glowingturnip

definitely putting it on my to-do list. Is it me, or does that little twist of dark nebula look like seaweed ?

excellent image, well done

completely agree, that kind of thing cheapens the whole IOTD process and makes it not worth pursuing (not that I stand a chance anyway). I might as well take a whole bunch of Hubble back numbers, tweak the colours a bit, and see how many likes I get. Sure the capture details are stated there on Astrobin, but would they survive if a mainstream news source picked it up as an IOTD to publish it, or would they survive a retweet ?

lovely image - what's the image scale of that ?

in fact it happened just now ! I'm writing this from work, and a colleague just caught sight of that Cat's Eye - "wow, is that yours ?", "errm, no..."

I've posted this before, but I have a hard time with the concept of renting time on other people's rigs. I few years back I downloaded some data off the Hubble legacy data website and processed it - I was a tough process, a lot needed doing to the data to make it nice, and I think you'll agree that the end result is beautiful... ... but I never did feel that the image was mine, even with the caption. In fact in the end I found it embarrassing, like I was passing it off as my work - I'd be scrolling through my work showing someone new - "Wow, look at that one !" "Oh no, that one's not mine, I processed it from Hubble data", "oh". I ended up deleting it from my Flickr account in the end. Conversely, over on the Beginner's forum, we occasionally get people posting up asking for processing help - they attach a link to a set of raw data and then various people have a go, bringing back various renditions of a final product. Are all those renditions still the OP's photo ? Yes, 100%, every time ! For owned remote rigs, the images do of course belong to the author, and I appreciate the effort to set it all up and the worry of making sure it's all maintained, secure etc, but I'm sorry to say there's still a part of me that thinks it's a little bit... cheating.

The last step in my processing workflow reads '24 hour eyeball filter'. ie put it down, come back to it 24 hours later and see if I still like it before publishing. All very well, but I almost always break that rule.

there are lots of online gif makers, wouldn't one of those have been easier ? eg https://giphy.com/create/gifmaker/

ahaaaa, got it - nice. Now I have Colonel Hathi's Elephant March playing in my head. Hup two three four...

go on, what is it ? I like it

thanks all ! It's definitely there, isn't it - wonder what it is. There's an HH object in there too btw:

Hi all, Just wondering if anyone would know what this is ? Found it in my Rosette image - I'm thinking a Cometary Globule (a type of Bok Globule but with the tail swept away by stellar wind ), but then it's brighter than all the Boks are, and the tail isn't parallel to the other trunks that show the solar wind direction. A tadpole, perhaps ? The full image is here if you're interested, click through for HD: Cheers, Stuart

I think this one is an easy fix, you need to have the server enabled in PHD2 - in PHD, go to tools and 'enable server' That will mean PHD starts listening to dither commands that APT is sending, I think at the moment it's not listening.

just to mention, the tolerances on those MPCC diagrams are there for a purpose - through experiment I found I needed at least 57.5+1 on my M48. Could probably even go 0.25 to 0.5mm longer for better results, but I'm running out of thread. I wrote a piece on collimation for another chap a while back - basically you'll need a cheshire *and* a well collimated laser if you're going to get it nailed - hope this helps -

ohhh yes. Go through a whole set-up, everything going smoothly, and then wonder why PHD is losing the guidestar just before starting the sequence off - look up, and... Tear down, then look outside half an hour later, and...

I just read through your other thread, sounds like quite a journey. If you've got ST4 working, that's a massive result ! I'd have a bit of fun with that, and address all the other stuff in due time. I have to admit that even though I have my mount connected via ASCOM for platesolving etc, I still perversely guide via ST4, based on a feeble excuse that my laptop only has two usb ports. Just works for me and I don't see any reason to change it.

Completely agree ! That was a huge source of frustration for me, drove me to ST4

"is the handset of any use if using a laptop?" - I certainly found it useful last time out - was setting up with just about 1 degree before a pier flip, wanted to start off pre-flipped so I could go the rest of the night, but every time I tried to 'centre here' with SG Pro, it flipped the mount to the wrong side again (with me scrabbling around trying not to get the cables snagged). In the end I just nudged it to where I wanted it framed with the handset. Normal use I'd use the handset to go to a nearby star for focussing after my one-star align, then plate-solve from there. I also like to turn PECC on. But anyway, why disable the handset when you don't have to ?

