Phillyo

Absolutely stunning work. Love the processing!

There's no such thing as an ASI833? Do you mean the ASI183MC? If so then I'm not sure why your image is black and white. Did you debayer the image during preprocessing?

Was this taken with a one shot colour camera? It looks black and white?

Love this Ruz! Lots of whispy stuff captured there. Look forward to seeing your updated version. How come you resorted to the Canon? Issues with the astrocam? I was out last night as it was clear over lincoln too. Added another 5 hours to my NGC7000. Clouded over for another week now

Added another 5 hours of data last night and reprocessed it (without drizzle this time Vlaiv ;)) so this is now 6 hours with a slightly different process. I've done stars and starless as I really like seeing both?

I think the actual focal lengh is closer to 129mm as calculated by plate solving etc but i'll have a look at the step down rings and see which is closest

Hi all, if I want to use this lens at f4 using step down rings am I right in thinking i'll need to step down to approx 32.5mm? I don't want to use the internal aperture ring as it gives diffraction spikes that I don't really like. Thanks.

Thanks Vlaiv. I'll give F4 a shot, although it'll mean more integration time it will also (hopefully) mean a bette final image. I have some step down rings I can use too so that should help also.

So you can get a trial version so I'm giving that a go. I uploaded all the images I took to create the image of this post and both curvature and tilt vary on each image, the worst being 18.1% curvature and 15% tilt. The best being 14.6% curvature and 5% tilt. Why does it vary so much image to image? Is there anything I can do about that? I ended up removing the spacers this evening and reattaching it without doing it up super tight. I only took 2 images before clouds blocked the stars out but they were better, with curvature being about 10-12% and tilt being either 5% or 1%. So now I'm confused. I did shoot the first image (with 1% tilt and 10.3% curvature) at a narrower aperture of like f4 maybe? Just to see if it made much difference. The second image was shot wide open at f2, but it's still only 5% and 12.3%. I'm rather confused now! Maybe I'll just take as many photo's as a can then just crop in a slightly to remove the very nasty stars Thanks, Phil.

@vlaiv this is how it's all connected (Sorry for bad picture, cold and dark!) so I'm not sure where the tilt is coming from. I'll need to do some investigations me thinks! I don't suppose there's a way of checking for tilt using software is there? I hate to waste clear nights.

Thank you. I don't obsess over it, but I like tinkering and making things 'better', it's one of the things I find most interesting in the hobby. Gotta strive to be better right?

Interesting! I'll need to take a look at that then. Thanks again.

Haha no that's fair. I did indeed do 2xdrizzle, I will do it again without the drizzle. However, the reason for the halos is due to the very fast processing I did. I removed the stars with Starnet to work on just the nebula on it's own, then I added them back in with pixelmath at like 0.8x maybe? Like I say, it was quick and dirty and if/when I come to do a 'final' edit (whenever I get more data) I'll not remove the stars and edit the same way. There is some tilt, though I don't know why. I'm supporting the lens, with 2 rings and the camera with a ring too so neither should be tilting/sagging. I'm wondering if it might be a distance thing? Is it definitely tilt? I'll upload a picture later of how it's all set up (I'm at work now). I have a friend-made bahtinov mask which work's 'okish' but I'm looking at getting a better one as it isn't great. That being said, I spent a good long while getting focus so I think focus is fine and I think it's more the processing that caused the slightly out of focus look at 100%. Cheers Vlaiv. Phil

Congratulations Spongey, a great process and fully deserved win!

Don't do it this time! Give me some more integration time first please

Thanks Martin, and yes you're right. I uploaded this at full res if you click on it and it definitely shows the noise. I'm not too concerned about it as it is definitely a work in progress! It looks fine on insta/facebook too :P

Aint that the truth 🙄

Thank you, yes taken with the Samyang 135 @ f2.8. 4 min subs.

I let the dogs out earlier this evening and noticed that it was actually clear here in Lincoln for the first time in weeks! Decided to try and snatch an hour on NGC7000 and give it a gentle process. It's a bit grainy, a bit noisy and it's not my finest processing ever. However, it's nice to actually catch some photons for a change! I'd like to add a LOT more data on this area, like another 19 hours or so. Kit as per sig with the IDAS NBX filter. Thanks, Phil.

These are great first images, well done! You should be proud of them, it's onwards and upwards from here. This is often up for debate, but I personally wouldn't use dark frames for calibration with a DSLR due to the fact they need to be taken at the same exact temperature as the light frames. That's tough with an uncooled sensor as it will fluctuate noticeably throughout the night.

This is beautiful, the whispy nebula at the bottom is gorgeous. I'm generally not a huge fan of blue for Ha though.

Thank you, yes I have the ZWO to canon adapter with the filter 2" drawer in it.

Haha yeah, there's always something that needs tweaking or tinkering. I think we're our own worst critics half the time!!

Absolutely stunning. I love M31 and this is top notch. The level of detail is phenomenal. I took a similar image recently with the 533 on a Samyang, slightly wider than this though. Didn't get this level of detail from it.

So I tried to resample it last night using different scaling methods and none of the results were as clean as the 2xdrizzle. Much more noise and much harder to process. I'm probably going something wrong but I'll stick with the 2xdrizzle for now.