Avocette

Anyone know if the '150°' lens that comes with the ASI120MC-S could have a use here? Thanks.

I have yet to come across any of these bubble levels that is accurately set up - just another gap in the manufacturer's quality control monitoring. It's taken some time but I finally got used to the bubble being displaced as shown when my SW AZ-ED5 mount is actually level.

Great! The whole plate solver approach is a game changer. It turns any loosely oriented and roughly levelled mount into an accurate to ~30 seconds of arc GoTo system. Magic!

The screw is a standard photo camera screwthread 1/4”-20 UNC. As you suggest it may have been screwed in too enthusiastically and it’s steel whereas the tube ring is aluminium alloy (possibility of electrolytic corrosion). It will come out with a bit of grunt. I use the thread in reverse with standard microphone 3/8” to 1/4” thumbgrip adapters to hold my guidescope.

The list options go green after you’ve downloaded the files to your RPi. Some more screenshots.... Firstly setting up your telescope information.... Next, you may need to do like I found, set up the astroberry folder as the source of the local astrometry files, then the colours may appear.... Then..... then when you select the appropriate astroberry folder - voilà! In my case offline solver works very well and pretty quickly with the RPi4. Canon DSLR about 45seconds, guidescope and camera about 5 seconds and my new ASI533 around 11 seconds.

If you’re running KStars/Ekos/Indi just let the program tell you which files you need to download. In the Ekos control panel, go into the Align tab (bullseye) then click on the Edit Solver Options button (see screenshot 1). Now click on Index Files (screenshot 2) and you will see a set of tick boxes against a double list of files. Provided you have told Ekos the parameters of your scope and camera the file lists will indicate if they are essential for successful plate solving (screenshot 3). Sometimes when I try to solve, a message tells me that the next (missing) file was really necessary, but that turns out not to be the case in practice.

You might try doing your stacking on the original images that look very dark and then display the result with stretch, perhaps in ASI studio, or one of many other programs. The process of stretching is somewhat distorting your data to make a pleasing image for you to view on your display. The (mathematical) process of stacking is better done on the original data, even if your display doesn’t show you a lot until the final result is stretched!

Thank you so much @stash_old- quickly solved my problem! By the way, I am finding the ASIFitsView (as its name suggests .fits file viewer) very convenient and quick with a useful auto stretch and histogram display, hence why I wanted a copy on my Desktop PC.

Yes - a search on Google suggests that 3. could be at issue here. There's plenty of advice offered, but some of it's probably not too trustworthy.......

I've got ASI Studio v1.1.0 working nicely on my laptop PC, so I thought I'd install it on my desktop PC. Both are fairly recent models with Windows 10 Home installed. I get this error message whenever I try to use it on the desktop PC. I've checked version numbers, tried deinstalling and reinstalling but I always get this result. Anyone had similar issues?

Yes as @MarkAR says, you can use the Alignment module in Ekos to Polar Align with your DSLR. You will need to have downloaded to the Raspberry Pi all the recommended Astrometry files for the FOV (field of view) of your camera sensor and lens or telescope combination. You start with the mount in the Park position (pointing roughly towards the North Celestial Pole) and run the PA routine. Choose an exposure of about 5 seconds. I found that it could take 45 seconds for the 'plate solve' which establishes the precise position of the image, before the mount moves by 15° and another image is captured and then a third final image, before Ekos calculates the error in the mount pointing and tells you that the mount is for instance to the right and below the NCP. The alignment window shows the error as a purple vector on the final image. You click on a suitable star in the image, and subsequently adjust the mount to move the star image to the optimum location. With a DSLR this process takes quite a time since each adjustment step made needs an image to be downloaded and displayed - but in my time I have done it successfully!

I do tend to choose my own star to guide on...... If left to itself the Ekos guiding system has sometimes failed to complete calibration in spite of seemingly finding its own guidestar. Of course if you're running a fully automatic schedule you may not be around to make the manual intervention. Can't help ypu with your twin camera question I'm afraid.

Well the good news is that taken together, some or all of your suggestions have worked, and I am just about to end my session for tonight after 25x300 seconds captures of M101. ClearOutside predicts 27% cloud cover in the next hour..... Many thanks for sorting out my issues!

Many thanks for the ideas - I have made the various suggested changes in the custom settings, and am indoor testing at the moment, although it may not misbehave until under tonight’s clear sky! After that it will be digging deeper into the Indi side as necessary and then the Windows APT camera interface.

Thanks, I had already tried a version of your ‘cure’ - however your description is better detailed - I’ll give it a try!

Yes - you and @R26 oldtimer are quite right - and it was set to ‘auto’ on my camera!

As far as I know, there is no 'long exposure NR' on the EOS 550D (bought in 2009, before the feature came into common use perhaps).

