OK Apricot

That honestly looks absolutely spot on! Reasonably priced enough to give it a go, and not a tragedy if it doesn't quite work as intended. Easy to install and then put away, maybe a bit of an eyesore but we will get it past the Mrs one way or another lol. A couple of those would do nicely. Thanks for the suggestion!

Despite the time and effort I put into making The Astro Podium, The number of opportunities to do some imaging that I miss is growing. With work and real life, not to mention the appalling weather the past year, I am finding that I just haven't got the super powers needed to pull a 12+hr shift, cook for the Mrs, do housework then set up in the garden knowing I have to stay awake to tear down again before getting some morsel of sleep, only to feel dead on my feet the next day. Unless I'm lucky enough to get a clear night on a Friday or Saturday, a lot of the time I have to pass. But I was thinking, if I could leave the scope outside safe enough to put my mind at ease, I'd surely be able to increase my imaging time. I feel like I live in a rougher area. I had a van broken into within 4 months of moving here after all! Our garden backs onto the public footpath in what could be considered a high footfall area (there's a streetlight above my garden - it must be, right....😒) Last year I decided to use some savings to get a fence installed. A bit of neighbourly tension helped to justify another reason for a fence, which was to raise the height needed for anyone to be able to look over as they walk by. This has helped somewhat, but it's not enough peace of mind for me to leave my kit out overnight. With limited space and certainly limited funds until the wedding and H-moon are done, I was thinking of something along the lines of a "portable" observatory. Think of a windbreaker at the beach, then four of them...? It would help hide my scope from the people that I don't want to see it, and with a 250PQ I need to try to shield even gentle breezes. Has anyone made something out of say PVC piping and black tarpaulin? If so, is it as easy as I envisage? Is it practical? Am I wasting my time building a cube lined with dark material within which to place my rig?

Naturally I'm going to struggle to bring my whole rig inside to point it at the telly, it's got to be in the region of 60kg, don't fancy that with a bulging disc. Could I use the t-shirt and the street light? It's a bright light source albeit more "orangey" than white?

A3 tracing panel it is - eye-watering prices for flat field generators at FLO! I'm wondering if this is reflection of stray light, well when doing flats the panel will then block that light and that light won't be there to correct, and instead will have the opposite effect in stacking... If that makes sense? How best to do flats in the mean time with this? White t-shirt over the aperture and pointed at a white light?

No flat frames taken for this, nope. If I understand the cause of the ring I can understand how to remedy it, but at the moment I'm not sure. This cam has been used many times on my smaller rig from the garden and I've always managed to produce something decent even without flats. I guess the only thing to do is try things and see what happens.

I did try a few different combinations of Gradientxterminator and reverse vignette in camera raw filter but no real joy.

Managed to get out tonight to get a proper test image - just over an hour's worth of 60s subs. Ignoring image aberrations, I'm loving the reach! Having only shot with 274mm and 514mm focal lengths, it's great to get up closer on galaxies! Anyways, I've not yet sealed the scope against light leaks, flocked the tube, or collimated properly. Here is a very quick process in DSS and Photoshop: Most obvious is the diffuse rainbow like ring, almost perfectly centred in the image. Firstly, as you can see from one of my pictures a few posts up, I unfortunately have a bright street lamp high above my garden. Even though I've shielded it myself as best I practically and legally can, I'm thinking that maybe stray light from that is falling on the front corrector lens and the camera is picking it up. Shooting M51, the scope is pointed loosely in the vicinity of the lamp. My primary isn't yet shielded so there could be spilled light coming in here too. Second, I see vignetting, or is this a trick on the mind due to the rainbow circle? I use an IMX533 sensor so doubt that it's actually inadequate field illumination? Third, it's a bit out of focus - Not fitted my EAF yet and haven't got a bahtinov so it was just a best guess. There was trailing all in one direction so I'm going to say this is down to the slight breeze catching the tube and making the mount struggle. Guiding was only around 0.95" for the short session. Otherwise the shape of the stars is consistent so I'd like to think that I'm pretty much spot on with backspacing. Does this look about right considering the handicaps?

It's a while since I had my 200P dob and after a few attempts felt like I was getting somewhere with it, but not sure I understood properly. I might need some more simpleton tuition 😏 Make outer edge of secondary concentric with inside edge of focus tube. Make full primary mirror visible in secondary. Align primary centre dot with Cheshire crosshair. Something like that? I am reading and watching about it again and feel like those are condensed steps to get there.

Thanks chaps, makes sense. It doesn't look like the draw tube is protruding into the light path. I've also had a more concerted look through the bare draw tube and a Cheshire and I'm fairly confident the secondary is not concentric with the draw tube so there are adjustments to be made there. A mirror mask is in my cart along with a few other things. I feel like I'd like to learn to collimate properly with a Cheshire so will hold off on the OCAL for now I think.

