PhotoGav

Sara, are you going to / have you posted the results?! Would love to see what you’ve been up to...

PhotoShop is your friend...! It's really easy to create an animated gif or mp4 from PS. Bit of a pain exporting the frames from PI or wherever, but you will have more success and it will be quicker than fiddling about trying to get ffmpeg.exe to work by the looks of things so far!

My guess is that the 'Program:' dialog is not pointing to 'ffmpeg.exe' correctly? So it 'Failed to start external process'. Check the path to 'ffmpeg.exe' and put that in the Program: setting. Hopefully it will then work.

Sara, here’s Adobe’s own Photoshop animated gif tutorial: https://helpx.adobe.com/uk/photoshop/how-to/make-animated-gif.html Works a treat!

Perfect result. Now you need some clear, dark skies... may be a while!

Chances are even the crystal ball would just be cloudy.....!!

Well done @Jonk, always slightly nerve racking when you hit ‘start’ on that update. I look forward to seeing the post update master dark as the pre update version is blatantly afflicted with the banding issue.

Excellent, yes, a simple beginners guide to radio astronomy that you can attempt at home with a baked bean can, a ball of string and some sticky back plastic to produce an image that shows the event horizon a little more clearly is what I’m after!

On the subject of helping... I would be happy to give a talk / workshop on anything to do with imaging, including capture and/or processing, in the areas of deep sky, or solar, or a bit of wide field, or maybe time lapse or even a touch of planetary. I could also talk about taking Astronomy GCSE in later life, if that would be interesting. Anyway, my hand is up should their be an interest in something that I can share my experiences in, good and bad! As for talks I would like to attend - something about spectroscopy for beginners and radio astronomy for beginners would be great, please!

Good stuff, thanks William. Good luck with the upgrade, Jon, and I hope the house move went well. How is it in the Atacama desert with your new observatory?!

Jon, I used to have the files on my Dropbox account, but it looks like I must have deleted them. I can put them back there this evening when I get home from work. In the meantime, here’s the QSI (now part of Atik) website support page with their email address: https://qsimaging.com/support/technical-support/. They might well sort you out quicker than I can if you fire a nice email at them! Good luck, well worth the upgrade. I’m looking for an email address for support to upgrade my skies... and now we are about to enter two months of no astronomical darkness... I despair!

Booked to arrive on Friday and leave on Tuesday. Really looking forward to this lovely event, whatever the weather... but please can we have less water this year!

Brilliant, look forward to this filtering through to us mere mortals in the not too distant (or expensive) future! Thanks for sharing the link. Quantum everything is the future!

Good to hear that guiding is up and running. Regarding the Weather ASCOM, you need to select ‘no device’ in the SGP drop down menu to remove it from the equation. If it is selected but not connected it will continue to use the last weather state it knew about. Not really much use though... you obviously want to get the thing working properly! Which cloud watcher are you using? Are you sure you have both it and SGP set up correctly to save and read the state file to the same place?

It looks like you will need to use the ASCOM drivers for multiple ZWO cameras to show up in PHD2 - check this on CN: https://www.cloudynights.com/topic/640869-new-guide-camera-not-connecting-to-phd2/ As for POTH / SiTech ASCOM - two roads to the same temple! Continuing good luck with the set up process... you'll get there... eventually!

Thanks Steve - that is probably exactly it. Tom, you might check that and de-tick it, that way you are fully in control of what is happening. Auto anything can be good, but only when you want it and know it's happening!

I have my fingers crossed that all is still working when you connect up tonight, Tom!! I don't see why it shouldn't be now, but look forward to hearing that it is all OK. Please don't hesitate to ask about the next steps of getting everything up and running now with SGP and guiding (are you using PHD2?). What is your first target going to be? The Gain setting was at 9 and we changed it to 0.9, which is the value for that setting in SiTech for my mount. What is this value actually doing? The one thing that worries me slightly from the session last night is that the mount Unparked as soon as it was connected to in SGP. I can't find any setting to ask it to do that in SGP, so wonder what is going on there. The one difference between Tom's set up and my set up is that Tom is using POTH to connect to the mount whereas I am using the SiTech ASCOM driver. Could it be something to do with the POTH driver, which I am not hugely familiar with?

Oh my word, Tom, you really haven’t had the luck with this one have you. I am keen to try and help get you up and running, but fear that the best way is to be next to the kit rather than remote. Having said that, the best starting point is to dial in to the system and at least have a look... I will PM you.

Perfect - that's really useful info - thank you! This could be a very interesting project to set up at my local school.

James - that sounds very interesting - can you give more details of what you are up to, software used, pics of hardware installed etc. please? I looked into radio astronomy recently, but quickly realised that to get more than huge fuzzy blobs of not very much you need way more than a small dish! I cite the black hole photograph and what it took to get that - an amazing feat with a spectacular result. It would be fascinating to be able to start to do something along those lines, on a very small scale of course. The huge advantage is that cloud doesn't matter... I visited the Astrophysics Department at Oxford University last year and saw the two 2m dishes that they have installed on the department roof in action and still wasn't very impressed with results, from an aesthetic point of view. To start making any kind of detailed images with radio, I fear that a square kilometre array, or approaching that, is needed!

Good, it’s doing the right thing on its own, so it must be an option or setting or something unusual from CDC. I’m sure this will be solvable when clear skies return.

Mmm, strange... why is it slewing? Where have you told it to slew? What happens when you just start SiTech and then click Start, with no CdC involved?

I don't see there being any problem with repeating yourselves. If you try and find endless new subjects, they will become increasingly obscure to the point of attracting hardly any entries. What's wrong with having a galaxy challenge in galaxy season, every galaxy season?! It's up to the entrants to surprise the judges, not the other way round...?

Black holes (at least there might be one entry!)...