Hi RWR,
Thanks for your reply which prompted me to look at my Celeron Telescope adapter and that is a T Adapter. As soon as I screwed it on to the duplicator, I immediately felt the difference.
I've been surprised just how much light I need. I used a 10w Phillips cool white LED with the camera set on program mode and the exposure was about 1/2 second. The duplicator soaks up a lot of light!
Colours and exposure were ok, but IQ was horrible - soft, lacking detail indeed still looked out of focus, so this option does not look to be a goer.
Any other suggestions for digitising my ancient Kodachrome slides would be most welcome.

Thank you all for your replies. Seems like the best option is to forgo the mirror up. Because in order to capture enough images for deep sky astrophotography I must use an Intervalometer. Either external, my favorite choice or the built in software. Often without an expensive guided tracking mount, the best option is many shorter images stacked together. This can give you the equivalent of a longer exposure.
I have a tracking mount, but it is not guided. So my longest exposures to date are 2 minutes at a time.
I’m starting to shoot with the camera attached to my old 70’s version Celestron C8 SCT. It tracks, but not very accurate over time. So with it, I’m currently exposing 20 seconds at a time. I may go longer but it’s the equivalent of FL-2000.
Thanks again. Spiney-Dave

Hi everyone,
Going through some old gear I cam across a made in Japan zoom slide duplicator/slide enlarger branded "Flexar Zoom reverser" which allows enlargement up to 2.6 times. It has what I thought was an M42 screw mount but on the box it says "in compatible T-mount w/filter. There are no written instructions.
I bought a K&F M42 - EOS adapter which seems to work. At least the Flexar screws into the adapter and I can connect it to my EOS 1200D but I can't focus the slides.
Exposure is another issue but I think I can get around that.
Should I have bought a T mount to EOS adapter and would that allow proper focus?
Any guidance, advice help would be greatly appreciated. regards John

I didn’t post this in Astrophotography because I wanted the most Nikon D7xxx users to see it. I’m using my D7000 for Astrophotography. Both with lenses & direct connected to my telescope. In order to have the sharpest images I want mirror up. I know how to use mirror up for individual exposures. Click once mirror up, 2nd click starts the exposure, all at least 15 seconds long. Using an Intervalometer how to I get the mirror up, stays up, and then take 10-50 or more individual exposures? Yes, I read the manual, but didn’t see the answer.
Thanks in advance, Dave

So, re-washing didn't help. It appears, as was suggested elsewhere, that what I'm seeing is a chemical reaction, probably between the plastic of the sleeve and the emulsion side of the negative. The images in question have been in the "archival" sleeve for about 35 years...
Or it was something in the environment to which the plastic was porous. I've been in one house and three apartments in that period, and though I aimed for a cool, dry, dark place for storage ... Who knows?
Thanks again for your thorough response,
Steve

I'm scanning old negatives using a Nikon Coolscan V and I'm finding these white spots of various sizes and shapes on them. And it's the inverse of what you'd expect: negatives stored 'improperly', as in stuffed in an envelope, scan clean. One's in Q-Pic archival plastic sleeves have the spots.

All were processed the same way: one of various b/w developers, kodak stop bath, kodak fixer, thorough wash and then kodak photo-flo. Excess liquid removed by running the film between two fingers or wiping with lint free photo-wipes.

When the image is on the monitor full frame, you can only see one or two on the better ones. The uploaded sample is blown up from a 1"x.85" segment of a scan which loads in as an 11x17 16 bit gray tiff file at about 330 dpi. (it varies a little depending on how/whether the negative is cropped in scanning.)

So far, I've been processing these in Affinity Photo using the clone tool. This takes twenty minutes to half an hour per frame. I have several hundred rolls of film to scan. While I don't know how many are damaged, cleaning them with Affinity isn't doable. I tried denoise in Affinty and Luminar 4, but to work enough to blend the spots into the background, they turn the image to mush (or I'm doing it wrong...)

I tried Cleaning a strip with PEC-12 Photographic Emulsion Cleaner. It seemed to work a bit but not enough to save me from a massive clone job.

Please suggest how I can clean these. Thanks, all.

Why would you ask that ?

Could be the old M-ring or P-ring that accompanied the pre-Ai 55/3.5 micro. Maybe it’s the K-tube adapter. They all present the same problem, and all call for the same solution.

Doesn’t really matter which tube. The butt end structure is identical on all of them. The rim of the tube is jammed up against the black plastic Ai aperture tracer ring. (Ai and AF tubes and lenses do not have that rim.)

Either the ring has already cracked under pressure or it hasn’t. Get a grip on the tube and twist it off against the friction. Then make sure the little tab or finger on the ring is still solidly connected and check that ring is not cracked. If the ring still rotates easily all is well.

The metering component driven by the moving tracer ring was never under any pressure, so no hidden internal damage. Everything you need to inspect is visible externally. If the plastic part is damaged or doesn’t rotate easily and return itself to its parking place, then ship it off to Nikon USA. Figger about $350 (includes a sensor cleaning and all new exterior rubber parts).

Otherwise, just don’t do that again !