OK Apricot

Do you have a multimeter? A continuity test would give you your answer 👍

I'm not really sure but the likelihood is that organic material is more reactive than say airborne dust etc. It's recommended to remove pollen, I'd guess for the same reason - organic lovelies can damage and degrade the coatings. It's a doddle to clean, just take your time with warm soapy water, gently using a few finger tips to massage the surface - you will get a feel for the larger and more stubborn specs this way, so you don't end up scraping these across the surface and damaging the coatings. You won't feel like you're cleaning anything, but after a rinse with distilled water it will come up gleaming 😊

Coming from a living creature I'd clean it if it were me. Mirror out, shower head on warm, dish soap and a gentle massage, rinse with distilled water.

I'm not sure what your demands are, but can vouch for the Anker 251 for astrophotography. So far I've got several good 7hrs+ imaging sessions on this and I usually finish up with around 35% charge, that's after having dew straps set to 50%, camera cooling around 60% and a big old EQ6-R slewing and tracking. A very well made piece of kit and charges in no time. A good chunk of cash but you get what you pay for - https://www.anker.com/uk/products/a1720?utm_source=google&utm_medium=search&utm_campaign=uk_anker_pps_conversion_search_powerhouse_purchase_ost&utm_content=powerhouse&utm_term=16922666765_138611941427_593281729343&gclid=CjwKCAjw2OiaBhBSEiwAh2ZSPwJI5upjqfrBpMUlsSX3drZ1KzP8DPiUidxGDmwNFGPOOnGOC4_A3BoCMHsQAvD_BwE&variant=42529253589156

Just popping in to give a +1 for the Evoguide 50ED. I use it mounted on my Skywatcher 80ED and EQ6-R. Just the other night I'd got everything setup to give the ASIAIR Plus its first run and it was guiding as low as 0.36". I took my first proper image with the 50ED using the field flattener - its a very respectable wide(r) field scope. You can guide it with your 80ED once you adjust the settings. I decided on this as you essentially get two scopes in one. Oh, and it looks beautiful in green against the red 😍.

Thanks Olly. I will try to give this method a go at some point. Still very early on in the stages of learning processing and photoshop as a whole, so give us some time and I will report back. So far with the short time I've had practicing with StarXTerminator I've found that I first do a couple gentle curves, then sample the black and white points, balance the RGB levels, a couple more gentle curves and after that is where I run starless. It seems to bring the stars out enough to be able to do things with them, see any defects etc but not so much that they start to bloat.

Sure - Going to be fun playing around now that I've got this for reference, and once nailed down I can maybe think about trying to imitate the hubble palette with HOO.

Enter the Evostar 80ED DS Pro kit, with a case to store both your 2" diagonal, finder, reducers and spacers 😎

I bought the Anker 251 which has been excellent. It has managed my rig for 7hrs+ so far on a single charge only dropping to around 35% having slewed to a couple targets with an EQ6-R, camera cooling at 60% and dew straps at 50%. A decent option for the money.

I managed to find a tutorial on youtube, exactly the thing I was looking for with respect to creating a starless and star only layer, manipulating and merging the two at the end. This is what I came up with after following along with the tutorial. The first was my first go at the Crescent, the second with StarX', separate layers and blending. There is obviously a lot of room for improvement here but I was just excited to see the difference, an almost 3D effect. Again I welcome any criticism! Question - These purple/pink haloes around some stars - Where are they coming from? I shot this with the ZWO Duo Band filter, could it be here? Focus looks good to me, a result of stacking?

Trying to get rid of some packing popcorn, FLO? This large box had an ASI air and two cables, the rest was padding - love it 😂. Seriously though thanks @FLO once again, this really made my day after being told I may not make the latest shipment next week, let alone it being delivered this afternoon! Now, what have we got in Warehouse 2 👀

@ollypenrice, @Elp, thank you both for your replies - plenty in there that should keep me busy for a little while. I will be back soon I'm sure!

This would lead me on to my next question. I don't know how you go about combining different images. I've tried looking fit tutorials but I'm not really any the wiser. I use Photoshop CC. Say I can calibrate each stack correctly (deep exposure for nebulousity, shorter for stars) and produce two images to process in photoshop - how do I actually blend these together? I downloaded the free trial of Starnet 2 and am trying to get to grips just with that - once the stars are separated I have no idea what to do about processing the stars separately. I've tried doing a select and mask, but can't seem to copy that mask to a new layer. Even then, I don't know how to merge those layers. Thank you for your advice on the flats and stacking though. I'll see how I get on.

Hi guys, I'm new to imaging and a little confused by the use of different exposure times in one image. Take this screenshot for example: Are these different exposure lengths all put together at the stacking stage? Are they stacked separately and merged in processing? Another question - how do we go about flats over multiple sessions on one target? If I had 3x3x3hrs on a target, do I take flats after every 3hrs or do one set of flats at the end and stack them all in the same run? Sorry if a silly question, I've tried searching and reading but I'm not sure if I'm finding the answers.

