tomato

Having experienced horizontal banding on a QHY268c (same sensor as the IMX571C) here are my findings: 1. Increase the USB Traffic value from zero to +40. 2. Use a good quality USB 3 lead. 3. I have found it is important to take flats/dark flats at the same temperature as your lights/darks.

OK, how about the Axolotl Nebula, kind of the right shape and certainly the right colour.

How about the Ear Trumpet Nebula?

Here is another rendition. I have bumped up the stars a bit and tried to fix the purples. I might have clipped the data in trying to sort out the uneven background though.

I’ve tried a triple scope set up, the mount could cope and it sort of worked but in my experience the degree of difficulty in getting it all to run harmoniously goes up disproportionately to just adding another scope. I have had more success setting up the third scope on a second mount and running it separately.

Yes, there are two schools of thought on dual rigs in the UK, the first is “why waste your money on a dual rig when we get so little imaging time” and the second is “we have so little imaging time in the UK, a dual rig makes perfect sense”. I think we are in the second category👍🏼

Thanks, you are right about the colour, it is way too purple. Again, I was hoping with 20 hrs of OSC on the board, getting a decent colour rendition would be straightforward, but not so. I need to have another go at the processing, but hopefully not the whole calibration and stacking routine, it took around 6 hrs on my PC... For a dual rig you will need some kind of adjustable saddle, I use an ADM item which I think would be sturdy enough for a couple of Esprit100s but is right on the limit of acceptable stability for the 150s. The trouble is the height of the adjustment saddle puts the COG of the second scope well away from the mount which is not good. The inherent flexing that occurred causing image shift between the two scopes was largely fixed by fabricating an aluminium bracing plate which bolts across the top of the two sets of tube rings. This has to be loosened off to allow adjustments to align the cameras and then very carefully tightened up so that the alignment is not thrown out too much by tightening down the plate. It's a bit of an iterative process and take the best part of one session to get right. Hopefully you could get away without one on the Esprit100 setup. But I wholly recommend dual rigs. The feeling you get when you can multiply the time spent capturing subs by 2 is for me, well worth the cost in time and money.

Agreed, my small 12v solar panel used to charge the dome 14Ahr battery that runs the dome rotation and shutter, is really struggling to keep the battery fully charged now that the days are shorter and the sun is lower in the sky.

The brighter stars have hexagonal artefacts if you zoom in, they must have used StarXTerminator.

Another stunning image of the Pillars, this time from the MIRI.

Thanks @Paul M, for the Stephan's Quintet crop suggestion, I suppose there might not be this level of detail on the 11 hr version so that's a positive.

Thanks for all of the appreciative feedback. I suppose by investing over double the integration time I usually manage on an object I had high expectations for the outcome, but to my eye there was not much improvement over the 11 hr version. It depends on the target I guess, but maybe somewhere around 15 hrs would be the optimum from my location.

Nice one Olly, is this the first time someone has used a Mesu for visual astronomy? The guidescope on my RASA8 is mounted on a length of square profile steel tube which previously saw service as the retractable handle on a hand luggage suitcase. I try to spend my astro budget on stuff I definitely cannot make myself.

For once I was determined to give a DSO the integration time it deserves, so here is 609 x 2 mins on NGC7331 with the dual Esprit150/IMX571 OSC rig, captured over several sessions in September/October. I also got about 6 hrs of Ha/NBZ data but I can't seem to make this work with the RGB image, so it is not included here. The Good The only thing I like about the image is that the long integration and minimisation of the foreground stars has given the sprinkling of distant small galaxies in the FOV more prominence. The Bad I have always had a rather cavalier attitude to precise framing, I don't worry about losing sensor real estate since my targets are usually galaxies so my approach has been "I can always crop the rough stuff out". However, there is no excuse for my initial stack looking like this when I have plate solving and auto centering in NINA. My only defence is the cameras came off numerous times during the month, and I didn't want to lose too much clear sky time realigning them but even so... I think this poor frame alignment has significantly contributed to the other issues with this image, you will also note from the dust motes present that I lost my way with the calibration frames assignment, on at least one occasion. The Ugly The background is really blotchy. You can see it more clearly on this stretched image. Is it real dust or IFN, or a consequence of poor alignment and/or calibration, I'm not sure. This experience has dented my enthusiasm for spending ages on one target, but I will try again at some point with more disciplined framing. Thanks for looking

Very nice, I’m not a huge fan of starless images, galaxies in particular look to me like they are suspended in ‘nothing’ but the stars give them some form of context. Just my opinion.

One of the best close in Elephants Trunk I’ve seen, an outstanding result from your location. Using a dual rig I got 24 hrs of RGB and NB data on NGC7331 in October from my location but to date the image derived from it doesn’t do the integration time justice, but I’ll keep plugging away at it.

I image from a Bortle 5 site with some prominent LED street lights present but using a OSC CMOS camera and a UV/IR cut filter has given me some reasonable results.

If the data was collected with a OSC camera, you could try stitching the RGB panels together. I have done this successfully in APP. From memory, the Photometric Mosaic script in PI handles L and colour images rather than individual RGB channels.

After LP and background calibration on each panel, you could try the calibrate star colours tool, to see if this evens out the green caste. I presume you have the neutralise background button ticked on the image processing panel? This usually removes any green caste from a OSC image, and will retain this if you save your image as a stretched file.

Use of LNC normally helps a lot with gradients when combining panels in APP, so you are at a disadvantage if this is introducing problems by using it. If you are using SCNR can I assume you have PixInsight? If so, I would recommend you try the Photometric Mosaic script. I did a 12 panel M31 and try as I might, I could not eliminate the gradients when using APP, but got a much better result from the script.

The image was most definitely non linear, but the settings I used have always worked fine on stretched images apart from this one.

Great first light, your perseverance has paid off. A mono version of the IMX571 camera plus all of the associated filter hardware will be my next major purchase, if we ever get out of the COL crisis.

Yes, if you have the patience you can do quite a lot of cleaning up of the background on the starless image. I combine a lot of images from different scopes and the FOVs never line up 100% so despite my best efforts, lines can be seen on the final integration. These can easily be removed from a starless image, but I don’t know if I have the dedication to use the clone tool on hundreds of halos, might be ok if it is just on the bright ones.

Interesting, the HST image doesn’t look much like it, the star near the centre in Goran’s and the sky survey images doesn’t appear to be there?

I’ve just checked the FOV using SGL/FLO’s astronomy tools, and I think there is a hint of it on the sky survey image.