alan potts

Never tried them myself but the Starguiders from FLO have many fans and have been written about but a lot of people on site with their many names. Lots of bang for the buck in these as a beginner I don't see you will go wrong with this choice.

Alan 

I read you need a 36 inch scope to view this so there are some that have Dobs of this size but few and far between, I have tried it with my 18 inch but like everyone else no joy, Sirius is fairly easy from here on a good night but it is a good deal higher in the sky than the UK.

Alan

My understanding of it is the masters are the collection of frames. For example I shoot about 25 Darks at a given temperature with the camera then the same number of Flats and Dark Flats. After that I just use the masters every time. I only redo them if I move the camera in the telescope.

Going back to the days where i just used  a Canon 40D and 7D you can't control temperature, some do shoot Darks after sessions though I never bothered, I never bother shooting Flats etc no matter what the temperature though a dare say the purist would say you should. I think the only reason no one answered is that it got buried in the pile, it happens, hope my limited expierence is of some use.

Alan

15 hours ago, Neil27 said:

@alan potts have you managed to image with the Stella mira 85mm at all, interested to know your thoughts?

I did manage a number of images with is though there was clearly a problem with the scope, centre was razor sharp but diagonally edges in one axis now so. We believed the focuser was sagging a little though I am not so sure myself. It was sold on this as a strong point and to me seemed odd it should be letting it down. It was a well made scope and looked quality. I wish now I had tried a sleeve in the focuser to see if it helped. It was returned and FLO did not have another to replace it with, I was very disappointed as it promised so much, FLO were first rate about it all and I received a full refund. In view of mine being at the very start of a run I imagine these things happen. Still want a scope in this F/L range but now with UK leaving the EU I guess I just soldier on with what I have.

Alan

More excellent work from you !!!

Alan

Beautiful shot, some lovely detail in there, I shot this the other nigh and got the star coming out a lovely yellow but I had a few guide issues that spoilt the star shapes a little.

Alan

A very nice start, you have some lovely colours coming through there, as you say nice to see. I can't see that sort of colour even with a fairly large 18 inch scope. Something to build on but there are so many things to trip you up in this hobby, I am still making mistakes and i don't think I'm on my own.

Alan

Lovely Carole, I was hoping to use data from year gone by but a drive crash put pay to that.

Alan

Shot a mixture of 2,3 and 4minute subs on this with normal Darks,Flats etc, and dithered every second shot. Total is 3 hours 10mins on a 183mc connected to my Borg 77ED ll at F4.3. Still finding this difficult to focus but don't see laying out the best part of 500e for a Feather-touch really worth it. I feel I have been getting better results from this scope of late and I also feel this is down to less messing with setting, now i leave things the same all the time.

Any advice would be most welcome, just don't feel I am nailing the guiding like I did last year, or maybe the focus

Thanks for looking.

Alan

Been awful here for a few days but had 5 nights before that, good start to it though Michael.

Alan

A very interesting image, not trying to steal your lime-light but you would even think it was the same area that I took 2 night ago, rained ever since

Alan

Lovely image!!

Alan

That's as good as any I have seen and much better than my effort a couple of years back, I always feel you do good jobs on all your targets, your M106 was really lovely.

Alan

11 minutes ago, Grant Fribbens said:

Hi Alan,

I bet the mouse issue gets frustrating. I was taking some flats the other day and I got a strange circle shape in the middle of the image and I do not know what was causing it. But I altered the position on the LED tracing pad with a sheet of A4 and ran the process again and everything was fine. I have found that when I use SharpCap and use some of its sliders it can alter the settings of the main imaging camera. With the beta versions of APT and N.I.N.A you can set them to set the gain and offset prior to imaging and that has helped. I once found I had different gain and offset settings to my dark library and APP certainly made the stacked image look rather wierd.

Grant

Its fine, it's the off-set, thanks a lot you've solved the problem.

