DaveS

Yep, looking very much better and with some good detail coming through. Are you going to try adding more data this Galaxy Season?

Well, since nobody's said "Don't do it!" I will put it on my target list.

Thought I would have a look at some old data to see if it's worth pursuing. 6 hours Luminance in 600 sec subs with the ODK12, bin 1 (Yes, I know stupid resolution). Capture in Maxim / ASA Sequence, post in AstroArt 8. Sigma applied to the calibration frames too. Sigma Add stacking with Darks, Flats, and Dark Flats. Adaptive Subtract Gradient Reduction after cropping off the alignment edges. Star Erosion. DDP with high-pass filtering, and a careful examination of the histogram. Richardson-Lucy Deconvolution. Light touch of Unsharp Mask. Saved as PNG. C&C welcome, and what do people think? Worth pursuing with RGB (Bin 2 lol) and H-alpha?

If it's clear it will either be a full moon or blowing a hoolie. Or possibly both.

Yep, cracking image. Is this the first Markarian's Chain of the season?

Can I make a shout-out for AstroArt 8? In addition to being a much underrated processing package it's also your one-stop-shop for capture, guiding and focusing. Yes, you have to pay for it but it's much less expensive than PixInsight as well as being less brain melting. I would also add Deep Sky Stacker for rare occasions where AA8 throws a wobbly during stacking, and Affinity Photo for final "polishing". Edit; The gradient reduction tools in AstroArt keep getting better with each iteration, plus the license allows you to have the package on more than one computer,, so you could have it on a laptop or remote PC for ths capture part, and also on your main PC for processing.

My obsy has a concrete floor (The top of the massive foundation block), but as I image remotely it's not usually a problem. One thing though, if you do go for a concrete floor get some rubber tile matting otherwise you WILL drop something expensive with a horrible crunching sound. In my case it was my mobile phone which I was using as a clinometer.

Small change for the average Grauniad reader 🤣.

They're going to have fun collimating *that* lot

If you can possibly afford to then bite the bullet and move to mono and NB filters, as narrow as you can afford, 3nm if at all possible. I used to live in West London until I moved here, from Bortle 8 to Bortle 3-ish. I note that Optolong have a 3nm dual band filter coming out soon, so that may give you the possibility of HOO palette with good LP rejection. @carastro lives in SE London and produces fabulous NB images, but she uses mono camera and NB filters. Some of the brighter star clusters and globs might be doable in RGB.

I'm not even sure ITER (Which we may or may not be a member of, depending on "P") is going to be the first to break even, there are other Tokamak / Stellarator designs in the works that show much greater promise. I completely disregard the NIF "Shoot a big gun at it" US attempts.

JET was never intended or designed to break even but to be a test-bed for the technologies needed. From the report I read they were testing out a Beryllium / Tungsten wall material that has much better (Lower) neutron absorption characteristics than the Carbon wall that was there previously.

A bit of a thin year with a lot of half-completed or barely started projects. Nevertheless, here are five (The only ones actually completed) from my hard drive. All captured with the ODK 12, G3 16200 and Chroma filters. First up, Pickering's Triangle in HOO Next, M13, the Great Globular in Hercules, in LRGB. This is just about naked eye for me here. And the rest are galaxies in LRGB Firstly NGC 3718 Next, the Deer Lick group and Stephan's Quintet Lastly M106. In this case I made a Super Luminance from the L and RGB for the brutal processing before layering onto the RGB. Had to chuck out a lot of subs that had a light leak in them. NGC 3719 and M106 are WIP as I hope to add more, better, data this year.

I keep the original data on my 16TB NAS (4 x 6TB in RAID 5) and only import what I need. My astro data sits on a 500 GB PCI-E NVME card.

Yep, space junk I would think, too slow to be a meteor.

Twice a year? You're that optimistic?

Unfortunately money talks, and Musk has more money than anyone else. Remember the Golden Rule, "The man with the gold makes the rules". .

Tried that test and apparently I'm Not colour Blind, confirming the ishihara tests I've done in the past.

One thing I'll say regarding Astrograph is that Rupert's support is second to none, on one occasion he spent a good half hour on Anydesk and the phone trying to sort out a bork in my Talon roof automation, and when he couldn't sort it then, he then spent another couple of hours on Anydesk and in email to the developer, ON A SATURDAY to get it sorted. The amount of kit I've bought from him is frightening, something north of £20k at the last count .

OK, being serious for a moment, although I entered results in the last two counts since I moved here I wonder how useful my count would be since my eyes appear to have problems with very faint points, as I've seen stars fuzz out slightly. Possible beginnings of cataracts.

Hmm... Stars.... I think I remember stars, but haven't seen them for ages. Do they still exist?

I too have varifocals with a pretty severe prescription so also have a pair of distance glasses that just correct for infinity.

What was the SX CCD you were using? the image is square, so a Kodak 4022 sensor?