Lumos

I bought one in the UK from DarkClearSkies.co.uk. It arrived as promised within a week. UK dealer with full support. The only downside is that it seems to generate clouds over much of southern England.

I guess if they used a guide sensor with large pixels and high gain they could get fast guide speeds. I have to believe that ZWO would not have produced an in camera guide system that does not play well with their AM5 and its fast guide requirements. Also do ZWO not know that mirrors do not invert top to bottom? See how that knob moved from the top to the bottom? (Is that what Quroboros meant).

All wifi equipment tends to give the maximum range and that tends to be outside with line of sight and no obstructions. For indoors they are referring to US style houses and not my 30cm UK brick walls or my 80cm stone walls in France. Stone just attenuates WiFi. In France with a thick solid interior walls I have WiFi transceivers in every room, it is just physics. the ASIAir of course will continue to capture data all night even when you are unable to connect. If you want to check progress open your window. Do you really not have internet in your observatory? If you do then an Ethernet cable to your ASIair Plus will make you much happier. Then you could access it from inside on your home WiFi.

Good point, when I installed Hocus Focus it changed the defaults for me to use Hocus Focus, but it may not always so you should definitely check those options.

I just spent 15 minutes trying to find this in Lightroom. I think that Lightroom solely uses the Prophoto RGB colourspace, but I have no idea how it maps your original photo to Prophoto RGB. I never use Lightroom so my level of expertise is close to zero, but I still suspect that the colourspace is the problem. In photoshop if you want a border just change the canvas size to be a bit bigger than your image. For cropping the letter c is your friend. By definition a RAW file does not have a colour space, and there is an option to assign one on import into Photoshop along with the bit depth .

I have rarely come across this, and it was always due to my tomfoolery, once I had mistakenly used a 2.5mm barrel connector for the power in, that would cause reboots of the ASIAir Plus, other times due to poor USB cables and hubs. I really doubt that it was directly caused by the upgrade, but in my cases it was a consequence of it (i.e. I took it off and put it back on differently).

Look closely, that is a super collectible Takahashi 18th century 2" wooden refractor. £3000 on eBay al day long. You're Welcome.

https://www.pixelskiesastro.com/contact They replied to say that their current facilities are full but they are building a new one and are taking reservations.

I found the book 'The 100 Best Astrophotography Targets' a good place to start. List the ones that interest you then play with your app (I like Skysafari Pro on my iPad) and fast forward thought the year with the Canaries as your location to see when your target is in the best position.

So easily done I feel for you, and really I would like manufacturers to put some protection in. I did have a look on eBay to see if there was an old HEQ5 pro you could cannibalise.

Just to expand on WIMvb, if you start the Pixinsight process Blink then add all the light frames you can look at each one to see if there is an obvious problem. That provides one stretch preview to all your images but if you select the top button here it will do a stretch preview on each sub separately, and they may give you a greater insight. Normally the default settings on WBPP has a reasonable rejection level but if your are having problems then you can increase it, but I suspect that your images are useable but have noise in the images that needs to be addressed that only becomes visible when you are trying to do a background extraction.

I believe that your ICC profile is to help your printer match what you see in the monitor. I was referring to the colourspace that the image exists in. There are several places for this to get mixed up, going from Pixinsight to Lightroom and especially going to your printer, you need to make sure that your printer is going to respect your colour space and not try and help out by doing another conversion. Here is what an sRGB image reports as in the bottom left corner of Photoshop You may have to click on the little > sign to change what it is reporting. As this is only an 8 bit colourspace if you hand it a 16 bit colour image you have way more colours than can fit into 8 bits so it clumps groups of similar colours together, and that gives your banding. It also screws up the colour balance.

One lesson that I was slow to learn was the importance of integration time. Loads of integration time. I started an M101 project this month and I reckon at f/7 I need something like 20 hours of RGB and I am going to add maybe the same again in Ha as it has some really interesting hydrogen pockets. The first time I opened an image with lots of integration time I could not believe how clean, detailed and contrasty the image was. They are a dream to process. Having said that, the OP is in Rutland and took several attempts just to get 7 hours. I think my plan is to keep my RASA 8 in the UK for the odd break in the clouds here and keep the Esprit 150 in SW France for summer shooting. I had not appreciated how dispiriting it is trying to catch the odd photon in England.

Often when I see results like that it means that I have screwed up the gamut, or colourspace. Usually I will be displaying and Adobe RGB image in an sRGB colourspace without having done the conversion. It looks like you have Lightroom trying to display colours that it does not have in its gamut so you are getting blotching as it groups your gradients into the dolours it has got.

When I started in astrophotography I went straight to Pixinsight. It was such a great decision for me, I simply love the application. Its metaphors are different but when you get the hang of it it is a thing of wonder. Check out Adam Block's tutorials and maybe just invest in his Fundamentals course Adam Block Studios Adam is an extraordinary educator. I think that Pixinsight gets a bad reputation from people who tried it and tried to use it using intuition, then they say that it is complex and hard. Sure, it is complex but it needs to do complex things. However, so much is automated with great defaults you can get the benefit of its extreme power without the extreme brain damage. Their Weighted Batch Pre Processing on default settings will assess all your subs, apply all the calibration frames to them, sorts them out, aligns them, does cosmetic correction and so much more at the push of a single button. Often I just tell it the directory to work on that is jumbled up with bias, darks, flats and lights and it automatically works out which flats to use with which lights.