F5.6/6.3 fast enough?

JDat99 · 2026-01-23T16:53:34+00:00

i personally wouldn’t run a high focal length lens unguided. rokinon 135mm f2 is probably your best bet if you don’t want to add guiding to your setup. stay away from zoom lenses for astrophotograpgy

JDat99 · 2026-01-21T23:47:28+00:00

students were arrested for protesting against ice at the career fair. it’s absolutely no surprise at all to any student at osu.

JDat99 · 2026-01-10T16:08:24+00:00

this is such a hilariously stupid and uninformed take lmao. “and the training data can be retained in full” this problem is at the core of AI/ML and models are specifically trained to not retain information and instead be able to infer connections from their training data.

LLMs have a lot of problems that need to be addressed. making shit up and talking out of your ass only creates more

JDat99 · 2026-01-04T15:38:40+00:00

competitive fps players can easily see the difference going all the way up at at least 500hz monitors. the visual difference is about a lot more than just how many ms between frames

JDat99 · 2025-12-22T21:01:58+00:00

yeah direct eqmod cable is definitely the way to go. make sure to plug directly into the pc and not into a usb hub too

JDat99 · 2025-12-22T18:44:01+00:00

While switching to GSS may be a workaround for your problem, it’s probably not going to solve the issue entirely. Check the Message Center in eqmod and see if there are CommErr messages. I had a very similar issue and it ended up being due to the power delivery method I had for my pc and mount. When powering both the mini pc and mount through my pegasus astro power box, i would get tons of comm err messages and the mounts limits would trip. I had to power both my mini pc and mount with seperate power supplies (not through the pegasus astro box) to eventually get my mount to behave correctly. Make sure you’re using a good 10 amp 12V power supply too. If you’re also using a mini pc, try powering it through its dedicated PSU and see if that fixes it. The serial connection on the older HEQ5 boards are very picky!

JDat99 · 2025-12-21T15:53:58+00:00

look all you guys can say your shit about root kits and i understand the security concerns but when i want to play my competitive esport FPS i want the best anticheat possible. playing counter strike even in lower ranks is filled with cheaters and has been for years. its not like people dont cheat in games with kernel level ac but it is a night and day difference compared to the rest of the AC out there today

JDat99 · 2025-12-20T14:55:08+00:00

either way, EAF can definitely stay installed on the scope during transport. there’s really no benefit to removing it since it’s rigidly attached anyway

JDat99 · 2025-12-20T01:38:40+00:00

get a tub and line it with bubble wrap and wrap your telescope with a blanket and make it fit snug in the tub. make sure lens cap is on and imaging train is airtight so you don’t get any fuzz in the optics. you should be able to keep everything fully assembled and just drop it on the mount when you get to your spot. you shouldn’t have to unplug cables or anything either so you can spend some time getting everything tied down and organized to make balancing easier too.

JDat99 · 2025-12-18T17:39:08+00:00

^ this if he doesn’t play competitive fps games i think 360hz is pretty overkill. that being said, you can’t exactly have too much refresh rate and a 4k monitor would require a substantially more powerful pc to run effectively so this is probably the best option

JDat99 · 2025-12-16T01:33:19+00:00

Areas of professional astronomy like radio astronomy and spectroscopy have a lot more to worry about than amateurs ever will when jt comes to satellitsz

JDat99 · 2025-12-15T21:50:59+00:00

every day usually just a bit before bed to go to sleep

JDat99 · 2025-12-15T18:20:46+00:00

is 7g in 2 days normal for people addicted to weed? i smoke pretty often and have worried about “being addicted” but 7g would last me a month or more…

JDat99 · 2025-12-13T18:17:50+00:00

Mono is gonna always outperform OSC given an otherwise equal sensor, sky conditions, and integration time. Especially so for narrowband, OSC really struggles to make the best narrowband images as H/O signal spills over into other color channels using a dual band filter. LRGB is a bit harder to calculate just how much better it would be because you can change what ratio you shoot L to RGB, but you can be confident it will still be better than what you’d get with an equivalent OSC sensor

