tomato

Progress is being made. When I re-installed the QHY software a list of QHY driver tick boxes came up with just the first one ticked. They all looked like old CCD cameras to me so in my wisdom I unticked them (you don't want surplus code clogging up your hard drive, right?), including the first one. That appears to be the main driver as with the first one ticked it will now connect to EZCAP and NINA. EZCAP displays the atmospheric pressure and humidity but they are still missing in NINA. I'll try installing again with the NINA box unticked as @Stuart1971 suggests. It is pi**ing down here so I'm actually quite relaxed at the moment.😎 Thanks for all of your help and advice. On the firmware question, the QHY site has a beta version of the allinone package that needs the firmware updating in the 268 camera, but I dont know how you go about this? There might be something on this elsewhere on the QHY site, but I'm leaving that well alone for now.

OK, so I have updated NINA to 2.1 (I was on 2.0) and re-installed the QHY All-In-One software package. Now the camera will not connect via NINA or EZCAP at all. Don't you just love this hobby?🤪

Indeed, walk before you try to run. If you are just starting out, I would manually move to a bright star, centre it visually then sync the mount with the handset. Get the camera focused and taking images through your chosen software, and get some images in the can to give you a morale booster before moving onto guiding, platesolving etc. IT and modern AP is a wonderful thing but if it doesn’t work straight out of the box (which it rarely does) it can drain your enthusiasm for this hobby in no time. The book “Making Every Photon Count” by Steve Richards is a brilliant guide to how to successfully make Astrophotography work from the outset.

Thanks Steve, I’m miles behind on the NINA version and probably on QHY drivers also, time for some updates, me thinks. Weather pants here also but the 20 minutes of clear sky was enough to get the mono and OSC cameras aligned.👍

Just a quick question, I plugged a QHY268 mono into NINA tonight, it is running with the native driver but I cannot see the sensor humidity figure displayed anywhere. I already had the QHY package installed from when I acquired my 268 colour camera, so do I need the latest driver and/or version of NINA to see it? Thanks in advance.

It is certainly spectacular but the colours are perhaps a bit too strong for my taste. Having said that, a lot of images from remote sites seem to have vivid colours, maybe its hard not to display them that way when you have hours and hours of quality data.

Yes, on the basis you only want to run noise reduction once, I do it at the end after all of the noise has been generated.

I currently run SPCC at the start, then BXT, NXT is not used until the end of processing.

You could align two SY135 setups with shims but it would be a faff and probably only worth it if you were to keep them on the mount for a while. They are widefield set ups so it depends how much value you place on the lost peripheral real estate vs having two rigs on the same target.

Steve, if your observatory has a powered roof, consider investing in a Hydreon rain sensor. It intervened a few times in 2022 to protect my gear on sessions I had left running.

I did suggest Atacama to Mrs Tomato as a possible retirement holiday home location, it didn’t get the response I was hoping for.🥴

Having a permanent setup makes a massive difference. If I was still setting up and taking down my total nights would be half of what I managed.

I was given a little astronomer’s notebook for Christmas 2021 which I diligently filled in every night I was out in 2022. It has 100 pages and I completed 96 of them, does the publisher know something about the UK weather, I wonder? Now I go out whenever it is clear if I can, regardless of time of year or moon phase, so they were not all ideal imaging sessions by any means, but I’ll take a 26% hit rate for the cloudy UK. I have a new notebook with 100 pages for 2023 so we will see how this one goes.

