Sampling rates can make your stars good or blocky, especially if you zoom in. It all depends on a few factors like your focal length, the size of the pixels in your sensor, how good the atmospheric conditions are, and even how good your guiding is. This article shows how to get a combination of telescope and camera that will give you nice smooth stars under a range of conditions.
This is an instalment of a tutorial series on how to slave a dome. In this part we look at connecting the dome control software to the dome and mount through the ASCOM Hub. Depending on the connections you can perform the slaving calculations in the dome control software or the ASCOM Hub.
In this second part of the dome slaving series, we discuss connecting your observatory control program directly to the dome and the mount using ASCOM drivers. This is the simplest we to set it up, and allows you to use the observatory control program to do the slaving calculations.
If you have a computerised observatory, you might know about dome slaving, the process of keeping the shutter on the dome right in front of the telescope. Not only is there a lot of mathematics in this, but also it’s a complicated task to set up the different components of your system. This is the first article in a series on different ways to do this.
PegasusAstro focus, power and dew heater controllers use a range of temperature and environmental sensors. Knowing which one goes with what product can be confusing. Bill’s written a handy list for you.
Taking monochrome images of a galaxy in red, green and blue light allows you to make a full colour image, in a similar way to your eyes detecting the three colours and your brain combining them in the colour image. But you add exposures taken through a Hydrogen alpha filter, which draws out emission nebulas in the galaxy.
For the Lunar Eclipse of September 2025, Bill used a remote facility that Sidereal Trading had installed at a club in Victoria to get a sequence of images. It didn’t go quite to plan, but he got the shots anyway.
Lunar eclipses, or blood moons, are really cool, and people love getting photos. But during the eclipse the Moon is dark and a photo doesn’t show the same details as a normal full Moon. This tutorial shows how to capture the sharpness of the full moon and still get the colour of the blood moon.
Have you had troubles pointing your telescope at the zenith? It’s especially difficult if you’ve got a long refractor, because the eyepiece or camera end of the refractor can run into one of the tripod legs. You can use a pier extender, but better still, you can use a pier tripod, which has a cental pier from close to the ground. No tripod legs, not obstructions.
The Sidereal Trading Telescope (FAQs) blog page provides answers to commonly asked questions that customers might have about telescopes.
Sampling rates can make your stars good or blocky, especially if you zoom in. It all depends on a few factors like your focal length, the size of the pixels in your sensor, how good the atmospheric conditions are, and even how good your guiding is. This article shows how to get a combination of telescope and camera that will give you nice smooth stars under a range of conditions.
This is an instalment of a tutorial series on how to slave a dome. In this part we look at connecting the dome control software to the dome and mount through the ASCOM Hub. Depending on the connections you can perform the slaving calculations in the dome control software or the ASCOM Hub.
In this second part of the dome slaving series, we discuss connecting your observatory control program directly to the dome and the mount using ASCOM drivers. This is the simplest we to set it up, and allows you to use the observatory control program to do the slaving calculations.
