tomato

Wow, I bet the upper galaxy was once a beautiful symmetrical barred spiral, until subjected to this gravitational torture. Awesome, thanks for sharing.

Light relief on an Astro kit price hike thread, can’t be bad.

If you want one AP package to rule them all, that’s a big ask, as the many discussions on this topic here on SGL demonstrate. Also, even if you buy them all, it’s still wouldn’t make a dent in what can be spent on the hardware. I agree a proper APP manual is long overdue, I suspect the enthusiastic users community has steered the creator to develop the software features rather than a manual, but that’s for Mabula to comment on. A newcomer coming up on the rails so to speak is Affinity Photo, it was a cheaper alternative to PS a year or so ago, but now it has built in dedicated Astro functionality including calibration and stacking, who can say what other Astro features it might have in another 12 months?

Crikey Rodd, I thought that image was one of yours for a second!😊

Roger that.🙂

Folks must be getting tired of me resurrecting this thread, especially as I promised to call it a day on the previous post, but... The colour was some way off so I have run the data through from scratch again and have hopefully come up with something a bit better. It could do with some Ha data, but that will have to wait until Autumn rolls around.

Sara, I'm really sorry to hear about your current outlook on AP, I can only say your superb images and website both inspired and informed me on my first steps into AP, I do hope your enthusiasm returns. I would like more clear nights, but maybe you can have too much of a good thing? After spending an intense couple of weeks on the processing side I have come to two conclusions: 1. I definitely do not enjoy the activity as much as image capture. 2. Because of item 1 I know I will never be as good at processing as I really need to be, given that my datasets are always likely to be down on quality and quantity. But hey, the night sky is always there, (sometimes not even obscured by clouds) and I still do enjoy the challenge.

I guess I'm not the first person to come up with this notion, but having spent around 6 hours yesterday in front of APP/ST/PI/AP it occurred to me that perhaps the UK climate suits my current imaging skill set rather well. If I lived in New Mexico I figured I would have lots of drives full of raw data but would never have the time to process them given my current time allocation is about 3:1 in favour of processing over image capture. OK, the argument won't stand up to close scrutiny, and the corollary is why am I not expert processor if I have all this time to devote to the activity, but it does make feel a little bit better about night after night of grey skies.

Thanks for this, on looking this up I have now discovered that NINA, my current choice of imaging control software, does something very similar. It does mean running everything through one laptop, but that should be OK. I will give it a try on my next outing.

Thanks Peter, like most of my images it needs more integration time, but there are so many galaxies and so little time.

This is 3.5 hours using the dual Esprit 150 rig and ASI 178 cameras. Lum 32 x 3 min RGB 13 x 3 min each I currently dither on the RGB scope every 3 subs so I'm dropping 1 in 3 Lum subs, but I will try pushing this out to 1 in 4 or 5 as I couldn't see any appreciable walking noise in the final image. Calibrated and stacked in APP, processed in ST 1.7 and AP, I ran it through the PI image solver and annotation scripts to try and identify the numerous background galaxies, but it missed quite a few. Thanks for looking.

Same here, I followed the tried and tested advice on SGL to install and set up Sitech Config and Exe and have had no issues but then I don’t use half of the functions that are available via the software and controller. Of course, there is a whole host of astronomers on the forum who use Sitech to control a variety of different scopes and mounts. On the dual rig I am using NINA on two laptops and dither every 3 x 3 min subs on the ASI 178 RGB camera as walking noise is quite noticeable without dither. That means I’m currently losing 1 in 3 Lum subs, but I will experiment with pushing the interval out to 1 in 4 or 5 as there was no appreciable walking noise on my last outing.

Back on topic, the Sitech forum is always buzzing with discussion on controller issues/improvements/advice, quite a lot of the content is from Mesu owners.

I do like the OTA assembly on a roller approach, but I have just spent 2.5 hrs under a precious clear sky aligning the cameras so the dual rig is staying where it is for now, guiding was 0.5" total RMS which is acceptable at my imaging scale. And another thought, I have to disassemble the rig quite extensively to put it on and off the mount, (lifting two Esprit 150s on in one go is asking for trouble) so I will need to keep accurate records of where everything needs to be, but that shouldn't be too hard. Will definitely try this method next time.

Spare a thought for the Mk I owners who cannot disengage the drives, trying to get perfect balance (which TBH I didn’t think was critical on a Mesu). Mind you, with 100+ kg all up weight, a bit of stiction gives me time to react.

Nice one, you got more Spaghetti than I did with my RASA8.👍

Superb result, great framing, colour and detail.👍

The Atik 383 is fine Astro camera, we are all getting enthused by the latest CMOS cameras, but you only have to look at the vast library of superb images captured with this camera and other KAF 8300 offerings to know you have a first class instrument. I use darks, flats and bias calibration frames with mine, +1 for making sure your flat exposures are of sufficient duration (1 use 2-3 secs). I have found the cooler is not quite as efficient as the Moravian Instruments version, so make sure leave a bit of capacity spare when selecting your cooled set point temperature. Enjoy!

Scope Nights says Go! for Shropshire on Wednesday, Flight.👍

Following @Laurin Dave's first class results with the Photometric Mosaic script in PI using one of his widefield images as the reference I was determined to have a another go using all my own data. Interestingly, a widefield shot taken with the RASA8/QHY 268c did not work, too much gradient in the image, (see PI screen shot below), but I had more success with another taken under better conditions with the same scope and an Atik Horizon OSC. The colours still aren't quite right, and there is a background cross hatching effect in areas where the high res data doesn't overlap with the widefield image, but the script has certainly given me the best results from the data by a country mile. I'm done with this mosaic for now, I'm looking forward to imaging some tiny galaxies that fit into the FOV. Thanks again Dave and John.

I had the same idea, but it’s not quite the result I was aiming for after 4 hrs in front of APP and PI.

Well, I made a Pig’s Ear of the processing.☺️

I love how sometimes APP can pop out an image of high entertainment value. I got this when attempting to combine a widefield image of M31 with a 12 panel mosaic, I really should know better.🤪

A brilliant result from one hour of integration, just what we need under UK skies.

There is now an astro background (gradient removal?) tool in the v 1.9 Filters drop down but so far I haven’t found any instructions on how to use it. Thanks for the video link, I’ll see if it’s in there.