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!

Poor Ken & Jared have been subjected to a lot of stick about SGP’s focusing over recent months. Hopefully a complete rethink and major improvement to the algorithm is what they are concentrating on, rather than a work around. I live in hope anyway!

Re-centering on the imaging target having slewed to the focus target is indeed a manual operation. IIRC, I turned Autofocus off in the SGP sequence and set the focus reminder pop up. When it was time to focus, I paused PHD2, clicked the Focus Target button and the scope slewed to the Focus position (having set up the focus destination earlier - I can’t remember if the focus destination persists between session, I don’t think so?). I manually ran an autofocus routine. Once focussed I right clicked on the target name and chose ‘centre on target’, it did its thing and once back on target, I restarted PHD2 and clicked to carry on the sequence. A bit tedious to say the least, but at least you get sharp globulars!

Here’s the post with the M2 image from last year:

The Focus Target module in SGP is a manual thing and is useful, but ruins the automation that SGP is all about. I shot M2 last summer using the Focus Target module and sat there nursing the system through the whole process. It worked, but it was only semi-automatic at best!

John - you managed to get good focus with SGP while M13 was slap bang in the middle of the field of view?

Thanks Dave. Yes, one of my astronomy sub-plots is to image all 110 Messier objects, though it is not my main priority, just an eventual goal. The biggest problem is that quite a few of the summer targets are very low for me, right down in the dirty bit of the sky. I'll have to take my kit down to my place in Southern Italy one day to complete the collection. I've been contemplating how to maximise the limited imaging time through the summer and globs seem to be a good option, despite SGP's best efforts to make it nigh on impossible. I don't mind a bit of manual intervention every now and again, but by about 2am I am generally rapidly nodding off!

That’s a rich result, amazing what can be done with just 48 mins of data and no astronomical darkness!

@geoflewis - thank you! Don't get me started about autofocus and SGP... it is driving me a bit nutty. I'm not sure what the SGP developers are up to these days, they used to be extrememly responsive, but since the launch of version 3, they seem to have gone very quiet. I have a feeling that there are so many fundamental issues with their code that need to be addressed now the application has become so hefty, that all their work is focussed on recoding stuff rather than coding new features. I guess it has to be done to make the app more efficient and stable, but as a user, it looks like no progress is being made. Patience, patience... yet again! As for trying to image down at 10 degrees altitude - you've done amazingly well to get anything at all. I struggle to get much below the celestial equator and when I do dip down to the 20 degree region, it's a fuzzy spongey mess, even when in focus!! @Mark at Beaufort - thank you Mark. I will endeavour to add M22 to the collection, though at a max altitude of about 15 degrees, it won't be up to much - see above!

Thank you Paul. I tend to think with Globs that you’ve seen one you’ve seen ‘em all, but this proves otherwise! I do love a good glob through the eyepiece too! Contact sheets - surely not old fashioned... it feels like only a few years ago that I was constantly poring over those, wondering which frame to put in the enlarger and print!!

Here is a compilation of nine globular clusters, each one is a single 30 second unguided luminance exposure, taken with a Celestron Edge8 HD and QSI-683. Focus is a bit questionable to say the least as this was really just a scout about the sky to consider my next imaging target. It struck me afterwards that they all fit the conditions for this Imaging Challenge, so here they are! Compare and contrast...

I was zipping about the sky last night, despite the haze, wondering where I might point my telescope next. We seem to be in Globular Season! Here is a compilation of nine globs - compare and contrast! I still don't know which one I will go for and am slightly hesitant anyway as SGP struggles to autofocus on globular clusters, which means I have to offer some manual intervention to: slew away from the glob, run autofocus, slew back to the glob and resume the sequence... the horror of getting that involved in an imaging run!!

I enjoyed the programme very much. Normally I find that at the end of a Prof Cox programme, despite appearing to understand everything he just said, I realise that I have very little idea of what he was going on about. This time it was very different, I knew a great deal of what was included already (thank you GCSE Astronomy) and happily followed the whole show with ease. I was waiting for him to mention the Frost Line, but so far I have been disappointed! I thought the programme was interesting, informative, well put together and looked great (the images/graphics, not the prof!). Any astronomy programming on TV gets a thumbs up from me and I look forward to the rest of this series.

Well... I have just redone the calibration frames with the camera in Bin 2... and the two white dots appear to have vanished. Hurrah! I will see what happens under the stars... eventually!

Thank you for the various replies, that is all helpful stuff. I have just been having a look at the various settings in PHD2 for the camera and have realised that rather than setting the binning to 2, I had only set the Noise Reduction to '2x2 mean'. When I set binning to 2, the image looks quite different and those two white blobs appear to disappear. I need to redo the BPM with the new settings and will report back!

Uh oh, that is not great, but sounds like a sensible answer. Damn! If I didn’t rely on PHD2’s auto-select guide star while I slumber, it wouldn’t be a major issue... but I do! Perhaps I will contact Starlight Xpress and see what they have to say about it.

My utterly reliable Starlight Xpress Lodestar X2 guide camera has decided to be unreliable... it has developed a couple of hot pixels that will not shift with darks or a bad pixel map in PHD2 - I redid both calibration frame sets yesterday evening, but nothing, they won’t go. Here are exhibits 1 & 2 that clearly show the annoying dots that lead to a flatline guide graph... both screenshots taken just now with the observatory roof closed, so it’s basically dark in there, with no stars... Any ideas on what’s gone wrong here please?

Congratulations on a fine choice of telescope - you’ll get some great views of the Moon, planets, star clusters, double stars and faint fuzzies with that! The longer the focal length of the eyepiece, i.e. the bigger the number, the less magnification and wider the field of view will be. So, pretty much always start your observations of a target with the longest eyepiece you have, in your case the 32mm, then once centred up and happy, work your way up (or is that down?) the eyepieces, towards the smaller numbers, getting higher and higher magnification. It’s a bit like the gears in a car, start in first gear and work your way up. Be warned, the ‘seeing’ or quality of the atmosphere on a given night, will limit how far you can push the magnification and it is always better to look at a slightly lower magnification but better resolution view through a longer eyepiece. Take your time and enjoy the wonders up there!

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.

My, my... who’d have thought this day would come...? Paul imaging!! The force from the dark side is hard to resist. Congratulations on your first session! A lifetime of frustration and elation awaits. Enjoy the journey. I look forward to seeing your first image post.