Maybe it’s precisely because I always lash the cables in an untidy bundle that I have yet to encounter a failure in 3 years of running a dual rig. There, I’ve said it now…☺️

So this is like a Sky-Watcher MN190 without the corrector plate? It would certainly be a cheap scope to manufacture, I suppose the key issue is how bad would the aberration be? Dare I say it, but software is now available that does a reasonable job in correcting star shapes, especially if these are only on the periphery of the FOV. There has been a recent thread on here w.rt. how critical the corrector plate is on a RASA, but that’s a F2 system. I have a very old F4 8” Schmidt Newtonian but unfortunately it would need quite a bit of work to try out the idea (the glued on secondary fell off and chipped the primary…)

True, you don’t want to waste time untangling a rat’s nest of cables if you set up and take down each time but when I used to do that, I just colour coded the plugs. If each end was plugged into the right location, I didn’t care where they went in between. I’ve never suffered from electrical interference but I don’t have AC or high voltage anywhere near the rig, and I use decent quality cables. For sure, if I had a fixed set up, I’d make them look nice, but for me it’s currently just wasted effort.

What's wrong with spaghetti? IMHO nothing at all. 😉 Seriously, short, tidy cables are nice, but I think we spend a lot of time on them in the UK simply because we can't use the set up in anger because of the clouds. Providing they can't snag then apart from the aesthetics what do neat and tidy cables do for your image quality? I just bundle them together and lash them near the COG of the rig with velcro straps and that's it. The only cable failure I have encountered to date is a long ducted powered USB from the observatory to the warm room. OK, If you have a well optimised scope set up that you never change, I can see the point in making a tidy, minimal cable run, but I re-configure my set up regularly so I would need purpose made looms for each configuration, and I'd rather spend the cash on processing software or something else that might improve my images.

Here is someone else who thinks NINA's sequencer is great. I don't like the idea of setting up a sequence to run from a cold start, I'll always cool the cameras, unpark, slew to target, platesolve, recentre and initially focus manually, by which time the cloud has usually arrived. However, I'm quite happy to let NINA run on well into the early hours if the weather is being co-operative. In 3 years of use I can count the number of unexplained interruptions I have experienced on one hand. +1 for checking you have all the command ducks in a row, as has already been said, just like any computer code it always does exactly what you tell it to do, nothing more or less. Most of my glitches arise from the dome automation (which is not controlled by NINA) and the scope automation not staying 100% in sync, but I'm slowly getting there.

The Moon was just too bright for galaxies earlier this week so this is IC 443, 7.75 hrs of 155 x 3 mins with the dual Esprit 150/IMX571c/NBZ rig. The Moon was 85% illuminated and about 65 degrees away from the target so I struggled to get any useful OIII signal. A pseudo HST palette was created using @Luke Newbould's tutorial, which to my eye gave a better result than sticking with the original. Calibrated and stacked in APP, processed in PI and AP, the RC Xterminator trio of tools in use once again. This is the first time I have imaged this nebula, it clearly needs more integration. The QHY268 mono camera should arrive shortly so I may return to this target with an NBZ/Lum and NBZ/RGB approach for yet another unscientific comparison. Thanks for looking.

I’ve just noted that a complimentary post I made about the above standout image seems to be getting an inordinate amount of likes. This is due I suspect to the hash I made of including the original post which could make it look as if I captured the image. Sorry for any confusion caused, I just want to make it clear @geoflewis is responsible for this remarkable image, not me!

+1 for inspirational images. I still keep an image of Pickering’s Triangle posted on here by @gnomus several years back for the same reason.

The lunar occultation of Mars is the one for me. I'd been waiting 2 years for this one, then a few days before the event I caught my 2nd bout of Covid of 2022. Out in the freezing cold before 5am in the morning, feeling crap with clouds ruining the view, I wondered why I bothered, but then there was gap for about 5 minutes which allowed me to grab this, despite very little time to focus, hence the somewhat fuzzy result... Superb, reminds me of Earthrise from Apollo 8 but a different celestial body.

This isn’t very impressive visually but it’s the image I’m most proud of from 2022. I don’t usually attempt to image transient events, but I couldn’t resist trying to capture the JWST 750k miles out on its way to it’s parking orbit. I nearly missed it, on the first attempt I was pointing the scope in the wrong place, and my only other chance was hindered by cloud. That’s why the trail is not of even brightness.

Very impressive, I’m glad it’s 93 million miles away…

Alas my garden dimensions aren’t in the same league as the Dobsonian…