knobby

2 hours ago, Stuart1971 said:

NINA will never be ported to Linux, so don’t hold your breath….👍🏻

I know ... Sadly but never say never 🤞🏻

On 27/03/2024 at 22:01, Rallemikken said:

You said it yourself.

Allow me to elaborate: Do you regard the control of your AP-rig as missioncritical? I do.  Windows was never considered. Soon ending my third full season, and never missed a minute of capture time. How? Linux.

It never stops to amaze me. Highly technically skilled folks, able to master a complicated AP-setup, and they lay their software foundations on Windows?

When NINA works on Linux , I'll be on it asap.

Love mine too, 0.75 second guide exposure works well for me, usually sub 1 arc sec guiding.

Haven't touched mine for months as we're moving ... From bortle 7 to 8 to bortle 4 though, so looking forward to that !

Rough guide is to aim for 3 to 7 times the size of camera pixels as F number.

Your scope is f13, so no barlow is really needed in your case.

5 x 2.9 = 14.5

Hi Francis, I use (when it's not cloudy, so very rarely) an HEM27 with Ipolar. I've been very happy with mine so far, carrying a 72ED / 1600MM / Mini EFW / Guide scope and camera. The ipolar is nice but a bit superfluous as 3 point polar align in NINA or Asiair works well and is free. Mine tracks at around 0.7 rms  which is about as good as I can get in my local seeing.

Also carries my C9.25 (when well balanced) for planetary.

Hi, a 150PDS is a 6" scope (the 150 refers to mm) but as Michael said, measure it's diameter just to be safe.

Agree with all of the above !

A few others I like ...

AZ4runner

Icemanastro

Galactic hunter

Astrobloke

Delta astrophotography 

Northern panorama

James lamb

Your favourite astro-nerd

The narrowband channel

And a couple of newer ones, youngsters that remind me of early Trevor Jones.

ORyanastro

Astrotan

Man I watch a lot of you tube 🤣

In my defense it's always cloudy in Essex!

After lunch, I had some time to see the sun before an online meeting for school at 3pm, then I took my acromatic 80/400 to the terrace with a wide-aperture solar filter placed on a photography tripod. As soon as I see the sun I say "WAW!!", there are a lot of commercials and I wanted to do (as I always do) a sketch but there isn't enough time. I decide to take a shot with my old smartphone and, looking at the photograph, I am amazed by the large number of spots there were, other times the results were poor. I share the photograph with you

From some Googling his name is Ian Lauwerys, North Essex Astro, seems to have posted on Linkdin 5months ago so hopefully he's ok.

NINA and APT both free,  have polar align by plate solving.

They both give similar results to my Ipolar.

The AZ-gti is a great little mount but won't track reliably in Alt Az mode.

You mentioned an EQ mount, you could get a small guide scope and camera for less I would imagine, thena wedge and you'd be able to do 2 minute subs easily 👍🏻

But that's a great start though .

Nice effort, in leue of flats you could try Graxpert, free application.

About the noise / artifacts It looks fine on my phone, I suspect it's jpeg compression of some sort.

I tried saving as a PNG but it looks very different now 😀

Processing really is a dark art !

Very nice !

this is how I use registax (varies each time of course) tweak the wavelets, then up the denoise when it gets noisy.

If you're just getting into this you might want to use AstroSurface, this seems to be quite popular and is updated, Registax is now pretty old but I stick with it as I'm used to it.

https://astrosurface.com/pageuk.html

Cheers gents, I've been into planetary for about 8 years but with some large gaps. So much to learn and relearn 🙂

I will be trying to process the other runs later but 'work' gets in the way.

Hi all, here is my effort from last night. I took 18 runs through very variable seeing from around 9.30 to 10.30 hoping to catch Io and GRS.

This one is the best of the bunch (so far) 10.28 pm.

This is probably the best I've ever managed from my back garden, hope you like it.

3 minutes @ 170 fps approx 30000 frames, best 800 stacked in AS3, tried wavelets in Registax and Astrosurface - preferred result in Astrosurface - tweaked colour and saturation in photoshop mobile.

C9.25 - ZWO 224mc - ADC - 1.6 x barlow works out to F16.

Thanks for looking.

Nice result, there's a lot to be said for grab and go setups in the uk !

Looking good.

Ah, if you don't like the stars you could try Starnet, it's free ! worth a bash !

You'd need to get more time on it to improve things, nothing wrong with that image, with only 1 hour of data it's going to be fairly noisy.

Thanks for this ... thought provoking !

Our garden floods (clay soil) get something like this https://www.diy.com/departments/einhell-dirty-water-pump-370w-power-9000-l-h-submersible-pump-drain-floods-empty-hot-tubs-and-pools-gc-dp-3730/4006825587203_BQ.prd a decent length of hose and leave it in the hoe you've dug.

15 hours ago, orion25 said:

Alternate, softer takes on the above images. Check these out @geoflewis:

 

Much better ... In my opinion anyway ,👍🏻

I run my HEM 27 at 0.75 seconds, many people suggest short guide exposures due to the PE on strainwave mounts. I have tried 1, 2 and 3 seconds just to see for myself and although not much difference I stuck with fast guide exposures to 'conform' 🙂

What I did find helped was PPEC in PHD2, I can see a definite improvement usually after about 10 minutes.

I do only get down to about 0.7" though but I think that's just my poor local seeing. 

I guess it's in ZWOs interest to 'tweak' the output of PHD2 on the Asiair, It's a bit like having your Mum being the judge of your own court case 😂 so I can see where you're coming from.

ps  - that must be the strongest coffee tin I've ever seen !