I'm assuming the mount hadn't started tracking, but a thought that's just occurred to me is it could be that the solve began before the mount was settled. Not sure but the stars were not round.

I found this as well. When I first started using it to get familiar (before buying my imaging camera) it was set to 3 seconds and worked a treat. I then got the imaging camera and with a dual band filter had to increase exposure time as 3 wasn't enough. I went up to 9s which lead to trailing so the solve would fail every time. I lowered it to 6s and its worked without issue.

Hi all, So I wanted to start to really pull some hours in on one target rather than a couple here and there on different ones, and this is the start of that. I feel like I'm starting to get used to photoshop now as well, and really enjoyed seeing the colours and details start to pop out at each stage! I may have gotten carried away, but it looked pleasing enough to my eyes for the start of a longer project. Again, criticism most welcome but thank you for looking Just over 6hrs (77x300s) with 20 darks, Skywatcher 80ED, ASI533MC-Pro, EQ6-R Pro, ZWO Duo band filter, captured through NINA, guiding at 0.5-0.6" with PHD2 using the Evoguide 50ED and ASI120MM-Mini.

Thank you both 🙂. As far as retaining natural star colour, is the best thing to do to make a mask and separate layer for stars before any stretching and do the two individually?

I had a play around whilst out imaging tonight, taking a few things on board. I've not downloaded any actions or tools but just been patient with colour sampling and balancing, and gentle with adjustments. A lot of my stars still look clipped so I'm going to have to look into StarXterminator sooner rather than later! Here's what I've come out with... Something I'm a lot happier with anyway.

So I had a little Google and found this It's highly probable that my issues are coming from being on battery power, no? It seems too much of a coincidence that my first hour of sequencing is fine then it all goes pear shaped as the USB ports are limited, disconnecting my equipment? I will disable this feature and report back once I've been back to the dark site - you guys might have helped me crack it 👍

@ollypenrice thank you for this. I will install these tools as soon as there's some money spare - I'm not even there yet and Vegas is taking my money 😂. As far as colour balance, I used the eyedropper at the start to find and balance the white and black points as best I could - I possibly lost sight of this throughout the process. I need to develop a consistent work flow. @Elp your take looks a lot sharper than mine! There was no noise reduction applied, just curves really and a bit of star reduction. I really appreciate you posting your work flow - I'll refer back to this in the coming days and see if I can get things to improve. I am planning on some Ha with this soon - I've done the same with andromeda and love the red bits popping out! @Paul M another nice and sharp take. I look forward to using some photoshop actions here as it looks like they can make a big difference in a more simple way. Could make learning and fine tuning a bit easier if it takes the load off, as it were. @scitmon so I'm assuming here that there is some uneven colour in my background? This was shot UV/IR under Bortle 5 with street lights nearby - would this explain it? @DaveS a lot of big words 😂. What's the reason for splitting RGB? Again very nice take. Having seen a few of your efforts, I feel like there needs to be more data, maybe some longer exposures to try to reach those fainter parts of the arms and bring some more dust out?

Hi guys, Just wondered if I could borrow your expert help and advice. For the last few weeks I've been getting by with GIMP, but felt like the images I saw on the screen during processing were waaayyy different to the ones I saw once saved, uploaded to FB etc. I decided to download Photoshop to help give me some more tools, techniques and control over my images. This is my M33 from friday. It was shot with the Evostar 80ED and ASI533MC-Pro with UV/IR filter from Bortle 5 sky, moon around 35% illuminated. The transparency and seeing was only "OK" by my reckoning. I've been playing with this for several hours this evening to try to spit out something resembling a respectable astro image, but I feel like it's very soft, very bland. I've watched a couple tutorials on balancing colour levels, masking parts of the core to bring up brightness around it etc. I just wanted to see what you guys think really, and see if you could improve on this if I posted the 16bit RGB file. Any tips and criticism greatly received! Autosave16bitRGB.tif

Can't have it all 🤷. They'll know my sky was clear when I turn up scruffy and tired from being out all night 😂

You know what, I'm being a complete fruit cake. My FOV doesn't really extend out to the arms so there isn't a lot of colour to be had anyway. I did the same stacking process with M33 and M45 and they were fine. I will post the stacks of M31 though, both the RGB and Ha, but will be later on tonight. Thanks for the tutorial videos - will take a look as soon as I can.

Hi guys, I'm probably having a brain fart moment or could be missing something, but I'm not getting any colour out of DSS on my Andromeda data? However I am getting colour on M45 for example. I don't change any settings, just let it do its thing, but maybe I need to change something for this? I'm using 30x180s lights and a master dark if that helps. Using ASI533MC-Pro Also, I have some HaOIII data for Andromeda that I got through the zwo dual band filter. I'd like to combine this into the RGB image to add the Ha but not sure how to go about that? Sorry if a dumb question but I'm new to all this still!