tomato

Yes, 10 times is good. I recently replaced the doors on a kitchen and made a jig to drill the holes for the door handles. Trouble was it was handed both for the door side and end, so I was ultra paranoid about drilling them in the wrong place. The Mrs was not impressed with how long the checking was taking, but I stuck to my guns and drilled all 20 pieces without making a mistake.

Agreed, why use a toothed clamp on ring when there is a suitable tooth belt drive already on the lens?

Some simple stretching at various points in the initial workflow would indicate that the spikes are introduced by StarXterminator. However, they always appear to the left of the distribution curve and can be clipped without impacting on the main curve. Their removal doesn’t appear to have any impact visually on the image.

Here is another go, using the new Spectrophotometric Colour Calibration tool in Pixinsight (just needed to download the 62 Gig Gaia stars database, gulp!). I think the background is better, but not sure about the galaxy...

Thanks Olly. I think it's great how 3D printing has made producing bespoke components more readily accessible, but we just happened to have acquired machine tools for a previous engineering intensive pastime, and it's nice not to lose the skills once you have learnt them.

Looking good Olly, but how about making it a duel rig, you know it makes sense😉

The Sony versions of the lens are quite a bit cheaper than the Canon version on the second-hand market. I'm not sure if these require yet another version of the adapter but that might be worth considering. In the absence of a suitable adapter, @Tomatobro has made adapters for 3 of these lenses, but the lower second hand prices of the Sony version might make this a popular item if it was available.

Great presentation, thanks for posting.

Yes thanks, I’ll do some investigation. Something has changed as historically these peaks were never there in the histogram but they show up every time now.

Thanks for the insight. The image has been cropped and a gradient tool applied but no stretching. Would gradient removal clip the data?

No, masks were not used, just adjustments in HSL, selective colour and colour balance.

This is 188 x 2 mins taken with the dual Esprit 150/IMX571c rig over two very contrasting sessions. The first 3 hrs were on a night of stunning clarity but terrible seeing, FWHM figures of >4.1 being recorded. The second was much improved seeing (~3.1 FWHM) but the session was curtailed by advancing mist and fog. I combined the data sets anyway, calibrated and stacked in APP, gradient removal in APP then StarXterminator in PI, Histogram and Curves transformation, recombine with PixelMath then NoiseXterminator applied, 0.85 noise reduction, 0.35 detail enhancement. Finished off in Affinity Photo. As usual some distant tiny galaxies coming through, I am intrigued by the reddish galaxy in the lower left PGC 267462, but apart from some general position and magnitude parameters, I couldn't find a value for the red shift. Thanks for looking.

Yes, I started with the image you posted at the start of the thread. You can see the distribution of the red and green pixels of the modified image is subtly different from the original. I was aiming for colours to match the example M31 posted by @vlaiv, it needs more work.

Clear here at 6 pm but then constant high cloud rolling over until 9 pm when it cleared. Good seeing for a change, imaged for around 90 minutes until fog started to impact on the sub quality. Still, a little bit more is in the can.😊

Now that’s a really bright Squid! Great work.👍

Would sag in the imaging train create this effect? Does your friend have a fully screwed together imaging train, or is there any play in the focuser? Do the tear drops change orientation on the other side of the pier/tripod?

Just received my annual album of images printed by MyPicture. They have excelled themselves this year, nice colour and brightness levels rendition on matte photo paper, there is some faint nebulosity visible on some of the printed images that I failed to notice on the monitor! 26 pages of A4 in a hardback format for £18, I’m very satisfied.

First class image with modest integration. The RC add-ons are a real step change in processing IMHO. So easy to use but they give outstanding results.

Apart from the darkening along the bottom there isn’t much for the flat to correct looking at that image. How do you keep your sensor window free of dust?

As the old adage says, don’t buy your astro kit from a department store, even a posh one.

Agreed, correct back focus is important to minimise aberrations right out to the corners of a large sensor, but when I use an ASI 178 camera (sensor dimensions 7.4 x 5 mm) on an Esprit 150 I don't worry about precise back focus.

It’s the LNC option in APP that adds the time, each frame is analysed, do the calculation then apply the result to each channel on every frame. Also because of of my lazy alignment when taking the subs, the final integration can be 36M pixels rather than 26M, APP on my set up integrates 62000 pixels at a time, and on 250+ frames that’s 6-8 seconds a go, that’s over an hour just for the integration. I don’t stack stacks, I thought there was some minor degradation in quality if you do that, so although I have interim integrations as the project progresses, after the final capture session I put all the subs in again and calibrate and stack from scratch, that’s when I can get my life back!☺️

I have a tower PC with the following spec: CPU) AMD Ryzen 7 3700X Eight Core CPU (3.6GHz-4.4GHz/36MB CACHE/AM4) Motherboard ASUS® PRIME B450-PLUS (DDR4, USB 3.1, 6Gb/s) Memory (RAM) 32GB Corsair VENGEANCE DDR4 2400MHz (2 x 16GB) Graphics Card 4GB AMD RADEON™ RX 550 - HDMI, DVI - DX® 12 1st Storage Drive 512GB PCS 2.5" SSD, SATA 6 Gb (520MB/R, 450MB/W) Stacking 230 IMX571 subs in APP with LNC enabled (3 iterations) takes around 6 hours… I just go and do something else.😎

Don’t take up golf, instead spend the money on setting up a duel rig if imaging is your thing and you don’t already have one. Imaging time is doubled without any reliance on the weather improving. Also having a permanent setup which can be operated unattended makes a huge difference in the UK. It’s only anecdotal but I seem to find that the skies can often remain clear from the early hours to sunrise, this slot was never open to me when I was setting up and taking down every time. Sure, Sept/Oct has been grim but I clocked up 75 hrs from 1st March to 31st May this year and kept on going all through the summer. Results were mixed but I got some reasonable images, if I wanted to try for APOD standard every time I would sell up and buy time at a remote site.

You can enter your scope and camera details into Stellarium to project your FOV onto the sky. The software will also display scaled images of many DSOs.