AusGuy

I'm new to StarGazersLounge so I've just been having a look around and found this Marathon thread. What a read with so many topics covered! It particularly interested me as I have a 383L+ mono. It's my first CCD camera so I can't really comment on its relative merits but I am very satisfied with it. Being a bit of a Luddite I tend to use the software that comes bundled with any hardware that I buy and for the past year or so I have happily used Artemis Capture. But one point raised by ollypenrice way back in this thread (on page 5 I think) caught my attention as perhaps being worthy of mention now. In relation to Artemis he(?) said “I don't use the Camera Rotate 180 option because you can get in a pickle with upside down darks and flats. If I want to reframe after the flip I open the pre-flip image in whatever software and rotate it so I frame the flip to that.” It took me some time to work out why my darks and flats didn't work after doing a meridian flip and then using the camera rotate option so as to be able to use the same star map that had been constructed for the pre-flip images. The answer I found was to use ImagingMap, a free download from www.davesastrotools.weebly.com. Any star map created with this software can be rotated 180 degrees so the same map can be used both before and after a meridian flip without needing to rotate the camera's output image.

Nice image. Sometimes referred to as "Fighting Dragons". You have to look carefully but once you see them they are obvious.