Not sure if this is the correct sub forum so mods feel free to place it somewhere more suitable if need be. Recently bought a 250P Quattro and have been dying to get it outside to see what's what. I just wondered what exactly I'm seeing here, normal or not? I took a few 10s shots of Alkaid. In focus (or close to it - I was rushing as thicker cloud was coming in) looks OK. Out of focus I see it needs collimating - Fair enough. In past focus there are 6 "imprints" within the halo of the star. Pinching from the mirror clamps? Is it normal? Is it something else? Also managed a quick 120s shot of M51, which, while guide stars were visible, surprised me. It was breezy and this thing definitely has some surface area to pick it up, I had 10kg of counterweight on the EQ6R extension so not ideal, and the guide "star" did not resemble one in the slightest. This is fine - A counterweight is on the way and I'm fairly confident in sorting the OAG. Pleased enough from the first test. Under strenuous conditions, it can produce round stars and a decent sub frame. What can you experienced guys/girls tell me about this? Cheers!

Mine was the same when I had one. Never an issue for me as much as a little build quality/design niggle.

An entire half of the season gone with about 2 usable clear nights. Dire. When I was in Vegas in October those reds were greens. I hate this country's climate.

I've actually found the guide logs from the night, attached here so if anyone can make sense of them I'd be most grateful. Autorun_Log_2023-11-24_183033.txt

Can anyone help?

Making the most of a crisp clear night last night, I left an autorun on the ASIAIR. 14 sub frames in, the guiding started to play up. It seemed to be in RA only, but would wildly swing from one side of the graph to the other, and looking at it, it resembles a response to an instruction to dither? I cancelled the autorun and guiding and checked everything over - The balance on both axes (slightly east heavy on RA), for any cable snags, stiction on the axes, cable connections, that the mount was locked down after PA, anything loose, but couldn't find anything obvious. I recalibrated the guiding and resumed autorun. After 3 subs, it did it again. I cancelled and restarted. After 3 subs, again. After a meridian flip it seemed to run just fine. I've loaded the SD card into my laptop to have a look at the guiding log but there is no log there. I wonder if the firmware or whatever itself that controls guiding has thrown a bug and needs updating? Really not sure. Sorry about the bad pictures, but just to help illustrate. Any ideas? Light_Flaming Star_300.0s_Bin1_gain101_20231124-215407_-5.0C_0027.fit Light_Flaming Star_300.0s_Bin1_gain101_20231124-201302_-5.0C_0014.fit

Wow! Thank you so much 😊. Must've been a tough vote as the submissions here were excellent. Congrats to the other winners and well done to everyone for the really good images 🙏

I've been watching a few tutorials the last couple days in the hopes of learning my way round Pixinsight. As far as producing an image goes, I'm happy enough. However, I'm fairly decent with Photoshop and if this was the result I'd be kicking myself! Strange background, blown stars, but otherwise it seems I've managed to keep hold of the dust and colours. I couldn't really tell you what the workflow was here, if you could even call it that, but I used DBE, SXT/NXT and played around with the curves a little. First is Pixinsight, second is Photoshop, and a side by side screenshot from my laptop (speaking of which - am I being silly to expect Pixinsight to run efficiently on a laptop? It's an ASUS Vivobook, Core i7, Nvidia Geforce RTX, OLED screen etc?)

Not much of a better time to do some solar and can make a holiday out of it as well 🙂 Yeah, Dallas was my first option but couldn't stretch in the end. Virgin (to Austin) and tesco clubcard came good by using all of my points to pay for the majority of the flight and car 😁

Booked my fly-drive to Austin for the US Eclipse in April. No real plans, hotel or the usual touristy stuff, but my mini rig will be accompanying me so hopefully can drive out to dark skies as well as get set up for the big show, and just bed down at a cheap motel for the nights wherever I end up. Priority 1) Eclipse and weather forecast. I will be watching the forecast from 5th April when I arrive to be able to hopefully place myself under some clear blue skies. Mileage not a consideration - what needs to be done will be done. Priority 2) Darkness. Might have a drive around Texas and have a peek at some of the larger US star party venues like Prude Ranch, Okie-Tex etc. See if I can find some quiet secluded spots to shoot from. Priority 3) Severe weather. I love nothing more than a good storm so will be chasing the fun weather depending on distance. I'd love to see a tornado, lifetime bucket list thing. Just wondered if anyone else had any plans, was excited to share my own 😊

