fwm891

He has a dark witch in front of him - but hey he's got a blue laser so no problem...

Many thanks Olly for those kind words. Early days (2 days!) with the RASA and the 2600MC Duo so getting used to what they will give me. After reading your comment I've run some tests with the star image from the NAN-Pelican image using RC-Astro Blur-XT (taking a small croped area so I'm not here all week!) and I've ended up running both the stars only images with a 0.35 setting for sharpening and leaving the halo setting at zero as the halo is reduced anyway. So I hope these are more to your liking. In for a few days of poor weather now so time to experiment further. Good to get comments from others about how images can be improved. Many thanks

Rob, if you look back through the moans on this forum it’s a wonder anyone is still practicing this hobby. People here (me too) will moan about the weather whichever way it swings. It’s a great hobby. You’ll get frustrated and elated all. In the same evening. USB cables will have rude words uttered on a regular basis but you’ll gaze at that image as the detail unfolds before you and all the woes will vanish… Until the next night… Dip in with some used kit first to get the hang of things. If you get hooked then start emptying the piggy bank.

I have been through that type of situation with kit in the past where moving either a loaded tripod or tripod plus kit in smaller units. One thing I did after many nights of setting up getting my PA etc was to mark (the patio) in my case where the tips of the tripod legs touched the ground and next morning drill 3 holes in the patio just big enought to take the tripod leg points. Mark one legs as always in X direction (mine was nearest the kitchen wall) if you can leave the mount fixed to the tripod so much the better. Any little routine like that where bits of kit can be left assembled as units so fewer operations are needed to get going will speed up both set-up and take down time.

Still playing with the RASA 8 and IDAS NBZ filter combo. I like it as there seems very little in the way of halo's from brighter stars. This is a 10x 240s combo from last night (22-09-2023). Processed in PI only. AC Astro's Star Exterminator used and the two parts of the image processed together. However the star/nebulosity image is from the initial integration. I didn't like the two part offering but did like the neulosity only image.

This year has been bad, worse than most. An observatory of some sort helps, even just a pier with the mount set-up so you don't need major PA's each session. Set-up and break-down are often the off putting stages because they're basically non productive so reducing them or removing them is a real bonus. I have a RoR obsy and my set-up is usually plugging in a power lead to a wall socket and connecting my laptop to the mount/camera (oh and rolling back the roof!).

Shot last night as a test for my newly aquired (new to me) RASA 8 and IDAS NBZ filter combo. Captured with an ASI2600MC Duo unity gain, 10x 240s subs and processed in PI only. I used RC Astro's StarExterminator to remove the starfield and processed the nebulosity separately. The stars were simply given a saturation boost before recombining. I regreted selling my RASA 8 a few years back and I couldn't resist this when a fellow club member decided to sell his.

My Duo has red leads. An older usb 3.0 lead in the Obsy will not connect to the Duo, all other cameras are okay ? Not sure if it’s to do with the extra traffic from the inbuilt guide cam.

Grand imaging Dave as always.

I’m using Nina’s framing which is great, even shifting the frame outline around in an oversized fov, and it will plate solve to that framing (with manual rotation) but what I haven’t been able to do is plate solve another image and import its details into the framing assistant to control the scope… Not using Stellarium, that’s like my small rig using ASIAIR plus foot framing/GoTo.

I have a couple of images I want to add more data to but they're not centred exactly on their NGC parent body. Whilst I can call up the parent nebula and use a wider FoV and play with the frame rotation I can't seem to get close enough to the original framing to use the new data without having to crop the miss alignments out during processing. I'm using the same scope/camera format for the new captures as the originals...

My first real session with an Askar Ha / OIII 6nm filter I purchased recently. With the moon having recently gone 'super' it was only going to be a short session before it raised it's head above the horizon. However. I shot 10x 300s subs through my Orion Optics (UK) VX10 with a TS 1x coma corrector and ASI 2600MC Duo. gain 101. Capture and scope control via NINA. Processing used PI with RC StarXterminator so I could process stars and nebulosity separately. I used red and blue masks for the nebulosity after splitting the background image and discarding it's green channel. Enhancing the red and blue channels and applying them separately to the background image and applying saturation and curves transformation through the red and blue masks. The stas only image was given a small boost with saturation and stars and background images reunited with pixelmath. Hope you like.

I reverted back to 1.8.9-1 which cured everything. PI have now issed a new release of 1.8.9-2 which I’ve installed and NXT, BXT Etc are all fine. I think they got some egg on face for the previous update.

Result of 10x 300s subs. Unity gain (101) ASI2600MC DUO, Orion Optics (UK) VX10. No filters. Processed in PI. I think I've hit the saturation button a little too hard...