Met office Peak District Mountain Area forecast for tomorrow is currently showing "Overnight heavy rain clearing to leave sunny intervals and blustery showers. Very windy with gales over the tops, but with somewhat milder temperatures and a further slow thaw."

BBC weather for Castleton shows the rain stopping around 10AM but that could easily be out either way and will probably shift during the day. After that dry with cloud and sunny intervals.

So looking good after a damp start

Paul

I'm still intending to come out. I'll take a call the evening before to determine whether to go for the Mam Tor 8AM option before the main meet - not a lot of point if full of cloud. I'll see you guys in Castleton at 9 in any event.

Paul

OK I'm still planning to come on this. Forecast not the best, but should be some dry spells and the odd patch of sun. But if there's going to be 100% cloud cover I'm not bothering getting to top of Mam Tor for dawn!

Paul

And another K5 owner who changes lenses a lot and has never had to clean a sensor. I have the "clean at startup" option enabled and it works a treat. And I do run the "detect dust" option. And there never is any..

Paul

Hi
As regards "how accurate is a Haig mount" it depends on how accurately you make it and (as with an equatorial mount) how accurately you polar align it, and finally how much magnification you are aiming for. I would think for exposures of 30 mins or more you'd be pushing it. However a cheaper (and perhaps better) alternative would be to use a Haig mount and take a series of shorter exposures and then stack them using software. That way the stacked images will cancel any sensor noise, much better results than a single long exposure, and the alignment facilities in the stacking software will also cancel any alignment issues in the tracking mount. Win/win. Lots of advice on astrostacking software, mostly it's free. Further win.

Good luck and I'd be interested to see the results!

Paul

Or if you're feeling brave and creative, you could always make a motorised Haig mount. Very cheap, and most rewarding once complete.

Paul

a) will be there
b) happy to meet at 9 or 10, but will be out earlier to photograph dawn from Mam Tor summit on the way over (if weather is halfway decent)! Sunrise at 8AM. Anyone fancy joining me?
c) Outside cafe in hathersage or grindleford station cafe. Or there are a couple of decent cafes in Hope.
d) I like David's list of venues, any of these will work for me.

Paul

Eddy, thanks very much for all these detailed notes, some really useful stuff here - including the ones about turning down the screen brightness, and a red light on the headtorch. I worry about focus too - think I'll take some test shots, zoom right in on image preview, adjust if necessary and then tape the focus ring in place!

Cheers

Paul

Actually this thread has got me thinking. I've never bothered much with HDR or layer blending because I don't like the "look" - I'm trying to get something as close as I can to how I remember the scene, as natural a look as I can manage. For me the use of LR4 / ACR / RAW gets me closest (personal taste) but still sometimes I'm not happy. So at the risk of a slight hijack, anyone aware of any good tutorials / articles on use of ACR for high contrast landscape images?
Cheers
Paul

Don't know if this helps, but if you set a 2 sec self timer, the mirror goes up (and SR is off) at the start of the 2 secs - since it assumes you will be using a tripod. Clearly you can have self timer or bracketing, not both. Personally however I shoot RAW and for the type of landscapes I shoot, with Adobe Camera Raw PV2012 in LR4, the K5 has so much detail in shadow areas that I can get away without an ND grad (or apply one afterwards in Lightroom, or us a brush) and just get the look I want using ACR. On a single exposure. Expose to the right, but just make sure you've not burnt out the highlights. Unless it's the sun in the frame. But that's just me. YMMV.

Paul