I went to Fuerteventura in June with easyjet so I can at least speak for travel. Get a robust flight case and get as much of your gear in there as you can allowing for good padding. I paid for upfront seats 1) because I love flying and like to look out of a window and 2) those give you a large cabin bag as well. Speedy boarding can help make sure you get on first with loads of room in the overhead lockers so no chance of crew telling you your gear has to go in the hold if there was no room in the cabin. As for power check the airline regs, but usually they will let you bring on one lithium battery up to 100Wh and a spare but these have to go in your cabin bag. A couple other things - blunt objects could be considered dangerous in the cabin (like counterweight and bar) so best to pack those in your hold luggage. Also, I didn't need dew straps when I went but took them just in case - Gatwick security had a wonderful time trying to figure out what it was that their x-ray machines couldn't see through, and it was the straps. I'd packed everything a specific way to fit it in my small cabin bag and they gutted the thing finding them. I suggest leaving those somewhere easy to get to!

Ah excellent - there's a great spot about half an hour away by car near Las Plajitas. I shot from a little trail off the road there in June 👍

Very nice shots and fun to see the evolution of its phases 👌. Which part of the island are you staying?

This will be my last entry I promise 😂 M31 from my trip to Vegas. This is 90x30s IR Cut, 166x120s IR Cut and 21x240s L-Enhance. The 30s stack was used to HDR blend the core, 120s was used to push the data quite far and bring out the fainter details and the 240s solely for the red speckled clouds within the dust bands. I found it hard to isolate and blend the Ha into the RGB image but managed to get there in the end, though I'm not really sure how. I was playing with blending modes in PS, aligning using the "difference" blend, and I think it was either soft light or saturation that I managed to get the two looking something like what I wanted. Then your usual StarX, NoiseX (gradient not needed here), camera raw filter adjustments, a touch of curves and a bit of saturation added to the stars. I've learned a good bit recently while processing my latest images so look forward to being able to use these techniques for some more winter targets. Shot with the mini rig Sharpstar 61EDPH II @f/4.5, ASI533MC-Pro, mounted on the SA GTI, guided OAG with ASI120MM-Mini, controlled by ASIAIR Plus, EAF. DSS and PS for processing.

