciate it. Thanks.

Anjal.

I took this on May 21 2007 with a DSI Pro and Lumicon Ha and OIII filters. Envisage was used to RGB merge them together into the HOO image shown. I can't figure out why I have a bunch of black dots throughout the images. I'm thinking that these are probably cold pixels as the temperatures dropped nearly 10 degrees from the time darks were collected to the time imaging was complete.

Anjal.

Hi All,

We have one of these at the University teaching labs which has been lying around for years without any use. We just got done resurrecting it and doing the needed primary and secondary mirror and field corrector cleaning and instrument collimation. However, the adapters that we have do not allow attachment with DSLR cameras, and the 1.25" ocular adapter it comes with won't allow the DSI, DSI pro or the ST-8 to reach focus. A 15 mm Panoptic comes to focus with just enough room to spare, but certain eyepieces will not reach focus. It's a nice visual instrument, but we want to try DSLR and CCD imaging with it. Does anyone have any experience with this late model astrograph? I've been trying to get a hold of the photo-visual system chart for this astrograph without any success, so if anyone has an old copy and can send me an electronic copy it'd be greatly appreciated. If not, can anyone give me information on how to attach a Digital Rebel or CCD cameras with 1.25 nosepieces and reach focus with this system? I would greatly appreciate it. Thank you.

Anjal.

The Huntsville Amateur Astronomy Society (HAAS) has an older non-GOTO NJP mount with the PD5XY hand controller. Is it possible to modify this controller and put in an autoguider port? I spoke to Art at TNR and he said to get the GOTO modification done which would add autoguiding capabilities. The club unfortunately doesn't have a spare couple grand lying around, so we were wondering if it is possible to add an autoguide port ourselves...something that could be used with say the GPUSB from Shoestring? Anyone tried anything like this before or have any plans that they could let HAAS have? Thanks.

Does anyone know of a means to insure expensive scopes and equipment against accidents and theft? Would renter's or home-owner's insurance cover accidental damage to the scopes and astro equipment even if the scopes were outside the home at a remote location?

I just recieved the ATIK 16HR monochrome CCD camera from John at AVA on Friday and spent some time on the horsehead region last night. The image below is thirty seven 2 minute unguided subs in H-Alpha (Omega optical 23nm H-Alpha filter), stacked in Registax and tweaked in PS CS2. No darks, flats or offsets were taken. Imaging set up was the APM 130/780 LW on a Celestron AS-GT mount.

Anyone have experience with these products? Will the Orion CFW work with my ATIK 16HR? The transmission curves for the LRGB dichroic filter set posted on the Orion Website look good. There is good overlap in the blue and green filter spectra at the OIII line. Plus there is a nice gap between the green and red filter spectra so it will help some in combating certain types of light pollution. However, I was wondering if anyone had any comments to add about these products. Anything negative? Thanks.

Is it unreasonable to expect the seller to fully honor the terms of his/her ad? Is it unreasonable to remind them that a deal is a deal when they change the terms of the sale AFTER you've sent payment? And if they insult you after that by saying you're not understanding and make derogatory comments about your worth as a person, what do you do? Just wondering if y'all have ever had to deal with these scenarios, and if yes what you did.

Darrin at TNR sold me a real nice FS-60C over the weekend. Does anyone know if the Extender Q can be used satisfactorily with this little Tak?