bomberbaz

Thanks guys, I think if I add another 60-90 minutes to it I will get it to where I want to be. When I think about what I was doing only 3 months since to getting here I have to pat myself on the back. Process is to run through Siril using for auto processes, do a star mask before saving as a PNG. Then final process is tweaking in Gimp and Py-astro tools. With py-astro there is a tool called Neutralise sky colour. I created a layer using that and then used the opacity slider to blend it into the warmer image. That is how I got the two images, one quite aggressively applied, the other more subtle.

Hello guys, did a re-work of Andromeda, shrank the stars a little then spent a little longer playing with layered images of differing backgrounds (thanks for the help with this Lee) and come up with the two results below. The top one is purposely a little warmer although I think I prefer the latter. Always appreciate any comments, good or otherwise on my work.

I think I will use my Baader 8-24mm zoom to test exit pupils. Simple to adjust to test various exit pupil sizes on differing objects/filters. Seem to remember you once did an article on horsehead eyepiece Shane which referenced exit pupil and the ideal sized HB exit pupil being around 5mm. My finding are leaning to a slightly higher exit pupil but A. that can be a personal thing and B. it is as yet inconclusive (to me at least) what the ideal size is. I am hoping to get more data next time we have a new moon (or there abouts) clear sky.

What scope you mainly using for this type of viewing Don, the truss?

Further to my eyepiece enquiry thread, (see below) does anyone have a preference for exit pupil size for using the various nebula type filters. UHC - OIII - H-Beta 20mm eyepiece opinion. (Maybe 21) - Discussions - Eyepieces - Stargazers Lounge You can find various information on this if you look with a big variance. For instance my best view of the Crescent came with an OIII clapped onto a 22mm eyepiece which gave me 4.5mm of exit pupil. Other information says UHC respond better to smaller exit pupils due to having a broader lightpass whilst HB need the largest due to having the tightest lightpass of them all. All benefit hugely from dark skies. So what are anyone's own preferences?

I have been using an F12 80mm scopetech refractor. It is extremely light and easy to handle and shows no false colour at all as well as being very forgiving to eyepiece. The latter obviously has scope (pun intended) to save you money, I use lowish costing eyepiece with both my refractors.

Hello all. I added another hours worth of data to my previous effort and there is definitely a sharper result and added detail. I am getting used to working with DSS, Siril and Gimp & Gimp/Py-astro which is also helping my results. Py-astro are a belting add in for use with Gimp. Anyway, top is the first effort and below it I have the version with added hours data. Very pleased with the new, improved result. SW Evoguide and FF + WO Uniguide ZWO 183MC Pro + ZWO Dual band filter/Astronomik L2 & ZWO 120mini SW AZ Gti + ZWO ASI Air plus 3.15 hours lights + darks/flats/dark flats (All data collected from my B7 garden)

Ok thanks you two, it would make a great eyepiece but this thread has made me think a little deeper and now I am questioning myself about how much use this (20/21mm) eyepiece is likely to get. At first I was telling myself as above that it would be mainly for OIII filter use but the more i think about it, I am wondering if the FOV and exit pupil of this sized EP will have a greater range of applications making it more compelling to consider a more expensive option, maybe even the 21mm Ethos, which to my OCD is a better solution. A re-visit to old observing lists should help highlight things a little better. And I think my impatience is less commanding within me than it used to be and therefore a trial test run using an old 20mm plossl I have and comparing notes against the 17mm Nikon will help me decide. By no means do I expect the 20mm to outshine the Nikon in any areas, other than that is brightness of nebula through the OIII due to increased exit pupil. This is the main concern, all other things are for pondering after the test. Well this is another hornets nest that's be woken up and might yet sting me where it hurts! (read empty wallet) cheers all Steve

welcome return Shane old bean, nice to see your back in the picture as it were. Some nice planetary available at the moment too, might have a dabble later myself before this weather breaks.

