kirkster501

Would rather they get it right. Just imagine…. “who left the eye piece cover on?!”

The other good thing about NINA is that you can often use the native driver as opposed to the ASCOM one.

I know Alan. I am equally terrified, I must say!

I take it you have the latest drivers for your ASI Andy? Maybe post the message on NINA Discord chat and one of the guys will get back to you on this.

James Webb Space Telescope Registration, Wed, Dec 22, 2021 at 7:20 AM | Eventbrite

A week on Wednesday it is set to launch. Just so many single points of failure. In most engineering systems we try to eliminate as many of these as possible to reduce as much entropy in the system as possible. On JSWT there are a dozen mission critical failure points with no backup, to say nothing of the launch itself. The most critical: 1. The High gain antenna HAS to deploy as do the solar panels. Pretty low entropy there but they can never take anything for granted. 2. If the sun shield doesn't fully deploy there will still be a mission but a drastically degraded one 3. The bus tower HAS to rise up 4. The secondary mirror HAS to deploy - zero mission otherwise. 5. At least one side of the foldable mirror HAS to fold out. JWST needs at least 15 segments. 6. The radiator HAS to open Pls others 😱 Gee whiz, scary stuff or what?!!!!! Let's all keep our fingers crossed. If it works it is going to be a bonanza of astronomy science this next few years Has everyone got a launch pass to view it live next week? Steve

The advanced sequence Stuart. I'll ask on the NINA Discord app.

To me that looks like light pollution. DBE should get rid of it - or whatever gradient extraction tool you use.

Sorry and I know its sounds a ridiculously simple question but every time I save a sequence at the bottom left, when I next come to load the sequence it is never seen in "lolad sequence" even though there is a "M45" file there. It seems to want either a .json or a .XML file. What am I missing guys please?

Yes, the largest SCT production scope that is made according to Uncle Rod.

Music is mildly annoying but a very interesting video nonetheless.

Before I built my obs I regularly set up with brilliant clear sky, got one sub and then it clouded over. I wait for an hour, still cloudy so call it a night and bring the stuff in. Of course, five mins later it clears. So I wait to see if it remains clear, and it does. So I get all the gear out again and set up again. Two subs in, it clouds over (again). I wait an hour or so to see if the cloud has set in for the night and it appears it has. So I take it all in for the second time. As soon as I have done so and just going in the house, it clears. Ahhhh, I say to myself, it'll cloud over again soon. But it didn't and it was clear for another ten hours. ^^^^^We have all been there. Equipment hokey-cokey, in-out-in-out.

The halos in the middle could be caused by reflections or stray light into the tube. It can have weird effects.

Yes, watching S@N is very refreshing after the abomination that is "The Universe"

I have (or rather "had") them recorded and sat down to watch the first one last night excitedly. I know these kind of programs are mass appeal and very high level to us as an enthusiast audience but nonetheless had reasonable expectations that at least it would be something like the recent "The Planets" series that would be entertaining. However, I abandoned 20 minutes in. A complete load of tosh. It didn't even talk about the stars in any meaningful sense. Lots of Coxy walking around on beaches and staring wistfully into the distance with a bit of CGI thrown in all with a bleach bypass colour LUT (for those that understand videography) in order to give a dramatic look. Complete and utter cobblers and I've deleted the other recordings. I watched "The Guns of Navarone" instead . I am not sure who the intended audience for this is supposed to be. What a complete waste of license fee money and Co2 to travel to Iceland and film it all. It is not Coxy's fault. It is the terrible writing and lack of any content and direction.

When this fails it is normally always because the image scale is set incorrectly. Why not share your file here with your FL and pixel size to see if we can solve it?

Took me about six nights to gather this four and a half hours of data I was cloud dodging so much in the crap skies. 90 minutes of 300s exposures in each channel. I thought I'd set it in a slightly wider field. FSQ85 reduced @0.73 with G2-8300 and Astrodon RGB filters binned 1x1. I am moving away from a separate luminance, I do not think it is necessary if you have at least two channels at 1x1. Seeing and transparency absolutely rubbish. And a crop of the centre. I would love to be able to get rid of that mottling noise in the sky background.

You are correct, it is the folks with the SCT/newt equivalent aperture not the £56000 refractor owners who are often the ones who justify.

Different horses for different courses. People have a tendency to subconsciously (or even consciously) fanboy their own product choices to justify their own bias/purchase to themselves which gives an opinion of dubious value in weighing /all/ the alternatives. I have seen these debates get very emotive on CN, something we have thankfully avoided here on SGL. I own three types (refractor, SCT and Newtonian) and actively use all of them. But I still maintain there is something quite magical about large refractors, in my opinion of course. My "main" visual scope is my 12" Dob but for the moon I just love the TEC. All my AP is done with refractors (TEC and FSQ); there are, in my opinion ,enough variables at play with AP that eliminating collimation issues is important to me in the cloud infested UK. All scopes have their own place in the pursuit of astronomy, If your main interest is exploring the Herschel 2000 objects and you have a dark sky then a very large Dob would be great for you. I can't do that in my skies so I am biased towards refractors. Different horses for different courses.

Yep large refractor territory gets very expensive for the scope, mount, observatory etc. There are people who buy them though. Yuri at TEC makes ten or so of these per year.

There is a reason that large refractors are still made. For those that can afford them of course! A TEC 250 refractor costs $56000 or say £44000 + import taxes and VAT so this scope were you to buy it would run you the thick end of £60000. The same aperture as a Skywatcher Dob 250 for £539. 120 times more expensive. There is a reason for that. Views through such a refractor would be sublime, all else being equal.

^^^^Fabulous

A lot of it comes down to the stretching process and overly aggressive background extraction. People go way too aggressively and end up cutting out much of the data they spent so long in collecting.

Astro imaging is a complex field in both hardware and software. There are plenty of books on the subject. You cannot distill such a complex topic into an easily digestible set of steps any more than you can learning to play the piano or guitar or learning a language. You need experience and need to feel your way a bit. Ask questions in the beginners imaging section and people here will gladly assist you.

The Heart Nebula is an object worth imaging in its own right. It does not always need to be with The Soul Nebula. Your image is super but there is a lot more faint nebulosity around the Heart (and Soul for that matter) that I can tell your data contains but you haven't quite pulled out as yet.