MalcolmP

Thanks, very interesting link. Nice typo ! Some would certainly call quantum phy. to be the Road to Perdition

Amazing what the night shift gets up to when left unattended, with no stars to distract them ! sorry bout that

Oh yes, watched it since the start with William Hartnell, he was the best. It went seriously downhill later, especially with the trivial, comical, Tom Baker. * That was not a typical ubiquitous British phone box - we called them boxes over here, not booths- The typical public one was glass paneled red painted - long gone now, put out of action by the coming of the mobile phone, (hence my attempt at humour involving bell and ringtones) Are public booths still common over there ? * I am in serious trouble now, because most people would have you believe Tom Baker was the best, but by the time he arrived TV was a popular past-time and few youngsters were by then brought up on books of good hard science fiction.

What is a phone booth ! Was it something medieval, ante3G ? Like antebellum, before ringtones, I'm trying, very !!

I would guess :- That which the Scots suffer when they fall over whilst using haggis on hillsides, to emulate the English habit of cheese rolling ? "Gamekeepers" are obviously, therefor, Ghllies. (aka Gilies)

When I saw the title I thought it was going to be about them interrupting you "hello helllo whacha doin then", like the police frequently do when I am out and about late at night ! At least the police usually soon move on.

- - and to bring my attention to two objects that I can add to my list of things to investigate thanks for showing. If it were me the easy way would be to put the original in a .zip and attach that to the post. Then we would have something to play with, in all it's glory, during these cloudy days in England

Hi, may I ask - which version of DSS was that with ? I have pottered about with DSS 4.1.0 & CR2(on an old slow Windows7) for quite some time, but only recently started getting a bit more serious, (on account of ageing eyes !) and was going to upgrade to the latest DSS (as well as ASTAP) on a newer W10, but if support for Canon CR2 has been dropped in DSS maybe I will not bother ! Thanks.

As @Elp says, dont bother with calibrating yet, just put in 2, or more, CR2 lights and lets get them stacking first ! Then we can add some Bias (dark subs at the shortest exposure you have, say 1/8000th). Leave flats till later Opinion varies on the forum about Dark subs of the same exposure as Lights cos of the difficulty of getting them at the same sensor temperature in an uncontrolled camera like a DSLR, some opinion favours only Bias , , but that is for later , , , ! Good luck.

Dont set it too low, aim for 40 +/- stars for starters, you dont want it picking on hot pixels. No need to convert , my DSS 4.1.0 takes my CR2 from my Canon 60D so it should stack your 100D ok.

Thanks very much for the guidance Han, and it is good to know that ASTAP can sort the matching temperatures for me !

Very interesting, thank you Han. What do you use to form the two stacks, I think maybe make two master darks in ASTAP then treat one as a light ? What do you then use to do the subtraction ? I have put a CR2 dark frame in the Lights tab and another CR2 dark in the Darks tab and tried to Stack, not surprisingly it failed ( I had expected that several darks in the lights tab would fail on account of no stars to align on, but perhaps with only one frame it would not try to stack lights, just subtract the dark, but it was more AI than me and rejected my little subterfuge ) I have asked myself the same three questions about my DSLR and the problems of controlling the temperature (and knowing what sensor temp. the temp. of the camera represents !) and posts on the forum suggest that I should not worry and only use bias and no darks with my Canon 60D, but it would be nice to try the experiment on it.

I like it With a bit of luck the clever engineers at ZWO will have designed in a slipping clutch to guard against unfortunate accidents, , , and mad genii So perhaps you will not have to test your sample to destruction for us all !!

Recently I have been having a lot of fun with just a camera + vintage lenses on a tripod, but wasting a lot of imaging time finding where I am pointing in the sky, with more time the following day stacking and processing. Then you all tempt me with a very interesting topic on this new-fangled S50 device thanks to everyone for showing, very tempting indeed ! Just out of curiosity [my note taking in-situ is probably worse than Geoff's ] I ran a couple of @bf79 Brian's through ASTAP and it IDed them from blind no bother :- reduced screen grabs so not best quality,

I am no expert ( I just like playing with posted images ) I was about to post similar to @ONIKKINEN - - ASTAP opens it as a single colour image with a stack count of 5 and a total exp of 10sec. So yes it is the result of a stack, not the individual subs to be stacked. Gimp opens it as 3 layers, one named and the other 2 it calls 'background', no indication as to which are the R,G & B layers. Nice M57, and ASTAP also picks out (only just visible) IC1296 close by !

