steppenwolf

Well that trumps my 'Skyfall' distraction! ? Who needs a pub though, the Shiraz is free-flowing here this week

I had a horrible feeling that you were going to say that!

I suppose that I really ought to qualify this a bit! You can run without CalStar Inits but they have the advantage of writing in stone a mini model of the sky and your particular mount's interaction with it so that your Offset Inits place a real time fix on that model. I like to use them as they have always worked well for me.

It could indeed be a comms. issue on the Eagle, Sara which is why I am keen to get 'hands on' to see for myself exactly what is happening without additional variables in the equation. The trouble with 'comms'. is that there are two ends to the link! ? It is going to be fun doing this when the system is 1000 km away as I what I'd really like to do is put my own observatory PC on it..... I have no direct experience of the Eagle, Sara how stable do/did you find the USB connections?

OK Tom, I now have a compatible version of TV up and running. No opinion really, I just report what works for me! ?

Hi Tom, I think a TeamViewer session is called for so that I can see this in real time as there are too many variables to evaluate this issue currently - I will look into updating my version of TV to make it compatible with your version.

@Tom OD Did you get any further with this or did I 'kill' the thread ?

No, there is nothing else you should have done providing that you carried out a sync and that the sync was a CalStar Init. Your first ever sync must be a CalStar init, not an Offset Init as the former is permanent whereas the latter is transient. .... and now back to 'Skyfall', I'm afraid!

The dialogue box underneath the 'Tracking' button should also be stating 'Tracking' so this is indicative of an incorrect initialisation. There is no reason why you shouldn't use POTH (I do because it suits my way of working) but this isn't a POTH fault anyway. As ever, simplify the test by purely supplying power to the mount with no other software running and then run Sitech by itself. If you unpark, does tracking now work or do you still get the same display (i.e. 'Reading Servo Parms')?

Yes, I was wondering about that too!

Thank you for that, Alan, I shall have a look on t'Internet for that tutorial!

My pleasure! I hope you find it useful, Scott - it's working every time for me now whereas before, I found deconvolution a bit of a variable process!

This would be my understanding of why I only use Moffat sample as well.

Thank you for the link, Wim, I will have to study that one very carefully!

There is no significance to the page number as this 'chapter' isn't in any way associated with either 'Dark Art or Magic Bullet?' or 'Making Every Photon Count' - this is a chapter from my own personal reference manual (I do like to document the stuff I learn as it makes it easier to absorb and I can easily refer to it in the future!) and isn't currently being considered for publication. ? I hope you enjoy 'Dark Art'.

Yes, in my earlier days of exploration, we used to call this a 'kludge' That said, as you can see from my article, I use the previews to good effect when testing deconvolution values but for stretching and image?

There are several schools of thought on all of this - of course! PixInsight will process an image from start to finish and it is aimed specifically at astophotography so this has some appeal but this appeal diminishes somewhat if you already have experience of any kind of image processing using PhotoShop! PhotoShop is very intuitive and everything happens in proper real-time so you can very easily see what is going on and make adjustments accordingly, whereas PixInsight is much more mathematically based and, frankly unfathomable to me at times! However, there is more than enough room for both and currently, while I slowly get to grips with PI, I use the best attributes of each.

Yes indeed it is. I do all my preliminary processing - calibration (bias, darks and flats), registration (alignment), integration (stacking) and deconvolution - in PixInsight and then transfer the data across to my old friend PhotoShop where I do everything else.

This is a draft extract from a 'book' that I am writing purely for my own reference at the moment and currently have no plan to publish!

I'd be really interested to hear how you get on with that, Wim.

Thanks Wim, I think I covered that in item 8 of the Luminance Mask but as you say, it is an important step because deconvolution can pick up on background 'noise' and produce additional artefacts. Yes, it is important to have several previews to test so that you can check the interaction between the different components of the image. The biggest problem that I have had in the past is with the brighter stars but the star mask has resolved this. However, I must work on a way of reducing the size of larger stars as well as they still bug me!

I have been working to get a repeatable workflow going for deconvolution of my 3nm narrowband images using PixInsight and having achieved that, I decided to document my process for future reference. I thought it might be useful for other PixInsight users just starting out so here it is. As with all things PixInsight, do try experimenting with different settings, especially if you want to deconvolve wideband Luminance data. Deconvolution Extract.pdf

I love this solution!

I have to say that I prefer a non-belt driven connection if possible and use a direct connection with the drive shaft and focus shaft in line as this way, there is no sideways pressure on the shaft bearing:-

I do not actually use SG Pro, I use MaxIm DL which assumes that I have absolute positioning (i.e. I am using a stepper motor rather than a open loop DC motor which has relative positioning) but I don't have an encoder on my motors. I know that my system (SharpSky) also works with SG Pro so as you are using stepper motors too, you should be able to define your start position for the telescope configuration in use at that session and produce a 'V' curve on the fly. Again, this is what MaxIm DL does and SG Pro as well to the best of my knowledge. It is only FocusMax that retains the values for the 'V' curve run for use in subsequent sessions.