Alan

8 minutes ago, Grant Fribbens said:

Hi Alan,

I bet the mouse issue gets frustrating. I was taking some flats the other day and I got a strange circle shape in the middle of the image and I do not know what was causing it. But I altered the position on the LED tracing pad with a sheet of A4 and ran the process again and everything was fine. I have found that when I use SharpCap and use some of its sliders it can alter the settings of the main imaging camera. With the beta versions of APT and N.I.N.A you can set them to set the gain and offset prior to imaging and that has helped. I once found I had different gain and offset settings to my dark library and APP certainly made the stacked image look rather wierd.

Grant

I think you may have hit the nail on the head, I change my off set for this run as I noticed it was set on 60 where as I normally have it on 20, this may have something to do with it, just now trying a stacking with no Cal frames. Last night was superb here and everything that I could do wrong, i did.

Alan

15 minutes ago, Grant Fribbens said:

I found when I got unusual results I took a look at the FITS headers and found that the gain and offset had changed between my dark and light frames and that causes all sorts of strange things to happen. One I took some replacement darks for the same settings everything was fine again. Maybe worth a check.

I have had a problem with my mouse and it's been double clicking even when I only single click. I am wondering if it has done something unknown to me. Just stacked and tried a set of 13 images of Leo Triplet and that looks fine. I have to say my Flat don't look right, way too dark and it wasn't.

Alan

31 minutes ago, happy-kat said:

Using my mobile phone there is nothing obviously wrong, the right star has a violet centre but what are you seeing that prompted this post?

Everything is red and I can't get out of it, the star before I recall coming out yellow. I have not stretched it at all just balanced the background and it still looks red, I've never seen anything like this before in all my efforts which generally are not bad

I am not expert, far from it but generally I do turn out a reasonable image. I use here an 071 OSC, on an APO at 800mm F/L, focus is a tad out but not miles and I have an Astronomik L2 UV/IR filter screwed toe Hutech flatener.

I use DSS and no setting were altered from the last 10 images at least, Any ideas what's wrong as I see something is? This is 20x 4 minutes at Unity settings with Darks etc, all images look fine on their own.

Hope someone can help, I have tried a few combinations of with and without Flats etc, same result.

Alan

Feel you may get a better response in this section

Alan

There is no doubt out here the air traffic is about 1/5 what it normally is, in summer months there are of often 10 planes in view at any one time. Sirius is not too bad some nights but I do have 10 degrees on the UK

Alan

52 minutes ago, newbie alert said:

Nice Alan, it's the tadpoles nebula next to flaming star.. monkey head is in orion( I think)

So it is, I could make out a bit of a monkey head sort of shape and looked no further. I have photographed the Monkey's Head before but with the C-Du-C showing only SH-2 numbers and NGC No's I got a bit mixed up. Thanks for putting me right.

Alan

Something of an annoying night towards the end of session, patchy cloud diffing by that always happened in the last minute of exposure, but I still got 2 and half hours on the Flaming Star and Monkeys Head i think.

Taken with the Borg 77EDll 38x4min subs with calibration frames as well as dither.

Alan

2 hours ago, fwm891 said:

Thanks Alan - Yes but for me it's waiting for things to get out of a bank of trees to my SE.

I know the feeling, I have a very large area here with some beautiful old walnut trees 80-90yo, lovely for the walnuts but one of them masks the darkest part of my sky to the SW, there's nothing for miles and miles.

Alan

1 hour ago, Iceman120 said:

Great images Alan.

For gradient software there is a plug in for photoshop if you have it but it costs 60 dollars.

GradientXTerminator (rc-astro.com)

There is a free trial though

Yes I understand that Iceman but I do not like to use credit cards on the net, or anywhere for that matter as I had mine copied once in HongKong. I am going to look at the Pixel Processor with an intent to buy this I believe has a gradient tool included. I can do gradients with PS on many images but wide field like this is very difficult, or at least I don't know of way. I personally feel $ 60 for a plug in is rather steep, no matter how good it may be.

Alan 

Very nice Francis, that must be fairly low for you, I must try this myself.

Alan