A couple of nights ago, my camera started playing up. After successfully recording five exposures of 300 seconds, at the end of the next imaging period of 300 seconds, the captured image was not downloaded to the RPi4 with the Indi driver indicating that there was an 'unknown error', and the camera display showing the number of remaining exposures on the SD card continuing to flash. When eventually, after various steps of attempting to get it to carry on working, I went to turn off the power the screen showed an animated rotating image saying Recording...Remaining Images :1. Since then I have tried various cures including changing power supply from mains adapter to battery and back, updating the camera firmware to the latest version, and changing SD cards, even though the images are not normally saved to the SD card. Has anyone encountered this before, and any good ideas for solving the issue? One final 'cure' remains for me to test, to attempt to drain down the internal power source which maintains the date and time and camera optional settings. I have removed the main battery, but I haven't a clue how long I will need to leave it to drain down, or if this may be any help at all! By the way, the camera seems to function quite normally when used in standard camera modes (P, AV, T, Auto etc) with shortish exposure times up to half a minute.

Thanks for the explanation about the sampling issues. As you can see in my ‘signature’ I have the three ‘scopes these days, including a SkyMax150 pro which has a very different focal length specified as 1800mm. Actually the focal length can reach over 20% more when you adjust the primary mirror to include a Crayford focuser and camera backfocus, so I have a radical option if the FOV of the others loses interest! The ED80 is effectively 510mm with the FR and the 150p 675mm with the CC. At the moment I am using the Newt for galaxies where the 30% longer focal length means a bigger image of the target, but I also benefit from the f4.5 versus f6.35 of the ED80/FR. For the equivalent light capture, the Newt requires slightly less than half of the exposure time, which is great at this time of year.

Hi Ruzeen, Could you spell out in a bit more detail what you mention above on the sampling issue? I am presently using my astromodified Canon EOS 550D with my SW 80ED with 0.85x FR/corrector and my SW 150p Newtonian with the SW Coma Corrector which has a 0.9x FR effect. After reflecting for a while on moving to a dedicated cooled astro camera I settled on the ASI533, but in my case rather than the ASI294, for AP and also some EAA in streetlamp influenced skies. Any thoughts? Ed

Yes - but since making the change to Astroberry 2.0.0, Radek has based it on the Raspbian Buster linux distribution (rather than Ubuntu MATE), and the astroberry.io site he manages is a 'repo', so updating and upgrading is a total doddle!

For test (simulation - cloudy times) purposes would it be possible to allow a folder of already saved images to be stacked, either at maximum rate, or perhaps a specified rate e.g. one every 30 seconds? I found with the Windows 10 version I could feed a capture folder with one fits file at a time and watch the ALS actions, but couldn’t do so on my RPi4 which is obviously very busy when ALS is executing (presumably because all cpus/threads are active with ALS in the present version). I normally control my RPi4 for capture guiding etc. from my laptop running VNC viewer over the RPi4 (Astroberry) wifi hotspot. I suppose I could use something like SyncThing on both machines to copy over captured images and then run ALS on the laptop which would have spare processing capacity. Am I missing any obvious alternative? Thanks

Personally I have put aside the microSD card which I duplicated onto the SSD, and replaced it with another (smaller) microSD card as the daily workhorse in the RPi. It has the same contents in the cmdline.txt file in the boot partition (which you can edit under Win10 of course) as the ‘master’ microSD card. I suppose I have accepted that microSD cards are ‘temporary’ and that one day I may need to revisit the backup card and make a fresh SSD copy. Over the last six months I have got quite proficient at handling the RPi at this user level and accept that inevitably I will be updating software when new features are added or new ideas come along. Don’t forget RaspberryPi.org suggest that some day booting from SSD directly may become an option!

The official RaspberryPi.org price for the 2GB version is $35 - it should be available from US dealers for that, no need to use AliExpress. One of the other members above (7170) mentions that he uses a Raspberry Pi 3. Well that was only ever available with 1GB RAM. No, I'm not saying there's no point in buying the 4GB version, just that for a very comprehensive package of software like Astroberry, you could presently save some money with the 2GB version. Of course in the fullness of time, other features could be added which might mean that the 2GB version reaches a limit, but for the moment I'm very comfortable running my 2GB RPi4.

You asked for an idea of what else you need in addition to the RPi4 (and by the way as I emphasised before the 2GB version does everything I want and is now the entry level RPi4 at a price of $35). I use a 32GB microSD card and have a spare or two. The RPi4 sits in a ‘flirc’ aluminium case. I power the RPi from one of the three ‘charging’ outlets on a tp-link 7 port USB 3.0 hub which is itself powered by a Pegasus Pocket Powerbox which also distributes 12V to the mount, 8V to the Canon DSLR, two lots of pwm dew strip power controlled by its dew sensor, and measures voltage supply and current drawn. I need lots of USB ports for: DSLR camera, guidescope camera, EQDirect to the mount, Pegasus PPB, GPS dongle if out in the field, Joypad dongle when I use my SkyMax, HitecAstro focus motor controller..... The three items sit on my mount pillar, attached to each other by a Velcro strap which ties onto a Velcro strap around the pillar. Cabling could be tidier, but I like to retain flexibility when I swap scopes etc.