Thank you, that is exactly what my tiny brain-cell was driving at, but not being a biologist I was unsure of. Yes, it was the arrival of (cyanobacteria ?) photosynthesis that produced the oxygen extinction event(s?) Till now I had not come across the relative importance of dms, so yes I'll take the @saac imperative to sit back and wait for the radio sigint to arrive

and be prepared to say "Yes sir, Mr Big Bear" after they finish playing tag in ufos Thanks yes, I see, but I was meaning dms produced by life that is not producing oxygen. As you say dms on earth is mostly a consequence of life but so also is massive quantities of oxygen at the same time, one without the other is, perhaps, on the unlikely side of the scales? So it is best to say " we have detected dms as a possible sign of life" rather than " we have detected dms but without oxygen is is unlikely to be a sign of life"

Which we presume they looked for and didnt find, especially Oxygen, but the beeb item at the top of the topic didnt say either way. I have found a NASA item about it and that does not say either, which means that they did not find any - as that is an indicator of higher life forms. When it comes to peer review would that be a problem if they had not looked for Oxygen ? Can DMS be produced by any non-oxy-producing life (as we know it Jim) ?

Only about 120 light-years away ! not far at all, I wonder if it has been on Frank and SETI's watch list ? Not too far away, I could be there in a few years to have a look-see, at a decent fraction of light speed, but I wouldn't see you lot again and would have trouble reporting back home !

" few million years for the DMS producing lifeforms to evolve and then develop radio" Good afternoon all, How do we know that "they" did not already do that Xbillion years ago, and stopped using it Xby +100y ago ? Our use of multi kilowatt transmitters (mult megawatt erp) is probably coming to an end soon after only 100 +/-y Thinks - I must reinvestigate this planet/system - how far away is it? Do we have the tech to detect their radio if they are still using it domestically. I mean domestically, not deliberately beaming a "hello" towards us ? But I really jumped in to say :- Darwin's survival of the fittest is very persuasive, so I am with the "keep our heads down" brigade.

Good news : Success Thanks to you all for your help. The clouds cleared last night and I was able to test "in the wild" under real conditions and it worked well. The king-pin app was Helicon Remote as suggested by @knobby, thanks great find, it gives the user the choice of which folder to use to store the downloads. So I was able to set one that could be accessed by the wifi remote PC. One gotcha worth mentioning for anyone following on - when HR goes to sleep it turns live view off, sensible enough on reflection, but when the tablet also went to sleep I did not see that when I broke the system down to bring indoors. Panic resulted later when I thought I had bricked the camera, it could still shoot but live view didnt work ! Eeeeek, it was some time before I discovered the setting in menu that allows lv to be disabled/enabled !! Phew!

Ah! I wonder : The Google app says "this application requires downloading the star database (H17) " and "Updated on 29 Jun 2022" but Han recently made a whole new set of data files, and methods The H17 is still downloadable but prob moved the location. How you download it and move it into the app is above my paygrade for Androidy things I dont even know how to run a cmd line cli.exe on Android but the cli for widows is a doddle

I presume that is you asking "Android app" on the ASTAP forum ? That is the forum of Han Klein, the author of 'ASTAP, whereas Yaz Saito appears to be the author of the 'Astap platesolver' on Google Play ??

Argh! "not available for your device" grrrr. Need a new tablet

Thanks but yes, sadly, more than "just" I am doing this to solve locally without my slow internet, ie in seconds instead of minutes, ASTAP is indoors on my win7. If all else fails a fallback position of smaller jpg from the camera to see how small I can go (to shorten the upload time) and still get astrometrynet online to accept them.