Another way

After a few days of fiddling with the new telescope mount and b&w astro camera, I've decided to descend further into the rabbit hole and get an ASIAIR camera controller, basically a Raspberry Pi computer stuffed into a little box. Solar imaging connected by cable to a laptop just isn't going to cut it.

The mount is extremely stable, but also extremely hard to see through the polar scope to align. I was reading through the Sky Watcher literature on that, and instructions on how to set the mount's setting circles is in the same section. I was regretting my purchase decision, but after some further research I figured out that a Goto scope really doesn't need setting circles. All that is needed is an accurate polar alignment, and supposedly the ASIAIR will help with that also. That will have to wait until November due to our upcoming travel schedule.

I did use the telescope on the mount and the 6D Mark II to get this sun image, but I slewed over to it with the controller rather than using Goto. Unlike a few recent images shot with the DSLR lens filter, this is the color of the filter and the image is not colorized. The sunspots are getting interesting.

Third attempt

I made a third attempt at Andromeda last night with the Seestar and think this may be incrementally better. It is slightly more tilted than previous attempts, and I cropped it to show M110 at bottom right. I used Siril for stacking and most of the processing, but not the stretching. Research indicated I could just do it in Photoshop, so I did. I also got a small, unimpressive image of the Crab Nebula.

I'm going further down the rabbit hole. I am expecting delivery of a real Goto telescope mount (Skywatcher HEQ5) and a real astro b&w camera (ZWO ASI174MM) today. For now my priorities are to get good Sun and Moon images with the b&w camera and Televue telescope, and get my DSLR to work with the mount to get a tracked LANDSCAPE shot of Andromeda and other objects. Once I get all that figured out, then it's on to a filter wheel, filters, an autofocuser, and perhaps a field flattener to get better images of Seestar targets. First impressions: Learning how to align the mount will require some study and some YouTube videos. The rail supplied with the mount is useless, but my standard tripod plates will work. I only put the camera on the mount, not the scope, and targeting was not very good since the mount was not aligned. On the other hand, the ZWO camera was a breeze to set up and I took a test image (not attached to anything) within minutes. I will try a sun snapshot with the scope tomorrow, but it probably will be on the tripod, not the mount. That thing is heavy. From comments found during my research, I knew it was heavy, but I had no idea. I should take off the 11-lbs. counterweights before I move it. I only needed one to balance the camera, and I wonder if the scope will require both.

October 3 sun image from the 6D, monochrome, colorized. I didn't use the teleconverter, so this is at 400mm and heavily cropped. I used the Photoshop AI Super Resolution to upsize it, then cropped it to my standard 1200x1800 (4x6 print size). We've got some good sunspots going. Remember, this is just a white light filter and doesn't show the detail of much more expensive filtering systems. Can't wait to see what the new ZWO does with the Sun and Moon.