symmetal

For a typical dslr at 4.3um pixels, a 500mm lens will give an image scale of 1.8"/pixel. At the moment Jupiter has an apparent diameter of 49" so will be 27 pixels across. Saturn at an apparent diameter of 18" will be 10 pixels, and including the rings it will be 23 pixels across. 🙂 Alan

Very good image for unguided. 🙂 I assume you don't have a field flattener yet which will give you better corner stars. Alan

I bought a set of Baader narrowband filters when i got my first CCD mono camera and that include a H-beta filter though I never used it. H-Beta is just a weaker version of H-alpha so as DaveS said it can in effect be obtained by attenuating the H-alpha signal. H-beta is in the blue-green colour range similar to Oiii. It would be easier to colour mix some of the Red H-alpha channel into the blue and/or green channel in processing, to create H-beta, rather than using imaging time to obtain a weak H-beta signal in blue and green directly. Alan

The only difference is the read noise added to each exposure. If there was no read noise in the camera then the above exposures would be identical as far as noise is concerned, including 3600 x 1 sec exposures and 1 x 1 hour exposure. 🙂 In the images above, 1 300sec exposure has 1 contribution of read noise added, while 10 x 30sec exposures have 10 contributions of read noise, so the latter is noisier. However, once you expose long enough such that the noise contribution from the sky background itself is more than about 5 times the read noise contribution, therefore making the read noise contribution insignificant, then your initial assumption is true. In my bortle 3 skies with a fast RASA 11 and luminance filter I would achieve this read noise swamping figure in about 12 secs, so 20 x15 sec exposures will look just like 1 x 5 min exposure as far as the noise is concerned. The 1 x 5 min will show very bloated stars though so will look worse. Having hundreds of short exposures can take a long time to process as well as taking up storage space so a compromise is needed. With a OSC camera I take 3 min exposures, although the read noise is still swamped at under 2 mins. Alan

Hi Tom, I got it a bit wrong on my last post. Firecapture uses the native drivers when you select the camera manufacturer from the FC startup page (visible when no camera is connected). If it recognizes the camera, which means you've already selected the Omegon camera previously and the native driver is already installed, it skips the camera select page and uses the Omegon native driver. You can choose to use Ascom on this startup instead of the native driver. Not sure how DirectShow drivers can be used as there's no option to select them in FC anyway as far as I can see. So you should be using the native driver anyway in FC, the same as your Toupsky program uses. If you have options in the Toupsky program like individual colour gains, high speed capture and USB Traffic which aren't visible in FC, it's worth contacting Torsten. It seems Ascom drivers don't have the options for high frame rates so any camera using Ascom drivers wouldn't work so well in FC either, including ASI ones. Alan

That's looking very good. Tilt looks well corrected. Luckily the Baader tilt corrector makes it fairly easy to adjust. I aligned mine such that the 3 tilt adjusters are at 12, 4 and 8 o'clock with respect to the sensor and adjustments are fairly predictable if you remember the RASA image flips left and right. 🙂 You don't seem to have any noticeable coloured flares around the edge either, so maybe you won't need to add an internal black tube. It's dependant on where the brighter stars outside the FOV are positioned of course, and on mine M101 and M51 showed significant flares before adding the tube. I should think you're well pleased. 😊 Alan

I checked the manual for the 385C and it's a 12 bit camera but I couldn't see any mention of a 'high speed' mode. On ASI 12 bit cameras this turns it into a 9 bit camera and it does significantly increase your fps. However I did find this statement in the Omegon manual In FC you're using the Ascom or DirectShow driver, so will have the issues quoted which may explain your problem. If you're using DirectShow this may explain why you have no colour gain controls. If you use the Ascom driver do they appear? This FC webpage states that DirectShow drivers may not work properly with some cameras. DirectShow is a webcam driver so likely wouldn't have astro related features available. The Ascom driver not allowing high framerates is an issue with Omegon or Toupsky not having implemented a full Ascom driver and not a FC issue. Zwo cameras work fine at high fps via Ascom. Alan

Yes, it's fairly obvious as indicated in this thread when I had the issue on a new scope in August 2022. Twice, FLO kindly sent me a replacement scope, but they all had the same issue which is when it seems Celestron withdrew them from sale and sent them back to China. It was the latest RASA 8 scopes, (at the time) which were affected and not the earlier ones which were fine. Alan