This will be a little diary of sorts that I can read back on in years to come, but mostly just to share my experiences on what was a textbook fairytale trip to Las Vegas 2023! The weeks prior to the trip I purchased a new flight case to be able to fit everything in mostly assembled so as to minimise setup time under what I'd hoped to be pristine skies. The flight case used every bit of size allowance on a BA flight, and even though we were flying economy and boarding last, managed to find space in the overhead lockers - I was very nervous that there wouldn't be room left and that it'd have to be checked into the hold last minute! We arrived at the airport, got the shuttle bus to get the car, got the car and made our way to the hotel which was NYNY. The plan for the first two days was to make the 4.5hr drive to LA, however plans changed last minute while we were stopped at a services getting some breakfast 45mins from Vegas. With that, the Mrs gave me her grace to go and shoot that night! Fast forward to that night - I loaded up the car and headed North up I15 to pick up the 93 bound for Hiko, Nevada. Having checked lightpollution maps, it looked like a borderline B1 area as far as LP is concerned, but also stood at nearly 3,500ft elevation. Driving up while the sun was out, it was clear that transparency was a bit down, but I wasn't put off. I had butterflies in my stomach as I approached the areas I'd only been seeing on satellite, the anticipation was strong! I found a great little spot up a gravel road and it was everything I'd hoped it would be. Firstly the Mazda CX-50 rental car was perfect for the terrain being AWD, but also there was a nice clearing off the road to be out of the way and phone signal! Happy days - this looked great. So anyway the sun started to go down and the stars started revealing themselves one by one. I hurriedly assembled the mini rig and polar aligned, and by 19:39 full astro darkness had descended upon me. Absolutely spoilt for targets at that latitude at the time of year, my gut said to go for something familiar, the thinking being that I could physically see the improvements that a dark sky would allow over heavily light polluted home skies. Besides, I shot a couple new targets while on the trip to Fuerteventura so I wasn't desperate to try anything new. I set up an Autorun sequence on the ASIAIR+ on Andromeda, confirmed everythign was running well, and then it was time to kick back and take it all in. I looked up and the skies were just breathtaking. That kind of breath taking where you outwardly say WOOOWWWWW like an excited young child. The milky way core was so much brighter than I'd ever seen it, even more so than Fuert. The main band stretching right overhead from horizon to horizon, you could make out dusty texture and features all the way. I bought a pair of Pentax 10x50 binoculars just for the trip, so got these out and started looking around. Absolutely blown away, but it would be nothing compared to the second night... One thing that was interesting was the size of the light dome from Vegas at a distance of 125mi away. Anyways tired from the travel and different time zone, around 1150 I dozed off in the car with the mini rig doing its thing on Andromeda. I woke up again 0230 to find that my sub frames were coming through with trailing stars! Could not believe it - I'd lost around 2hrs of data because I didn't recalibrate the guiding after a flip. Gutted. Never mind - I recalibrated and carried on for the rest of the night until around 0430 where I packed up and made the 2hr drive back to the hotel in Vegas. This was the night of the 8th October into early hours of 9th. So the next couple days we settled in and took in the sights and sounds of the strip, and soon enough on the 10th it was my birthday. Started off with a nice IHOP breakfast, had a look around some shops, more touristy stuff then hit the booze and the casinos in the evening. We got a bit merry and were playing some machines and actually winning, one machine to the next, until we sat on this particular one... We're making a complete nuisance of ourselves, loud and lairy brits abroad and the game we were playing landed a bonus. We watched and hoped that it would do something good, and BOOM $2769 major jackpot drops in! I don't know who's aware but americans pay 30% tax on gambling winnings in the States over $1200, but being Brits we don't need to pay tax due to treaties or something. It took a good 45mins to sort the paperwork but we got our payout, and got absolutely wasted for the rest of the night. Next morning was a bit sore but I'd made sure to drink water between drinks so I wasn't too bad. Fast foward to next shooting evening, the transparency and visibility looked crisp on the drive up to Hiko, so I was very excited to see any improvements in the sky... Same routine as before, added a few targets into the ASIAIR in Plan mode, and sat back and did some casual observing. What I experienced for the rest of that night was something I will remember for many years. This is how good the sky was.... The darkest sky I've ever seen. Low level clouds were only visible due to the void of stars in the sky that they left. The milky way was so much more prominent even than the night before! It extended in width from Delphinus to Lyra, and was thick with contrast, very very bright. The Lagoon and Triffid obvious within the core area, with M16 and M17, many clusters visible, and maybe the faintest hint of colour through the MW band. There was the most subtle of shadows on the ground just being cast by the light of the sky above, just from the MW and the stars. M31 was a well extended disc who's radius was going right out to the star HD3431, a mag+6.8 star itself, M33 was an easy naked eye object, almost with direct vision among many others. The Veil complex was visible through my binoculars, the Eastern side very obvious and direct vision, the Western and Pickering's Triangle there too but with averted vision. The Cygnus Wall in the NA nebula was there, M33 was a pronounced bright cloud, dust lanes visible in M31, SO MUCH TO SEE. The Helix, Dumbbell, M42, M45, Double Cluster and the list goes on and on. The icing on the cake was during the drive back. Bearing in mind I was not dark adapted, you know, with the many drivers on the roads driving with their beams on, as I looked east checking out Venus I noticed a brightening of the sky, a sort of wedge/isoceles triangle shape extended past M44 toward Gemini. It was the zodiacal light! I was seeing the faintest dust of the solar system disc, very obviously while not even dark adapted on my drive back, for the first time ever! A very strange and surreal sight to be honest - like a false dawn as they say. That felt special. That felt like going back to the barest bones of nature itself. Just unreal, utterly fascinating and welded into my memory forever. The day after, we wined and dined, did some more touristy stuff, and at the Top of the World up the Strat Tower, I proposed to my partner and she said yes! So that's the fairytale! Three jackpots in Vegas - One an actual Jackpot on my Birthday, two the most pristine skies I have ever seen, and three, my partner will soon be my wife! They say things come in threes Thanks for letting me share, and for reading if you got this far. Finally I'd like to share the three images that I produced with photons collected from Hiko... By far my best to date, and with my modest mini rig M31 is an HaRGB total of 7hrs 41mins integration - 90x30s IR Cut, 166x120s IR Cut, 21x240s L-Enhance. M42 is an HaRGB total of 5hrs 2mins. 60x10s IR Cut, 70x120s IR Cut, 38x240s L-Enhance. M45 is an RGB total of 3hrs 17mins. 197x60s IR Cut. Thanks once again for letting me share

I used my 533MCPto gather a couple hours of data on M31 in Ha/OIII to compliment the broadband data, but having spent a few hours on it tonight I'm struggling to find a way to blend the nice red clouds into the RGB image. I use DSS and PS CC. I have processed the broadband stack to a point where it's nearly finished, and the dualband stack as far as it will reasonably go without making things messy. I've tried simply blending the two images, copying the red channel of RGB into the red channel of the dualband image, then copying that back to red channel RGB, but seems to be no good. Does anyone here have any tips? Any work flows that I could borrow? Cheers 🙏