tomato

I set the camera spacing on the basis that the standard adapter with the Esprit 150 FR gave 55 mm backfocus, and had no issues.

Yes, an hour of Astro darkness returns next week. 👍

Wow, that is special! If that was taken with a SW 400 syncscan dob I’d better give it a try.

I’m just wondering if anyone has tried this out? I have a second hand 16” Synscan flextube Dob which I would like to try imaging the ISS so implementing this software should in theory make it a whole lot easier, but I find it hard to believe that it could move the big scope accurately and quickly enough to be successful. I also note that the latest version of the SW drive motors may need to be present for it to work so it might all be academic anyway.

Thanks, I tried a HST palette version but not enough Oiii signal. All data collected without Astro darkness so not a surprise.

Now with some more subs added, 36 x 3 mins in total. Nowhere as deep as as @gorann or @Adreneline's SY135 images, but some signs of the surrounding gas and dust coming through.

Excellent M27! I can still see a dumbbell shape but this is now marked by the outer shell of gas, seldom visible on shorter integrations.

How exactly do refractor cells fill up with stuff? Yes, you will get crud on the external surface of the lens, but that can be cleaned (when necessary) just like a mirror, but aren’t all of the internal surfaces sealed in the lens cell? With the number of refractors out there I would expect to see a steady stream of posts on this topic, but I haven’t seen any evidence of this.

I got a bit worried when this came up on Google, but it’s referring to an impact in May, so presumably all of the “first light” images were captured post this impact. https://news.sky.com/story/meteoroid-hit-has-caused-significant-uncorrectable-damage-to-james-webb-space-telescope-12655489

I have never used the ASI178MM for guiding but can’t see why it wouldn’t be a perfectly good camera for this purpose. I regularly use them for imaging small targets, in conjunction with Esprit 150 refractors. Here is an LRGB example, bin 2x2, NGC 891, ~6 hrs integration. Your scope would give a reasonable FOV.

Looks good, it would be good to know how you created the HST palette channels from the L extreme OSC data.

I remove them after I have a stretched image, but I don’t use PI exclusively to do the processing, I find I get much better background removal results with APP or Startools than with PI.

It does work but it requires a bit of practice to get right with only 3 points of contact.

Thanks for some really helpful advice. It was tee shirt and shorts weather last night but as a consequence I collected some rather irritating insect bites. The perils of Astrophotography. Guys you are spot on. A totally different hands on experience to DSO imaging, where you lazily collect minute long subs and choose to refocus or not along the way, while all the time the subject stays rock steady in the FOV. With the ISS, its more like doing the scene from Apollo 13 when they had to perform the manually guided mid-course correction burn. 😄

Here is a first go at trying to image the ISS, a collaborative effort between myself and @Tomatobro. Set up is an Altair 102mm F7 APO with an ASI315 colour camera on a NEQ6. This is a set up and take down rig and despite giving ourselves a couple of hrs leadtime last night, glitches with the software meant the ISS sailed overhead on the first pass while we were still trying to sync the mount... We used the excellent SkyTrack software, but didn't optimise the lead/lag settings very well so the ISS would swing into the FOV then just as quickly zip out of it. Here is the best 50% of 57 frames captured that actually contained the ISS. I guess you can just about make out it is the ISS(?) but clearly a long way to go. We just need to get the subject over more pixels, get the frame rate up, get the exposure right, and have it stay in the FOV long enough to capture a reasonable number of decent quality frames, to name just a few.

I could be doing this wrong but I use the 3 screw wedge adapter on the OSC version to adjust tilt. It’s a bit agricultural but it works.

Really, really impressive. Myself and @Tomatobro had a go at imaging the ISS for the first time last night, so I now know just how hard it is to get a result anything like as good as this.👍👏

That’s interesting. My conclusion is solely based on the qualitative observation that the ASI 120 MC-S in the AllSky camera is exhibiting a lot more dead pixels than my other astro cameras which don’t get the exposure to sunlight. There isn’t enough to impact adversely on the night sky images, but they are noticeable at twilight. Of course, I should have taken a measurement when it was installed.

I’ve been getting concerned about how many dead pixels are showing up on my AllSky Camera sensor which I have put down to it being exposed to direct sunlight day in day out. So Mrs Tomato kindly donated a perfect Tupperware storage bowl with the exact ID to push fit over the clear dome fixing screws. A quick rub down with 400 grit paper to provide a key for the paint and a coat of primer and VW silver and it’s in place. I will just need to get used to taking it off and putting it on…

Nice Veil, my favourite is your final rendition.

Quite right, it’s about the science not pretty pictures.

Quite a feat to combine data from all three sources, but to me the result looks oddly clipped and over processed. However, I’m applying my views on what an image ‘should’ look like, and this one is well outside the limits of my experience.

Yes it is, apologies for the unorthodox orientation, but I think there are a number of interesting structures in this nebula. I’ve seen some stunning deep renditions of this region using the HST palette, but looking at it again I’m not sure I have the signal to justify it. I’ll have a go at fully processing the original shades of red version.

Wow, your location is starting to look like Mauna Kea! 👍☺️

This is 270 minutes of integration made up of 60 mins from last year with the RASA8/QNY268c/NBX filter and 210 mins from this year with the NBX replaced with the NBZ filter. Calibrated and stacked in APP, processed in StarTools, PI and AP. There was enough data to attempt the creation of a new blue channel from the red and green to produce a pseudo HST palette. I'm not sure about the lighter band across the bottom of the frame, there were no edges in the images in this region when they were combined. Thanks for looking