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And maybe watch this

Start reading here https://theskysearchers.com/viewtopic.php?t=13708

Please can anyone recommend for me YouTube videos for myself an absolute beginner wanting to learn Astro photography. I late 60’s of age and understand absolutely nothing about imaging so I need to firstly learn the terms & phrases as I don’t even understand them. then the easiest beginners Software. i need to learn from ‘ground zero’ Up! I have purchased from FLO a Celestron C8N AVX 8” Newtonian reflector package, but I have a skywatcher 100ED DS Pro refractor with 0.85 reducer. I also bought from FLO a ZWO ASI 585MC camera, but still in its box unused until I can understand how to Start I intend buying from FLO the New Celestron Starsence Autogiider for guiding because it looks the Simplest guiding for a Learner The one thing I have being recently retired is Lots of Time on my Hands to learn so would like help with recommendation for the most Beginner Friendly software and YouTube videos to learn with. thank you very much, Gary (from York, England)

this may be a hint as to what graxpert is doing in the background here

I"m not sure what has happened with 3.0, it takes over 2 minutes to open, loads a file, then when denoising or background immediately hangs or throws the above error. the log only has the date and no further info. v2.2 worked flawlessly. Win11 23H2 64bg ram, 1.6tb free space. I tried it on an older win11 ver22h2, and it does the same. reinstalled v2.2 and that works as expected. any ideas? thanks

I have the Morpheus 14mn rather than the 12.5mm. I haven't done that much head to head competition between them. They have very different distortion characteristics, so are a bit hard to compare. The Morpheus stretches objects close to the edge like 98% of well corrected astro eyepieces while the APM squashes them. As a result, the APM actually has the wider true field of view of the two. It's even a little wider than my ES-92 12mm due to it also stretching objects.

OK, CO is saying 100% cloud. I'm looking out of the window and seeing 0% cloud... If it holds I'll get some doubles in. Sat shows a band of cloud coming across but nothing the other side of it.

Let's not forget that RGB or OSC does have Ha signal but it only has it in a proportion which is about the same as seen by our eyes. For me, galaxy Ha is not compulsory. Olly

I also fit a washer and Bob's Knobs to every Newtonian I've owned. I also spray the washer matt black to prevent any possible reflections.

I believe it's best to think through what it is that your calibration frames actually do. Darks record camera noise and no light reaches the chip so you can do them in any situation in which no light reaches the camera. Flats record the illumination arriving at the chip, which should be perfectly even but won't be. Why won't it be? Mostly because of vignetting, which is not affected by which filter you use. Also by dust somewhere in the light path. The closer to the chip the dust is, the worse the 'dust bunny' it will create. This dust might be on a particular filter but is more likely to be closer to the chip, perhaps on the chip window. This means that you might need flats per filter but might not. With observatory based rigs I used luminance flats for all filters and had hardly any problems with this. If I did - once every few years - I'd shoot a filter flat or clean the rig. If using an uncooled camera you will probably do best without darks entirely and with a large dither between subs. With a CCD camera the only dark-for-flat you need is a master bias. With a CMOS camera you need a matching dark-for-flat. My real point is that there is no need to make a mystery of calibration files, nor is there any need to treat them as a religious ritual to be followed to the letter every time. If you think them through and look at how they work for you, you'll be fine. With my CCD rigs, flats per filter would have been a total waste of time and luminance flats lasted 6 months to a year. Olly

Used it today on windows 11, everything worked fine standalone.

The link above sh0uld work lee

Done it a couple of times already but I will try again.

very nice, see you put ptfe on your colimation bolts 👍

I've been using astro sharp last week or so and it seems good. I'm a noob but might be worth a try?

Thanks for the info! So I understand the gain; and u understand the clipping part but forgive me for sounding dumb I’m totally clueless in regard to “aim for 3000 ADU average”. What exactly is that and how would I determine that I’m averaging that 3000 number?

Watch the video and disassemble it in stages like he did and check the various sets of securing screws. Good luck.

Awesome thank you so much that’s great info I’m going to do some searches this evening!

Planetary Nebulae are worth the effort of finding as they look very impressive with a big Newtonian. Here's one of my favourites, the Eskimo Nebula (NGC2392), observed in early March with an 8" Newtonian with x1.7 Barlow, x400 gain (50%), 77 x 15s frames.

Thanks Ian. I will try again tonight with the clutches. I found a replacement motor with encoder etc, new, but I don't want to fork £100 if I am missing something with the clutch etc.

What he said^^ lly

Out of curiosity, which 135mm lens did you use? Mark.

So I succumbed to temptation and purchased the Martin Pugh 27 hr LHaRGB dataset from Chile taken with a Planewave CDK 17. I'm not sure whether I should have done this, but for added effect I added in the 8.5 hrs of Starbase RGB data to give 35 hrs total integration. I think I have sated my appetite for this galaxy, at least as far as using third party data goes.

I can connect my CPC 800 XLT to CPWI without any problems, however if I connect my celestron auto focuser the focuser is recommended but the mount no longer communicated with CPWI.

Downloaded and tried Graxpert for the first time today. The noise reduction and everything else works very well for me (standalone Windows version). Why not add sharpening and star reduction as well? You know you want to 😃