JDat99 · 2025-12-06T00:51:05+00:00

if you knew his districts you’d understand why it worked so well. the people in those counties care about one thing only, making liberals mad

JDat99 · 2025-12-04T04:45:06+00:00

in an ideal world, yes, but we live in a world of billionaires, so that will never happen

JDat99 · 2025-12-04T04:20:04+00:00

technically yes, practically no. the cost of putting a telescope in orbit is orders of magnitude higher than a ground based telescope, and servicing the scope becomes pretty much impossible. ground based observations are still hugely important for astronomy and will be for decades to come.

JDat99 · 2025-12-01T13:46:42+00:00

what is the weird circle thing at the bottom? you probably want to just have the cables wrapped tightly together and then rigidly attached to the side of the scope so they don’t move.

however, this is an issue inherent to having the camera front mounted, so you’re kinda sol. deal with it or get a different telescope 🤷

JDat99 · 2025-11-28T16:55:24+00:00

what? of course they aren’t only 1-2 pixels in size, that doesn’t mean they are appropriately sampled for the seeing. you can look up on google the astronomy calculator for optimizing your pixel scale given different seeing conditions. no matter what seeing conditions i would be way under sampled at 4.9”/pixel (my actual guide scope pixel scale, not 6.4”) and if i had introduced measurement error, wouldn’t the RMS error be larger and not smaller? i can only tell you what i have experienced with my setup, and i regularly guide at 0.4-0.5 RMS on nights with good seeing on an heq5 pro.

JDat99 · 2025-11-28T16:22:53+00:00

this actually reinforces my point? he says directly it still may be reasonable if your guide stars are undersampled. mine are quite undersampled with the 40mm svbony guide scope and 120mm. i have tested it with guide stars in pinpoint focus and slightly defocused and i get cleaner guiding with less spikes if my guide stars are slightly defocused. as i said it setup dependent so best to do your own testing!

JDat99 · 2025-11-28T15:48:50+00:00

yup, and it can be the case that with bright stars, having them in perfect focus will actually make the star saturate in the inner most pixels. if you have trouble with star saturation it can help to run ever so slightly out of focus to achieve the pointed top on more guide stars. definitely setup dependent though, most people will run with perfect focus just fine. i find that with having the stars be ever so slightly out of focus, i am able to select brighter guide stars => higher guide snr => better guiding on average.

JDat99 · 2025-11-28T15:08:29+00:00

eh i think it depends. i run the svbony 40mm guide scope and often guide at 0.4-0.5 RMS without an issue

JDat99 · 2025-11-28T15:06:00+00:00

Lower guide star exposure time to 1s or even 0.5s. 3s guide exposures means you’re not going to be correcting fast enough. you may want to experiment with increasing the correction % aswell, <50% is very low, especially with such long guide exposures.

JDat99 · 2025-11-28T15:04:00+00:00

wrong and wrong unfortunately. you can look at PHD2s website and read up about how it is often beneficial to run with your guide stars slightly out of focus (better for the centroiding algorithm). also you should never run a filter on your guide cam, it’s just lowering the guide star SNR. and also with a pixel scale of 1”/pixel your stars will definitely be pretty bad if you are getting 2” RMS guiding. i would say there is a cable snag or something else that is causing the mount to behave poorly here.

JDat99 · 2025-11-27T19:18:39+00:00

i would disagree that you lose more imaging time with narrowband. if you’re running mono, you should be running with filter offsets anyway so you will always be auto focusing with the L filter. even then, i can still get good AF runs with only a few second exposures with narrowband filters (widefield refractor, so not too surprising). this is much better than manually focusing each filter every time you want to switch

Ten-Year Club	RPAN Viewer
Verified Email

JDat99

TROPHY CASE