glowingturnip

just don't do what I did and try and take your darks with the camera in a suitcase to keep it dark - it got hotter and hotter and eventually couldn't hold its set-point temp !

you could post your guiding log to the phd forum, they're pretty helpful over there. It's not excessive Dec backlash is it ?

AZEQ6GT count ? Few years old now though

I reckon I've got a very slim chance of doing the Prawn Neb one day from where we are in Spain - got about 2.5 hours from when it rises over one hillside and sets over the other (we're in a valley) and it'd be in the light dome from Malaga, but maybe one day, when I've done everything else !

definitely the best one, I'd be over the moon with that 🙂

+1 for stellarium, though from the above replies, it looks as though I'm not even using half its capabilities. It's great on a phone or tablet too, with the follow-phone feature turned on

no no, I do my imaging from Spain when I can get down there. Very slow burn hobby for me - I probably get all the stars aligned (as it were) for me to image only about 3 times a year - in Spain, no clouds, no moon... Mind you, got a two-weeker coming up next week, so watch this space 🙂

top tip though - I save my process icons, especially if it's one I spent a long time tweaking, like a deconv or tgv, and they take up much less space than an interim image file. Makes it easy to reproduce should I ever want to re-process something. I usually keep the first and last xisf's too, bin all the others.

Haha, no, not at all !.. Takes a second to try a new stretch or curves. I have the same thing, I do all my heavy lifting processing on my laptop, but I know that however much I try, the colour and gamma on its screen never quite agree to any other monitors, so I do my final curves stuff on the desktop instead, if I can get my wife off it. Always looks insipid on my laptop afterwards - strange.

i think with a bit of careful stretching you should be able to get more out of it - there's structure in that patch to the left and below the swan that you could rise above the background. Careful with the gradient removal though, there's more red stuff below than above. Can compare to mine if you like - took it a while back with a modded DSLR, looking very similar -

funny how some posts slip through the cracks isn't it - I've had a few, but then again, my stuff probably is rubbish ! looks very good to me, I like the colours - last one slightly dark for my taste. I must have a go at it some time

got proper thumped yesterday didn't it. Politicians...

as do I, but it has chosen doubles for me in the past

another thing to check - don't choose a guide star close to any other star in PHD, eg don't choose one of a binary pair. PHD can get confused between the two stars and keeps flipping from one to the other as its centroids change. PHD won't report anything wrong, and the guiding graphs will look good, but the subs will all show a smear in the same angle and magnitude as those binary guide stars.

i like that a lot, the squirly bits at the front, in front of the bright starlight

wow

indeed, almost everything I do in PI I merge back with a 'before' version, experimenting with the opacity to suit. Saved process icon for it, but would be nice if they actually formalised a tool, real time sliders etc - but then it gets too much like PS for their tastes

liking that a lot - it's on my to-do list, might have to have a go. One thing though, flat field issues in the bottom corners ?

i think I was luckier with my Moravian OAG, I can find bright stars to guide on almost every time with my QHY5Liic (might have to rotate it sometimes to find one). If I recall correctly, I did have the plastic bolts but I switched them out straight away for some metal spares I had in my box of junk. If the OAG is at exact focus though, I get bi-lobed star shapes which confuses PHD, it jumps between the two lobes, leaving the same pattern in the subs. However, defocussed slightly I get a nice round blob and good guiding. I 3D-printed some shims so I can keep it screwed down and at the correct focus.

too much smoke - the unintended consequence of legalising marijuana 😀

or bush fire

before clicking, I'm guessing... volcano ?

how does it look with a normal stretch ? that's a strong stretch you've got there. Could always layer version one over version 2 and adjust the transparency till it looks good 🙂

doesn't help with fixing the root problem of course, but you can fix this easily in post-processing - split out the R, G and B into individual greyscale files, star-align them to each other (use the green for reference since you have twice as much green on your DSLR), then re-combine them to RGB

why not try an impromptu experiment here ? Pick a target, and ask people to give a dropbox link to their data if they're willing to play, then we could all play around trying to process it edit: should probably ask for calibrated subs, rather than go overboard with data on flats, bias, darks