at the risk of throwing a spanner in the works, do you really need to be using EQMOD ? Are you using a Skywatcher mount ? I believe EQMOD mainly came into being since in their infinite wisdom Skywatcher didn't bother shipping an ASCOM driver with their mounts, so EQMOD as a third-party piece of software filled that functionality. However, just my view, but as a driver it's very clunky - it needs its own GUI, its own hardware and it renders the handset useless - not what you want from a driver. However there is a proper Skywatcher ASCOM driver now, 4th from bottom of this list - https://ascom-standards.org/Downloads/ScopeDrivers.htm With that driver installed, and a USB to RS232 converter (make sure you get one with the latest chipset) I have my laptop running PHD and SGPro talking directly to the mount (an AZEQ6GT) via a cable into the handset, the handset still works, and no extra GUI's. I'm sure APT would work the same way, they are all ASCOM-compliant programmes, and with the driver installed they will be able to discover your mount directly. The handset connection is RS232 and you want USB on your computer, hence the need for that converter.

well to me, I'd say the stars in the classic version all seem to be a pale shade of purple ? I'm a sucker for sciencey things so would always go for the PCC but it does make your galaxy look a little red. Did you apply Background Neutralisation after PCC by the way ?

oops, I meant I apply the MLT at linear stage, not non-linear. Will amend my post above

I've been getting decent results with Straton recently, I use it for tonemap combining narrowband images. I think the key is to use Straton to produce the stars, then subtract the stars from the image in PI or PS. It's a bit long-winded though. Here's what I do, from memory since I'm at work and don't have a Straton screen in front of me: - works in both linear and non-linear - open the image in straton - open the same image again, as the reference image - set the stretch slider to suit so you can see what you're doing, think it's top-middle ? - there's a slider bottom right that I think goes from remove more stars to preserve more nebula, or something like that ? Set it all the way to the right. - in the menu, remove stars from the image - then zoom in a couple of times and go all over the image looking for stars it's missed, you can remove them manually, I think there's a clickable tool for that, or is it alt+click on the star ? Might have to do it 2-3 times on stubborn stars. The undo tool doesn't work, just makes a mess. - once done, there's a menu option that says something like 'subtract image from reference image' - do that, and you'll just get the stars and nothing else - save it and close Straton, then load that star file in PI or PS or whatever. - zoom in again, looking this time for anything that looks like it's not a star, comparing to the raw image will help, and clone-stamp it out, prevents bright bits of nebula getting removed - once done, you can then subtract that star image from the raw image in PI or PS. Key is that 100% subtraction seems to over-do it. So in PI, use pixelmath and do something like '$T-0.995 * star_image', or I guess in PS you would add the star image as a new layer, blend mode subtract, and opacity 0.995. Tweak that 0.995 parameter to suit, too low a parameter will leave lighter bumps where the stars were, too high will leave dark bumps, get it just right and they'll disappear. - you might have issues cleanly removing really bright stars, halos or newt diffraction spikes.

I'm confused - isn't the Bubble in Cassiopeia and the Lobster all the way over in Scorpio ? What's the official designation of the large nebula in that pic ? Re PI noise reduction, as Wim says for TGV, I usually do it on the stretched image and do trial and error on both the edge protection setting and the strength setting - though I think the strength setting I use is much less than 1, more like an exponent of -2 iirc. Multiscale Linear Transform works very well for noise reduction too, and settings are much less than are generally touted on the internet - here's my trick for doing it - *linear*, masked as per Wim's post above, open up MLT, 6 layers, and turn off layers 1-5 inclusive, run on small dark area previews first, open a live preview with a strong stretch - it'll just look like a blurry nothing. Then turn level 1 back on - the noise will jump out at you, kind of looks like etched glass. Turn on the noise reduction for that layer, amount 0.75, iterations 3 and fine tune the threshhold till the noise *just* disappears. Then turn that layer off again, and repeat for levels 2 and 3, maybe 4. Finally turn all layers back on and apply it to the full image. Whether MLT or TGV, I usually dial back the settings till the noise starts showing a little bit, rather than removing it completely. Just need to take the fizz off, not make it look plastic. Can run a stronger denoise on chrominance than on luminance. *edit, I apply MLT at linear stage, not non-linear

are there any bits of the region that suit a longer focal length (1000mm, just under 1 arc-degree) ? I've got a week in Spain next week and hopefully the weather allows.

Thanks for the kind words, and yes, I guess that image was a bit of an acid-test wasn't it ! This, in case anyone's wondering: