Gumminess8083

Hmm, interesting observation! I'll try taking everything apart once again and re-tightening all the parts! Am I correct in assuming that fixing this would require me to open up my scope?

I do indeed use NINA, so I'll try that out next time! I also have a small update—I remembered that I had taken some test shots while trying to figure out the best exposure time for my target the other night, which were taken before the meridian flip, while my normal LIGHTs were taken after. Here's a comparison: S filter before meridian flip S filter after meridian flip H filter before meridian flip H filter after meridian flip O filter before meridian flip O filter after meridian flip If the problem was caused by sensor tilt, I would see the "gradients" in FWHM always in the same corner, since the image would always be aligned with the camera. In my current situation, the gradient seems to be flipped by 180° after the meridian flip, suggesting that this is not caused by sensor tilt nor collimation errors, but by sommething else altogether! My best bet would be the guiding, as my mount is not that good at tracking currently. I should get a belt conversion kit for it soon, though, so maybe that will help me fix this problem. ...This is as far as my knowledge can take me. If there's some other factor at play, I cannot figure out what it could be, beside astigmatism.

Is there any way to do it with an autofocuser? Or even to fix it at all? I usually let an autofocus routine take care of it, so I would have to find a way to change the settings on there. Anyways, looks like this weekend is gonna be pretty clear, so I will do some more tests, such as rotating the camera and taking some more measurements with shorter exposure times, so as to eliminate other variables such as tracking, etc. Hopefully I'll be able to sort everything out, eventually! Thanks again, everyone. I'll report back if I have news

OK, I finally have an update! After months without a single clear night, I was finally able to take some pictures yesterday and the day before I have included all the measurements in the following album: https://imgur.com/a/T4GqSd8 All pictures were taken with the same setup, in the same position and without moving it. The first night was perfectly clear, while the second was quite hazy, but I decided to shoot anyways, just to see if I could get something decent out of it. I have also included some old pictures before "calibrating" the sensor tilt, to see whether it made a difference. Now, I am not an expert, far from it, but, from what I can see, considering that the camera has been clibrated and should now be flat, the problem still seems to be present... Could it be that the problem lies with my tracking? I tried using the guiding help tool in PHD2 for the first time, and it seems that my error is around 3400 ms. If anyone has any further ideas, I'd be happy to try them out Edit: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1-H2JRX_zegJOhZemnRRRL9razu7LcvnZ?usp=share_link I have uploaded some of my new shots from these past 2 days in here Edit 2: @gaz81 Thanks for the suggestion! Should I still attempt to collimate my scope, even if it's a refractor? I read somewhere that refractore don't usually need to be collimated

Update: Just had a chance to try again last night, and, after reinstalling everything one more time and re-checking all the settings, it is now working! Thanks for the help, everyone!

Thanks for the suggestions! I'll try again using default values and see if anything changes, although, besides changing the algorithm to PPEC and changing the step size, I don't think I've changed much. Unfortunately I cannot image too close to the equator, and my mount is located in my garden, and it can only see a specific window in the sky. I guess the biggest problem for me now would be waiting for a clear night.

I did try changing the values in eqmod, as I later realized I had the RA set to 0.9 and the DEC to 0.1, but once I tried seeing if it worked, it was already too cloudy, unfortunately, and the reading were messed up, as per my last post yesterday night. As soon as there's another clear night, I will try and see if it works

could it just be the clouds messing up the readings? I double checked my polar alignment both with the polar scope and the three-points polar alignment tool, and it was perfect within 2 seconds at most

It's already at 1350, automatically calculated... Maye I should change the minimum move?

Thanks for the suggestion! I actually wanted to try that first, but I didn't want to have to redo all my settings without being sure that it would fix the problem. Since it did the trick for you, I will try and see if it works edit: no candle. The graph still shows up as empty... Actually! As I was writing this message, it started working! Hopefully it isn't just the clouds moving around... I'm doing another run and it still shows a dead graph... This is strange

The scope does move, and the cables are connected via Usb, so there shouldn't be any problem, as I could clearly see from the guide scope.

I initially started with 0.9 and 0.1, since I forgot to change both of them, but I later tried with both set to 0.9 and it made no difference whatsoever

yup, I have both set to 0.9

Hello everyone, I just started using a new pc for my setup, and I installed everything copying the exact same settings from my old one. Unfortunately, I seem to be unable to calibrate PHD2, since the program keeps telling me that the stars are not moving enough, and the history graph is showing nothing. Could anyone help me figure out what is going wrong? Everything worked flawlessly with my old setup (altough, admittedly, I haven't had the chance to use it in a month, since the skies have been cloudy). I am ataching 2 log files from tonight, just in case. Thanks in advance! Log 1.txt Log 2.txt

Thanks for the suggestions, everyone! While I was looking into all your recommendations, the theft have been continuing (they keep robbing 2/3 houses every night, and the cops haven't managed to stop them yet), but their area of operations has moved a few cities away from mine, so it looks like things may be getting calmer... For now. As I try to decide which option is the best for the long term, I have set up a temporary solution. Since the pc connected to my mount is not accessible from outdoors, I have changed the windows sound for when a usb device is disconnected to a very loud siren noise, and I have set it to max volume and connected to a pair of Bluetooth speakers. One speaker is indoors with me, while the other is outdoors. Since, if they decide to rob me, I don't think they'll try to take everything away (the mount is quite heavy), they'll probably try to at least get away with the camera and scope. As soon as one of the usb drives gets disconnected, windows will start playing the siren noise at max volume, waking me up and, hopefully, scaring the robbers away. I have already tested the system and it looks like the sound was loud enough for the neighbors to come to my house asking if everything was okay 😂 Let's hope this works in the interim!

Sorry to hijack the post, but I was wondering something. Is starting from the home position really that important? I initially set my home position with my mount perfectly aligned, pointing the scope straight forward (I did this like a couple of months ago). Now, whenever I bring my scope outside, I don't really bother pointing my scope forward perfectly. I just start it wherever it is, usually pretty close to home position but not perfectly, polar align, and then platesolve, which usually fixes any error I could have made and properly recognizes the scop position relative to the home position. Is this procedure wrong? 'Cause so far it hasn't caused me any problems

Hello everyone, I usually set up my rig in the garden, right outside my window. I have recently started using a laptop, but I tend to keep it between my blinds and the actual window, so that should be pretty safe. I cannot say the same about my camera and mount, though... While I have never been that scared of theft, recently there's a group of thieves going around and stealing from medium to big-sized homes, and my house fits the bill perfectly. Does anyone here use any theft prevention methods? I was maybe thinking of buying a scooter alarm, but I'm not sure how much help that would be...

I have made another post on here showing some examples of what I assume to be tilt. I have tried taking everything apart and putting it back together, so I'm gonna shoot some exposures to see whether or not that has solved it, otherwise I'm going to try and move one piece at a time to see whether anything changes and make sure that it is actually tilt. No luck today. It's currently 21 and the sky is super cloudy

@scotty38 @RolandKol @geeklee I have proceeded, under the assumption that I have mistakenly taken all my lights at 30 offset instead of 2, proceeded to redo the whole thing. I shot all of my darks, flats, and dark flats with 200 gain and 30 offset, just to test whether the theory held any value. You can see the results for yourselves in here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1YliX_I4YkaKUSjJqnf061Lj7rF7Xnq1W?usp=sharing I hastily made this combination just to see the results: As you can see, while the problem seems to be mitigated, you can see that the patterns are still clearly visible in the background, although less, when compared to the previous results. I'm not really sure what is going on, but I guess I'll just have to put the data aside for now and wait for another clear night to run some more tests. The weather forecast changed and it now says that it's going to be clear this coming Saturday, so I'll leave my scope out and shoot the same target (making sure that all my settings are correct this time), just to compare the final results. (Not yet 100% sure on this, as I'd first like to run some tests on whether or not my camera has sensor tilt)

I know what you mean! What I was trying to say as well is that I did check those options and made sure they were correct (by clicking on the gear), but I changed the cables around, which may have reset them to default (although I cannot be sure). While in the NINA app you can directly change the gain even with the Ascom driver, you are forced to use the cog to change the offset, so I am thinking that maybe I did actually shoot at 200 gain and default offset (I believe it was 30 as well). Since I have plenty of things to try out, I'll test this as well tonight and see if it makes any difference. Edit: Actually, I have the stats plugin installed, so I should have a json file with all the info pertaining to each shot I took!

I did initially use the ZWO driver, but later switched to the Ascom one since I was having troubles with PHD picking my main cam as a guide. As far as I know, though, I should have used the ascom driver for both lights and flats in this imaging session (not sure about the darks, but I am sure that those had the right settings).

I'll answer the question regarding offset first: If you see my first comments on this thread, pluse the first piint of Vlaiv's reply, you can see why my offset is so low. Keeping gain at 200 and offset at 2 allows me to have the minimum pixel value slightly above 0 when integrating some bias frames. As for the flats, I'm not really sure how they could be underexposed, as I took them with NINA's flat wizard and made sure to keep the histogram at 50%. As I mentioned previously, I'll try retaking ALL the calibration subs tonight and see if I can get everything to work. Maybe I changed some value by mistake without realizing... I tried checking in pixinsight but, while it looks like I can see the gain value clearly for my lights (it's 200), the offset value is not using the same unit of measure as NINA, so I have no clue what the value presented to me by pixinsight corresponds to in NINA...

Huh, this is strange. I thought I took them both with the same driver, but oh well. I tried opening them in pixinsight but the offset value for the lights is not using the same unit of measure as NINA, so I'm cannot confirm that it's 2, but it should be. As for the other question, I'm not really sure where I read that, but it was a post going around the internet. Since my gain was so high, I was looking into whether I could take my lights and flats at a different gain and offset value to be able to get my RGB flats decently, as my sky flats were too bright. For the new ones I will use tonight, I made sure to use the same exact settings as my lights, but I'll reconfirm it later when I get home.

(Not sure why this update was posted as a separate comment instead of an edit, but oh well...)

If you mean camera offset, then yes, 200 gain and 2 offset (although I read somewhere that it's not necessary for flat frames to have the exact same gain and offset as the lights). If you mean filter focus offset, then I haven't bothered too much with that, since the filters are supposed to be parafocal.