engstrom

At the moment I think it’ll stick with the adaptor I have and when the skies clear give it another bash and hopefully I can get focus. I’m reluctant to bag that one on Amazon as I don’t really need a dual pack plus there’s a 1-2 month dispatch time and the one I originally ordered from the Svbony Amazon us store kept getting pushed back.

Ironically that’s where I started off. I ordered a 226 but the delivery date kept being pushed back until it’s now marked as unavailable via Amazon. It seemed to be out of stock everywhere unfortunately.

Nice image of m101. It’s helping see just how out of focus my own attempts are :-)

Ah! I thought I did have the correct bf from the sensor but I’d forgotten I needed to add an adapter between the camera and the extenders. Now I just have to wait another three months for a decent night’s viewing. Thanks for the impetus to take the train apart and recheck. Hopefully that might sort it.

It’s an asi585. I have 55mm between then camera and the reducer. The filter is before the reducer attached directly to the draw tube.

Update on my efforts. I bought a 256gb sd card and installed astroarch rather than astroberry. It seems much more stable and the plate solving worked pretty flawlessly. This in turn helped with the PA. I think I’m now in a good place to do some serious attempts at imaging and maybe adding some guiding in (if needed when I try longer exposures).

So after initial successful attempts imaging (finally getting my raspberry pi to behave itself) it seems a further step to improve focus and image quality is the addition of an ir/uv cut filter. I bought a 2in filter and one of these after reading comments but i find now I can’t achieve focus. I have the filter in the adapter fitted into the draw tube in the 2in collar, the focal reducer attached the adapter along with the 55mm bf extenders and then the camera. The image gets near focus but the I run out of inward travel in my evosfar ed80. have I basically got the purpose of this adapter wrong or am I making a mistake in my image train?

I have all of them downloaded on an external usb hdd attached the pi. I am running all the devices from a powered hub and I’m within a few metres of my router (although I might try a powerline adapter to improve the downloads for online solving)

I’m getting that way but as funds are limited I just have to hope I can figure out why performance is so spotty/variable. i tried astroarch today and infuriatingly the platesolving was spotty (online failed every time but I’ve got offline “working” - slew to target doesn’t move the simulation mount…not sure if that’ll happen on the night).

Yes, it’s a great achievement by the team but for me it’s ultimately frustrating. I’m probably additionally hindered by the fact I’m Mac-bound as this limits my choice for alternatives. It’s infuriating as the first time I tried it, it worked pretty well but since then it’s refused to play ball and I’m at a loss as to what to try next to remedy it.

Going to give this a go. I've just about had it with Astroberry. Another 5 hours wasted trying to get it to work. Frustrating when the first time I used it, it seemed to work pretty well. Not changed a thing and now it's an exercise is frustration. PA using plate solving took ages to start showing the updated error...then it didn't show the correct updated error (no ,matter how long I left it to capture images)...and then refused to plate solve 9 times out of 10 no matter if I used online or offline (actually it just seemed to hang if I used my local indices). I even tried it native on my Mac but the plate solving didn't work there either. Online plate solving fails instantly, offline just spins and spins and spins....

I guess it depends on the size/design of the mask though? I self printed one for my 80ed and I definitely do need really bright stars for it to be of any use. But having said that; yes! They’re invaluable. I went from “I need an EAF!” To “I can spend the money on something else!” Overnight.

An utterly frustrating and baffling night for me. What promised to be 3-4 hours imaging of clear sky turned into a night of fighting against various things. First for some reason my Bahtinov mask seemed to only produce a blobby mess of colours with no indication of focus no matter how bright or dim the star I aimed the scope at. Focus looked “ok” without it via captured images but for some reason it was impossible to get focus even close with it on. Finally relied on eyesight (risky I know at my age) and started PA using Indigo A1…and it utterly failed giving me errors of 1000s of degrees and slewing to utterly baffling orientations. Tried Kstars on mac. For some reason the INDI server kept stopping and starting and the profile i was using was deciding to drop equipment randomly. Tried Kstars via Astroberry for the pa. Used the online solver as for some reason when I use the downloaded indices it just hangs and eventually fails. It solved images fine but when doing the PA routine the updated error kept failing to update.I ended up aligning a bit, noting the error then starting the whole alignment process again hoping I could get closer. Finally after about 2.5 hours after setting up I was ready to go. Find m101 and use Kstars to slew to target in the solver to resolve the syncing and it just danced around the centre of the screen for another 30 mins sometimes getting close then suddenly losing it and having to try to home in again. Finally just settled for “near enough” and started imaging. Clouds rolled in on image 3 of the sequence..Bah!!! It’s patchy cloud so I might just let it run and see if I can salvage some images.

I know your pain. Last week I used Astroberry with virtually no problems. Tonight I spent 3 hours wrestling with it (and Indigo A1) and captured exactly nothing. Last week platesolving went pretty much without a hitch and was solved within a few seconds. This week…it just seemed to stall. Up to 5 minutes with no results sometimes. After some false starts with indigo I got the platesolving working, got it polar aligned and all seemed good but then it would slew off to weird sky positions that certainly weren’t what I was expecting. Anyway it seemed to sort itself out and pointed in the right part of the sky but always just off the target…and despite the PA error being reported as within acceptable limits there was obvious tracking issues. Bah!

Handily the app doesn't let you save a corrected file as a fit. I'm just about to try as an unstretched, auto WBed tiff. loading an un-autostretched but auto WBed tif into affinity now shows all three channels but they’re too far from the left (which makes sense…I guess…if they’re not stretched). The pain in the bum thing is you can only load the fits in singly to the asi viewer before saving them out… And there doesn't seem to be a way in the capture app to specify what WB to use.