Thanks for drawing my attention to that @Louis D, very good report and just what I was looking for. Also the report on the Svbony. My current 6mm Svbony is used in my F12 refractor, so experience of it is basically with a 0.5 exit pupil in a very slow scope. Re the Svbony, at £40 Uk you basically get what you pay for in terms of results, I'll pass this time. Much obliged Steve

I am looking for user reviews and/or opinions on the eyepiece listed below. All 20mm bar the Ethos but the rationale for that is it offers an ideal exit pupil and not forgoing my FOV which I enjoy so much with the Nikon's. 20 or 21mm is set in stone. Primarily going to be used as an EP for nebula viewing with OIII filter. Recent trip highlighted this gap when objects that had been bright when I used the 12" were actually dimmer in the 17 Nikon. Further investigation showed the 3.5mm exit pupil was almost certainly at least partially to blame and so I aim to plug this gap. A 20mm eyepiece gives me 4.1 exit pupil and a 21mm provides one at 4.3. I have already checked each eyepiece has a minimum (for me) 15mm ER, I am looking for reports/views/thoughts on comfort of use, flatness of field, off axis stars and my other thought is cost for something that will get limited use. Ideally I would prefer a 21mm eyepiece but after a good long look I only found hyperions (no thanks), Denkmeier (can't source) & Ethos. (How much) The cost is the main stalling issue with the Ethos, even 2nd hand is probably more than I really want to shell out. Although any other suggestions would be welcome. For the 20mm, the researched list is: ES 62 series ES 68 series StellaLyra UWA Pentax XW I am also considering this Svbony Wide Angle Eyepiece 1.25" Telescope Eyepiece 20mm FMC 68 Degree Astronomy Eyepiece for Telescope (20mm): Amazon.co.uk: Electronics & Photo does anyone own one, feedback would be great. I already own the 6mm which is very good and this would be a very low cost way of filling the gap, I also have a 3 month window to try it out.

Only 2 hours of integration on this target, think I have squeezed all I can out of this as it stands without blowing it. I will try to add to it later and improve it. I would like to get some of the dust showing a little. @Shibby did a cracking effort the other day although I doubt my rig could manage it anything like that. Still, pretty happy with this as it stands. SW Evoguide and FF + WO Uniguide ZWO 183MC Pro + ZWO Dual band filter/Astronomik L2 & ZWO 120mini SW AZ Gti + ZWO ASI Air plus 2 hours lights + darks/flats/dark flats

That is very nice, loving the dust features. I am having a go at it myself but my gear is far lower spec than yours so if I manage a quarter the detail I will be happy.

Depends how you define improvement Lawrence, for some it is greater fov, better eye relief, better experience all round etc. From what i have read the Kitakaru RPL (Really perfect lens) will give you a colour free, flat view across the full fov of the eyepiece if reports are true (and I have no reason to disbelieve them). It may be 62 degrees, but I would rather have a near perfect 62 degrees than a shabby 82 if you get me.

It's a image of the Tarazed "dark nebula" Lee. I am basically trying to polish up my star processing whilst keeping a neutral background. Once I get the hang of this I am hoping it will help bring on my galaxy/nebula DSO results too. I too am quite pleased with these results.

All shot with the ZWO 11183MC/SW Evoguide with FF on a AZ Gti. Both results are of circa 40 minutes of data. Tarazed. From top left clockwise NGC 654 (Fuzzy Butterfly) -M103 - NGC 659 )Ying Yang cluster) - NGC 663 (Lawnmower)

I thought I would have a go at something a little different. Only about 40 minutes data and had to manually process it although Siril did help with background. Quite tricky. Anyone identify it?

