When loading my OTA with the mount (Mach 1) in Park 2, I've always wondered if it makes a difference if the saddle locking knobs are UP or DOWN. I usually keep the dovetail and rings attached to my OT

For those who are interested, The Mauna Loa eruption on Hawaii Island is continuing and lava is now flowing down the mountain to the saddle between Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea. The telescopes on Mauna Kea

Hi All, This latest image was from last weeks session. I have been trying to figure out how to process it for about a week or so. My imspiration was fellow group member Andy Ermolli's image of the sam

Hi all, I wanted to share how my first night out with my new 1100-AE went. I meant to just do this as a test to see how well the tracking performed, but it was working so well I let it go for about 5

*NOT SPECIFIC TO A-P*: -------------------------------- *My only interaction with MS Windows is from astronomy in the last 1½ years or so. As such, this first section of the email might not resonate w

I was deep into working on tilt last night but something odd happened late into the evening and while there was no problem caused, it worries me. At 1:44:50 am I needed to change something on the imag

Technically it's my second night. I had a hardware issue with my DEC encoder which had to get sorted out back at AP. But they were fast, and had the mount back to me in less than a full week. It's bee

My Mach1 mount started making a strange noise when DEC is slewing North. Besides just being noisy, it now will not guide when the object is tracking north. I have re-meshed the DEC worm gear according

Hi all, I'm the proud new owner of an 1100 AE that just arrived today. In setting it up, I noticed there is play in the RA axis when the clutch knobs are snugged down - about 2mm worth measured at the

Hey Astronuts— Does anyone out there with an 1100GTO wish they’d been able to get a 1600GTO-AE and have an interest in trading up? I got my new 1600GTO-AE six months ago and was delighted to find I co

Hi, I've only been a silent reader here since I got my Mach2 (April 2021). No problems everything works. Now I have refined my pole alignment and wanted to create a new model in APPM. Now I also get t

Happy Thanksgiving from Charlie & little MOOSE

My Mach 2 crashed in bad windstorm while I was out of town. So I just recently have had a chance to test the equipment. So the mount seems to operate smoothly. It will park back to position 3. However

Up until this point, I was happy to do all of my deep sky imaging using Mac Based software. However, there are number of capabilities enabled by various software packages that I was not able find for

Hey Lowbrows and Astronuts— Just to show what can be accomplished by a newbie with rudimentary imaging skills, 6” of top-quality apo aperture, unassisted manual focus and seeing that’s sub-par even fo

Hi, The Perseus galaxy cluster is one of the most massive objects in the universe, made of thousands of galaxies immersed in a cloud of very hot gas, approximately 240 million l.y. from us. It is domi

This morning I allowed Windows to run updates on one of my two imaging systems and it turns out that it updated Windows 10 to Feature version 22H2. Tonight, APCC become unstable and unresponsive, with

Hi Has any used the 3 point polar align routine in NINA’s latest Beta version. I am unable to get the mount to slew from within the NINA”s automatic mode PA routine. I constantly get the error message

I'm about to try a new to me AP1200GTO and I have not been able to find and settable RA axis slew limits in the software. Do they exist and if not how do you keep from crashing the telescope. I am use

I am sure this can be easily identified, but last night I set out to image comet C/2021 Y1 (Atlas), as according to SkySafari, it was supposed to be near star, Aldebaran. I got that set of images but