Hi Tom, I remember my previous posts to you concerning bayer patterns. 🙂 With regard to improving frame rates, these are good settings to use. I assume you've got a ROI just covering the planet to avoid downloading unnecessary background sky data. Use 8 bit capture and not 16 bit. Stacking will give you extra bit resolution up to around 12 bits anyway if captured in 8 bit. Use an exposure of 3 to 5mS if possible to freeze the seeing. 5mS will theoretically allow 200fps though other factors will limit this. At 20mS exposure you will never get above 50fps. Use a high camera gain setting to enable you to reach those shorter exposures, and still have a histogram peaking around say 75% It will look horribly noisy on the preview but stacking will remove pretty much all this extra gain noise. Two other options which help but you may not have in camera 'More' settings are USB Traffic which can usually be set to 100% on planetary ROIs without causing corrupt or missing frame videos. The other is 'High Speed Mode' which reduces the camera A to D convertion bit resolution by 3 or 4 bits and so allows quicker data conversions. As you're capturing in 8 bit anyway which will still be lower than the High Speed Mode resolution this won't matter. If these options aren't available a message to the FC developer may well help so good luck. Finally an SSD is highly recommended for storage. FC allocates memory to a buffer for storing video frames and indicates the buffer size remaining while capturing the video. If this reaches zero your fps rate will drop considerably. Depending on your ROI size and heap memory allocated (used for the buffer) it can run out of buffer in just 15 secs or so. While recording, FC is also writing this frame buffer to disk so freeing that buffer space back up. A normal mechanical hard disk can't write fast enough and so the memory can't be freed up quickly enough to avoid it eventually running out. An SSD can write about as fast as the data is received so your buffer size remaining may not show any drop at all or drop slowly enough that 5 minute captures are easily done without it reaching zero. Hope these help. 🙂 Alan

When you say the pattern is identical even after changing camera orientation, I assume you're saying that the right side of the image always shows the same defect, then it's the camera sensor that's tilted with respect to its mounting. If your camera has a tilt adjuster built in then, adjusting that should correct it. If you use a separate tilt adjuster in the imaging train to correct it then you're introducing tilt of the opposite direction in the scope to correct the camera. This means you can't then rotate the camera for framing as that will cause tilt to reoccur. It's best to adjust the camera so it has no built in tilt, and if your images still show some tilt, an external tilt adjuster in the imaging chain will correct it and will also allow you to rotate the camera without introducing more tilt. To adjust the camera tilt, it's simplest to build a test jig of a simple box with a hole in the top and a cheap laser pen as shown later in this thread with various examples. You can adjust it accurately during the day indoors. Trying to adjust it at night which may mean removing the camera each time, is generally just endless frustration. 😬 Alan

Pity those options aren't available with the driver as implemented by Firecapture. The histogram just lets you see the results of changing the gain, exposure, offset etc., so histogram settings don't allow those parameters to be changed independantly as that would be confusing. It's no great loss not being able to change the colour gain as that can easily be done in post processing anyway. I assume if the options aren't available in Firecapture they are stuck in the default 50% gain setting. If all three colours are showing on the histogram but the blue is around 25% that of the green and the red is like 80% of green then that looks about right. Alan

In Firecapture's 'Control' section where you set the camera gain and exposure, click the button labelled 'More'. You'll see more camera options, and among them should be red and blue gain sliders. To get a reasonable colour balanced image on ASI cameras I usually have the red at around 45 and the blue at 95. Firecapture doesn't have a white balance button, as for any object except the Moon or Venus, it would give the wrong colour result. Use the Moon to get an idea of where the Red/Blue sliders should be to get a grey colored Moon and those settings should be pretty good for the other planets. You can always make final colour adjustments later in your processing software anyway. The red and blue gain settings will affect the recorded video. Alan

