tomato

I have a RASA8 and an Altair Wave 102mm F7 APO, they have never been side by side on the mount, so that is something I could try out.

Lumenators… Didn’t a certain Albus Dumbledore invent a device to sort them out?

Yes, Olly, I am very grateful to @gorann for bringing the RASA/OSC combination to my attention, the light gathering capability suits my somewhat impatient approach to AP perfectly! I also get a good physical work out changing over the Esprits to the RASA on and off the mount, beats the gym any day...

Now with an extra 88 mins of data, but still needs more I reckon, to improve the outer spiral arms and clean up the background.

Great mosaic result from another RASA/CMOS OSC combination, and dare I say with quite modest integration time per panel? My word, there is a lot of crud in space, but it is very photogenic crud.

Here is their response in the FAQ section regarding creating light pollution: Green Space Dark Skies will present temporary, low-impact lighting interventions (the lights will be used for a short period of time at dusk) creating magical, memorable moments in the landscape. They will most likely get a memorable moment if they wave the lights about after dark in front of a bunch of astronomers who have travelled to the dark site.

It certainly looks like orbiting hardware re-entering the atmosphere, but quite a sizeable item.

Just to convince you further, here is 103 x 2 mins with the F7 Esprit 150/IMX571 OSC rig from last night, and there was a crescent moon in the sky.

With the relatively low price of mass storage these days, I tend to keep everything but I guess once you have created a master calibration frame that works, there is not much value in keeping the individual subs. I never delete my light subs though, I might use a different software package to stack them etc in the future, and they just took too much time and effort to capture to throw them away.

Great capture, I read that amateurs could still image the JWST out at L2 and you have the proof right there.👍

Thanks for the comment. I must have about a dozen of previous attempts, the final ones were posted in this thread:

Great detail and colour, I have never thought to use the OSC and NBZ on this target, but M1 would be quite small in my FOV.

Thanks, I was surprised how much of the FOV it takes up with this set up. I will need a 4 or 6 panel mosaic if I put the ASI 178s on!

That’s a stunning image, beautifully crafted. It’s not a criticism but if you get fed up with the red nebulosity dominating the image, you could try using @Luke Newbould’s tutorial to create a Hubblesque palette, it’s given me some pleasing results on Ha dominated targets. It uses Pixinsight but the method could be used in other processing packages.

Here is 132 x 2 mins on M101 captured with the Esprit 150/IMX571/QHY268c dual rig. There are a couple of things I need to put right, I used the 268 in DSO mode (Gain 30, offset 30) but calibrated with darks taken in high gain mode. APP gave me some polite warnings that all was not well, but carried on so I thought I would see how it turned out. The second issue was me being impatient to start the run I began with M101 at only 30 degrees elevation so guiding was poor and the subs were nowhere near the quality of those captured later in the night when the galaxy was at +40 degrees. Hopefully I can get a few more hours data tonight and rectify both of these faults. Calibrated and stacked in APP, processed in APP, PI and AP. I used the Starnetv2 to separate out the stars, seemed to give slightly better results than StarXTerminator. Thanks for looking.

Nice one, pleased it passed the storm test which is where I thought it would be vulnerable. I take your point about security, I wouldn’t leave my kit in the observatory if I was away for any length of time. It also doesn’t scream “Astro kit inside”, it looks more like an emergency water storage tank to irrigate your lawn.

My default exposure setting for RGB imaging with this set up is 120 secs. I could spend a lot of time optimising the exposure time for my sky conditions, scope/camera setup, but that number seems to work for me 95% of the time.

Here is 113 x 2 mins of LDN 1532 in Taurus, framed by three 6th, 7th and 8th magnitude stars. Captured with the Esprit 150/IMX571c sensor dual rig. Calibrated and stacked in APP, processed in PI and AP.

This is my result from a Bortle 5/6 location with a RASA8/QHY268c, 6 hrs integration. I would haver thought my OSC camera has to be less sensitive than your mono setup so definitely worth a go in my view.

I took some calibration frames this morning, no repeat of the error message.

Something a bit more basic, while imaging tonight my 268c returned a QHY error message repeatedly saying the supply voltage was too low (below 11V). I checked the on scope power distribution and it was rock steady at 12.4V, cooling was running at 37% capacity, no fluctuations. The message came back every time I cleared it, I eventually disconnected it from NINA and reconnected, so far the message has not returned...

Wonderfully deep! So that fibrous looking nebulosity on the RHS has no official name or designation? How would you go about registering it as a discovery or is that even possible these days with so many all sky surveys having been completed?

Awesome...👍

I started my career in the chemical processing industry as a Pilot Plant technician and was shown how to assemble Corning Quickfit glass process plant. I was told that the glass column buttress ends under compression were stronger than the cast iron flanges bolting them together. I was sceptical and left to me own devices promptly proved the statement by tightening a joint until the 9" iron flange split down the middle, the glass was unscathed. Learning by doing is good.

Nice M31 in Panavision. Its nice to capture it in widescreen with just a couple of panels.