Dann

Evening everyone,

Lucky enough to take delivery of my first ever dedicated astro camera yesterday (2600mc pro) Amazingly it's clear tonight so I'm working things out and doing some tests.

I have a question about the histogram as it looks quite different to how it appeared when using my DSLR. I usually stick to 300sec exposures and when using my DSLR this moved the peak of the data in from the left by a good margin, 20% or more depending on the moon phase. However as you can see from this screenshot the histogam peak on a 300sec exposure with my new camera appears in APT to be clipping the black point as it's against the left hand side.

Is this the case, am I interpreting this correctly? Any adjustments I should be making?

I currently have the gain set to 100 with an offset of 50. The second histogram is a 600sec exposure with the same settings.

Thanks all

Very nice, is that up in Capel le Ferne on top of the cliffs? 

I live in Folkestone and have family in Capel, keep meaning to try the Milky Way from up there.

Hi Geordie john, 

Welcome to SGL. 

Hi all,

A few weeks back I did something a little silly. I was behind the mount in the 'looking through the polar scope' position, the guide scope looked out of alignment with the main OTA and thought I would give it a little adjustment. Thinking I had hold of the guide scope with one hand I loosened the thumb screws and the guide scope and camera slid out and hit me right in the throat, bounced off quite nicely. Thankfully it was only a ZWO mini guide scope and camera. 

Felt a bit bruised for a few days and no harm done but it got me thinking. Anyone else happy to share any astronomy related mishaps and injuries? I'm sure they're quite common seeing as we fiddle around in the darkness 🙂 

Hi all, 

(UPDATE: Astrobin have contacted me to help resolve, they think it may be a bug specific to my hardware/upload options. Happy to hear it's only an isolated thing.)  

I've looked for information on this else where but haven't been able to find anything.

Whenever I upload an image to Astrobin it always appears to add a slight blur to it, removing a lot of the finer detail. In fact I can see it happening, if I click on an image in someone's profile I briefly see it nice and crisp before being blurred a second later. This happens with all of my own images and it's annoying to share links with friends/family only for their first impression to be a blurred image. Anyone else experience this?

Clicking on the image to enlarge it solves the problem but I find it quite disappointing when first scrolling through my gallery and seeing them like that. First impressions and all that. 

There is lots of information out there regarding how to maintain quality when uploading to social media but nothing I can find for Astrobin. I didn't expect a dedicated astrophotography site to do this but I guess some sort of compression is being applied? Does anyone know a way of avoiding this? Is there an optimum aspect ratio, resolution, file format etc for Astrobin uploads or am I missing a trick?

Thanks in advance 
Danny

Hi all, 

I feel like this is probably something I'll find out for myself and maybe a silly question but providing its clear tonight I'll most likely be performing my first meridian flip in combination with plate solving in APT. 

Once passed the meridian my intention was to slew away to a bright star (something already past the meridian), check focus and then use a previous sub and APT's GOTO plate solving feature to slew back onto target. My question, will APT be able to identify the target is past the meridian and plate solve using what effectively will be an inverted image when compared to the new desired position, or will it just slew me back to where I was to begin with (pre flip)?

I know APT has an automatic meridian flip feature but I haven't really had a chance to look at that yet. 

Thanks

Welcome Alex, I'm from Folkestone and have a similar setup to yourself. 

Happy to help anyway I can. 

Dann - how was it last night? any improvement in DEC graph?

Well I must thank you all for the help. Last nights guiding was much smoother.

All I changed was the Calibration step up to 2000 and the Max dec duration to 1000 and to 1500 towards the end.

Below is the graph for about 2 hours guiding, off out tonight to see if I can fine tune it a little more.

Thanks again.

Ok, up and running. I've left it going for half an hour and hope to return to a better picture.

I've balanced the dec at horizontal ever so slightly mirror heavy and changed 'Max dec duration from 150 to 1000 and The Calibration Step from 750 to 2000.

Definitely made a difference to the calibration, it only took 15 steps in each direction as supposed to 40ish.

I await the red line of doom :-)

Thank you. Ill tinker with the above tonight and let you know how I get on.

Thats interesting Bill, pretty much the same oscilations I have. Ill keep you in the loop with anything I try in the hope we can find a solution.

Apologies for starting another 'guiding problems' thread, since starting to guide I have been unable to achieve good guiding in the declination axis and I’m hoping someone may have some ideas.

Below are the guiding graphs for three separate nights, the top two were in a similar part of the sky, M33 and M45. The last one was in the direction of the Dumbbell.

Each night was very still so I doubt it had anything to do with the wind and I’m in a reasonably quiet village so no heavy vibration. At first I was poorly balanced in declination, I’ve since solved that and I’m happy that everything is nicely balanced now, although it doesn’t seem to have solved its tendency to imitate a ride at Alton Towers. Should the RA and dec be deliberately and slightly unbalanced at all?

I’m guiding a 750mm focal length 150p with Orion’s 50mm guidescope and I’ve read I should up the calibration stop value from its default, so I’ll be giving that a try. At the moment it takes around 30-40 steps to calibrate each direction, could that be the cause? Any other settings I should look into? Currently I have everything as default apart how quickly the camera takes an image, set at 3sec.

Oddly last night’s guiding was great to start with and I managed to take this single 8 min test sub of M27 (longest so far) but after 20 mins or so it went mad again.

Any thoughts or ideas I can try?

Thanks

Danny

These are my first two, apart from a shot of Albireo prior to these.

As I now have something to be proud of I can share my first few too.

M13 and M27, both are around an hour worth of 30 second exposures with darks, bias and flats.