As you won't need any of the other wires I would cut them off and heatshrink or tape the individual cut ends so they can't short to anything. If you want to heatshrink or tape the individual unused pins that would be fine too. Connected to the FocusLynx it won't actually matter as they are not connected in the RJ45 but some moonlite/robofocus compatible drivers may supply +12V on one or more of the unused pins, in order that unipolar steppers can be used as well as the bipolar ones you have. Connecting them to unused pins in the D9 would work with the FocusLynx but could be a bit dodgy if used with a different driver module as above. The Lakeside steppers are wired with +12V going to D9 pin 5. The Lakeside motors themselves can be wired as unipolar or bipolar. Disconnecting and isolating the 2 motor wires to pin 5 turns the stepper into a bipolar one which is moonlite compatible, which is how I use it with my arduino based homemade bipolar drivers. 🙂 Alan

Yes, The male pins are fixed in position by the D9 housing anyway so glueing them wouldn't be a problem. It's the female pins that need to be free to move around a little in the housing. 🙂 Alan

I think you've downloaded the wrong file. xz extensions are for linux. This is the file you want from the download link I posted above Other files may also contain the source code for compiling your own versions so will contain thousands of files. 😉 The highlighted one contains two folders, bin and doc. The bin folder contains 3 files ffmpeg.exe, ffplay.exe and ffprobe.exe The doc folder has 34 files, mainly html documation files for opening in a web browser. When you've copied ffmpeg.exe to your Autostakkert folder and you click 'Open' and select your mp4 file, a command window will open which is ffmpeg running and creating your avi file. It should close when it's done. ffmpeg is a command line program with no windows interface, which makes it easier to implement on various operating systems. Autostakkert takes care of entering the correct command line options and running the program so you don't need to worry about this. Alan

Autostakkert will read and process mp4 files if you have the open source program ffmpeg.exe in the same folder as Autostakkert. Here's the main ffmpeg page and here's a link to download the latest builds from github. Download the ffmpeg-master-latest-win64-gpl.zip file listed underr assets. Unzip the file and you will see it contains a bin directory. Copy the file ffmpeg.exe from the bin directory to your Autostakkert directory. PIPP uses some dll files extracted from ffmpeg but it's possible the codec used by the 6D may not be covered by those dll files. Having the full ffmpeg.exe file available to Autostakkert should work with your 6D files. mp4 is not a specific format but a container, for various coding and decoding formats. AVI is also a container format and can contain an mp4 file itself, among others. Uncompressed AVI is just one form of AVI. Alan

Another stunner Adam. 🤗 I especially like all the fine detail in the Cone Nebula region. Very 3D like. Alan

Fascinating Image Göran. There's a mass of galaxies as well as all the stars. Nessie only has a supporting cast role here. 😊 Is this an RGB RASA and an NBZ RASA data combined? Alan

Oops. Silly me. Alan

When inserting the pins they should click into position when pushed far enough in, and you shouldn't be able to pull them back out. There should be little flanges on the pins which spring out when fully inserted to prevent removal. If they don't stay in you can bend the flanges out slightly and try again. The pins should be free to float around in the socket to ensure proper mating with the male pins when connected. Glueing them in position may hinder this proper mating. 🙂 Alan

Yes, that's right. The ASI294 doesn't have a heated protect window so if there was a dew issue with the window, getting the Zwo camera heater strip would help. This won't affect dew on the sensor itself like you have.

Looking good Miguel. 😃 Not sure if your dew band will have much effect that far back, but it may not need to. 😉 I 3D printed my dew shield and made it shorter than normal to avoid it hitting the shed roof . What's the weight of your counterweights? Mine's on an EQ8-R and it has three 10kg weights further down the shaft than yours are. Also where's your guide scope going to fit? Alan

My first astro camera was a Starlight Xpress Trius though I didn't have their filter wheel. I just checked my Starlight Xpress downloads folder, and it has various drivers and stuff from 2014 to 2019. If you wish I can zip the folder up and post it for you to download and check to see if there's anything useful for you. 🙂 Alan

I forgot to say that there's no standard on the colours used internally in these adapters, and it depends on the manufacturer, so if it has loose flying pins and the DB9 is unwired, it's best to check visually or use a multimeter to confirm what RJ45 pin each colour goes to. Alan

I think you'll find this useful Adam. 🙂 https://optec.us/resources/documents/FocusLynx/19698-FocusLynx_Robo-Focus_Converter.pdf Alan