Buy mine of me and use it to fix yours ! 👌 😂 (see my other post just above) 😉

what is with this mount of my, poor Ags above is developing a hiccup whereas mine, after months of poor tracking (average would have been 1.5) is running at under 1 for most of tonight. I am doing nothing different. I would point out I have also just ordered a new one, fgs 😱🤣 Steve

Hi Lawrence, have you looked at the Kitakaru eyepiece. StellaLyra 30mm 2" KITAKARU RPL Eyepiece | First Light Optics Now it might not have a fantastic FOV at 62 degree but I have not heard anything bad about these. The reviews I found refer to extremely flat and colour free results at the eyepiece. And your DOB at F6 will be a perfect match giving 1.5 degrees at mag 40. Slightly over budget but you might struggle getting one 2nd hand. There is also the superview eyepiece also by stella lyra but I believe this is a copy of the GSO although should still work well in an F6 and better still, under budget. However I am not able to offer any more info about it but might be worth pursuing further. StellaLyra 30mm 2" SuperView Eyepiece | First Light Optics I would like and may yet get a Kitakaru 18mm for the DOB for use on smaller targets. I love my 102 eyepiece but sometimes smaller objects look better framed in a smaller fov.

Brief garden session last night trying to cut through the murk of a near full moon, although it was low the glow was still very noticeable. For those that don't know I have a hotel to the right of me that kindly uses more lighting than Blackpool illuminations as well as streetlighting to the front and rear which both encroach upon my garden so getting anything from here is a bonus. I did also place out the imaging rig to grab another 90 minutes of data from my previous night in the trough of bowland and a quick ten minute process of my Andromeda data is shown below. Anyway, last night was a mission to do some double stars, so armed with the scopetech F12 80, my (legal) laser and Skysafari 6 which was pre loaded with cambridge list of doubles I headed for Cassiopeia which was not too low and North so away from the worst of the glow to start. There were 4 listed doubles for Cas (I know there are many more) but this is all the download brought through, it was the first of these on the list, eta cas that gave me the biggest ooh in this area, a very pretty pairing with a lightly contrasting pair of quite tight stars. The other satisfying aspect of the whole of last night is using a laser. It is a legal laser which is collimated to the finder and used in a flash on/find/off type way to get the rig close to the target object used in conjunction with SS6. It is very accurate and far quicker to use than just a finder, for me at least. Moving on I went for a couple of globulars, open clusters, several more doubles and even a quick bash at Jupiter which to be fair was too low although nice to get a quick view of it but there was a sting in the tail of my night. The scopetech will not come to focus at high power using any of my zooms (Baader/OVL/TV). My intention had been to use a Baader zoom/barlow combination but nope. In the end I used the OVL 21-7 but that would go around 2/3 of the way before the focuser bottomed out of inward travel so I had to use my fixed focal length glass for higher power. Currently exploring options for sorting this out but I noticed this recently on my pimped up frac which also ran out of inward travel until I trimmed an inch off the length, something I desperately want to avoid on the scopetech. So an otherwise very enjoyable night had the gloss taken off by this. Instead I used a Svbony 6mm and BST 5mm for my high powered views. Not as planned but at least the night wasn't ruined. One last point to report on is the views in the scopetech, they are simply sublime. Well apart from the focus issue with zooms,. At low power it offers a rich and deep view of star fields (using a relatively cheap OVL zoom) and at higher power the fixed focal Svbony 6mm and BST 5mm gave super views of Almach at x167 and x200 respectively. I did a drift for both eyepiece of the double across the full FOV and they remained sharp as a pin with no false colour across the entire fov. Very impressed.

cheap zoom eyepieces like the OVL are the way for outreach. Went to one recently and the first punter who was after a gander must have been rimmel's main customer. I wouldn't want that on my Nikon/TV glass.

thought I would put up my latest data captured on M31, as suspected my results have improved immensely by gathering a decent amount. So we have 2.15 hours with just a ir/uv cut filter. The AZ was tracking so so but as it's a widefield I get away with it. Camera ZWO 183mc cooled, stacked in DSS, quick blast through Siril and tidy up in Gimp. Stars are a bit bloated, think it might look a little less busy if I had run it through starnet, processed then merged but nevermind, I am very pleased with the result for a ten minute process and it gives me a benchmark. I shall have another play down the line to see if I can improve on it.

Not just nebula either, I still say this (ET/OWL) looks like a bat in flight.

Cracking chair and workmanship that a craftsman would be envious of. As per @Shimrod mentioned, it would be great if we could design a way to mount bigger bins. I would happily fork out for such a design.