Killpond

I did another edit on it.

Really enjoying PixInsight to be honest. The book I got has helped alot. That was 10x 300s Ha, 10x 300s SII and 5x 300s OIII. Didn't get chance to finish the last 5 OIII's as heavy cloud set it. And ZERO calibration frames 😄

Finally got a break in the clouds... This is my first atempt at an edit, not sure how I feel about it.

Also just finished editing this. Very noisey but I think that's just due to me not exposing on the narrowband for long enough? 68 Cygni

M31 taken on the 12/09/2023 Askar FRA400, ZWO 533MM Pro, EQMount, ASIAir + Pixinsight Full story leading up to it :

After more tinkering with PixInsight I have this...

Thanks! I watched this today and it really cleared up a lot of questions I had around sub exposure timings. In my bortle 5 zone with this lens and camera I think, based on that video, that 60 second subs for RGB(L?) and 500 second subs for narrowband are what I should be aiming to use.

This was last night. It's just 3x 5min R, G, B filter images combined. Still learning Pixinsight.

It's the 533MM Pro with the 8x1.25" wheel with ZWO LRGB, H-Alpha, SII and OIII installed in it. Managed to get it all up and running just before the light went. Got initial focus using a TV aerial in the distance. Think the camera is upside down at the moment but everything seems to work so far.

I had to get creative with the counter-weight but she weights in at bang on 11lbs

I have the same floppy 55-200mm lens clunk... clunk... clunk... Not the more reassuring noise for a lens to make 😄

Ahh the joys of Fuji again The lens focus (and other rings) is fly-by-wire so turning the focus ring does nothing but tell the camera to change focus that in turn instructs the lens to move inside the housing using some complex electo-magnetic guide rail (at least that's my understanding of it). As soon as the power is taken away the lens just flops about inside (Not even joking, you can hear it). So yeah, this solution would be fine if it was a manual lens, but unfortunetly it's not. I'm problem solving with the right tool for the job I guess

Ahh, I see what your saying. This could still be an issue I guess since the weight distribution means the Fuji is pretty much centre and the guide scope is off axis. It's frustrating that Fujifilm is so poorly supported globally. Not being able to dither or use it as a main camera (at all with the ASIair, or limited with INDI) is really annoying since I'm spending time solving issues instead. I'm pretty much pulling the trigger on a Askar FRA400, ZWO 533MM Pro, ZWO EAF, ZWO EFW 8x1.25 and filters at this point.

Good shout but when I aligned them they were pretty well matched besides the vertical alignment. Just checked on astro tools and suprised at how close they are 😮 They also both have roll adjustment, the Fuji lens in the collar and the mini cam in the scope. If I could add more vertical offset to the guide cam they would line up perfectly. Think I got lucky with the magnification.

Yep, it's one long Dovetail they are both mounted on. I can freely rotate them but I've also removed the clamp from the camera lens shoe to lower it, trying to bring them level. Now it's just bolted directly to the dovetail plate.

I've just finished aligning them so they don't look cock-eyed anymore and they were not that bad before.

So last night I PA'ed using the guide cam, as the main cam in ASIair, down to a fraction of a degree, then did a goto to M31 and it performed the goto, did a plate solve, repositions a tiny bit then confirmed it was centred and started tracking. I then switched the guide cam from being the main cam to being a guide cam in the ASIair and started guiding. All good so far. Then I took some exposures with my 600mm camera that's mounted about 5 inches to the left of the guide cam and no M31. I took the images from the card of the Fuji cam and plate solved them on my main PC to find I was off by a little bit. So it's just dawned on me that I think I need to align both camera's to the same point in the day time in order for them to both have the same goto location? Is this right or will it still be off due to the distances involved? Aligning them both to a tree off in the distance is a little different than a galaxy light years away right?

Phew! Good to know

The "GOTO" worked once I disabled the feature that needs a main cam to plate solve so it knows the goto was correct. Polar alignment and plate solving using the ASI mini sounds cool but will PA work if the cam is offset to the right of the axis? I have the cam and guide cam left and right of each other and the mount rotated 90 from normal. Will this offset cause the PA to be out of line? I'm also intrested to see how far off my focus has been. The focus on Fuji is by wire so I can store a focal point in the lens to quick snap too. Looking forward to seeing how far off it was once I put the mask in place.

I picked up this book and a Bahtinov mask today. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Deep-sky-Imaging-Primer-Third/dp/0999470949 Fuji does work with INDI and I think ASIair uses it under the hood. Not sure what technical reasons ASIair has for not supporting it, but I know first hand that the solutions out there right now are far from ideal. Best I could get from using anything INDI based was still limited to 20 seconds of delay between shots caused by, I think, the way it encodes/decodes the RAW image using base64 encoding. Also never managed to get FIT files that were anything other than gray. I was holding out that ASIair would allow for a simple shutter release setup where I could at lease configure the camera then use the shutter release to take exposures, allowing for dithering, but unfortunetly I can't find anything that would allow me to do this. I'm happy just to have guiding for the time being and I'll be looking at getting a cooled astro cam at some point in the future anyway.

It doesn't work with USB but I didn't expect it to. I'm just using it for guiding and goto. Looking forward to getting more compatible devices (camera, filter wheel and focuser).

Ok, autoguiding is amazing! This is a 4 min sub at 600mm. Very impressed!

@Space Oddities thanks for the advice! I just ordered a load of bits from Smallrig off Amazon and the ASIAIR Plus 256 version, guide scope and camera from FLO.

Thanks @Richard_! And thanks again for all your help to date! Really tempted to pick up this for guiding https://www.firstlightoptics.com/guide-cameras/zwo-asiair-plus-asi-120mm-mini-and-mini-guide-scope-bundle.html but I need to figure out how to mount it next to the X-T5.

Took this of M13 last night with the 600mm but out of 30 x 2m subs I could only use 4 as the rest had trails.