pipnina

To be honest I was unaware that they offered a good refurbish policy. That said I am getting around the lack of usb port issue by using a dedicated hub anyway so I won't be bothered to send it away for a month. Re: the sensor window issue. I turn the heater on (for whatever good it does) and run at -5c, no issues at that temp but I did see problems at -10c, though it took a few hours to start setting in. This is in humid Devon (regularly 90% towards the end of a night, even worse in summer)

I don't know how many people own the ZWO AND the RisingCam version to perform a direct comparison. I might suggest that build quality is likely to be better and the level of support you get from the ZWO version is far superior as well. Example: My RisingCam's USB hub isn't realiable. My ZWO EAF and EFW will cut out constantly but people with ZWO cameras seemed to think I was mad when I suggested camera USB hubs in general were bad... So in likelihood mine is just a dud with no way to get a refund or replacement or repair! If I bought a ZWO version I could return / replace. On that same vane, if you buy a ZWO 2600MC you can make use of the FLO 30 day no-question return, get support etc. I think there is also a difference between how gain is managed. I think (think!) on the ZWO you get a single gain slider and above 100 gain you switch to High-gain mode, whereas below that you run in Low-gain mode. Meanwhile on my RisingCam I don't know WHAT is going on with that setting, I just picked gain 100, gain ratio of 1, and high/low threshold of 100. Who knows what it's doing?!

Does this happen from focuser misalignment, cell misalignment, or both? I see this in my refractor and know the focuser is not straight but have been worried that the front cell might be out too.

Interesting. Maybe that screw is pushing down on the tension pad after all... I'll have to check that. I take it you don't really need the side tension grub screws and can just rely on the center one? Also i put the flat plate in such a way to increase the flat surface area the plate would have on the focuser, given how hard it was to get it to behave at all haha

Still no luck. I've tried fiddling with a few adjustment screws to no avail. For some reason the focuser barrel just won't sit parallel to the scope tube! Measured the error both on the blue part of the camera's outside diameter and on the focuser barrel and it's consistent between the two, so I am fairly confident that it's the barrel not sat right in the focuser itself. Some pics of the focuser

I was wondering why my new (second hand) refractor was showing astigmatism on one side, coma in the center, and fuzzy stars on the opposite side last night. I figured the most likely cause would be focuser slop as the previous owner took it apart to remove their ZWO EAF. And then I also messed around with it to add my own ZWO EAF. Sadly, I could only affix the EAF via the hole for one of the tilt tension grubsrews, and I really hope that only one is necessary for getting the tension across the spindle correct because I don't know how else to attach the EAF... I noticed when tightening and loosening the main tension screw, the focuser would shift up and down, but figured erring on the tenser side would be better. Seemingly not as it caused the EAF to skip steps and still wasn't true to the optics... I used my dad's dial test indicator and the focuser's very convenient 360 rotation feature to see how much the focuser runs out with a 180 rotation. Turns out it is likely more than 80 thou! That's about 2mm near the camera, and I think that's almost certainly enough to disturb my images and give me the astigmatism, coma and blobby stars... I'm really hoping there's a good way to adjust it because tomorrow might be the last good imaging night for a while : ( Any help greatly appreciated! here's a non-raw image to show the problem (astigmatism in bottom left), as well as two abberation inspector samples from raws in pixinsight.

So I got my first light with a second hand 130mm f6.6 triplet (SET optics, equivalent to the discontinued TS Photoline model) and a Photoline 0.79 reducer/flattener. The previous owner had no issues with this flattener but for me it's producing suuuuper long astigmatism (the type pointing inward to field center) and I already have a bit more than the 55mm backfocus it requests on the product page and adding a few mm more didn't solve it, maybe it made it better but I was in a bit of a rush to best the risk of clouds and didn't save the pictures, so need to wait til next clear to show comparisons. Meanwhile without a flattener the scope... Had pretty good performance across my apsc sensor. Though the platesolver suggests it actually has a FL of only 808 and not 860 which is weird, and I probably need to solve some focuser tilt as there is mild on-axis coma and one side has asitgmatism and the other has blobby stars. What reasons might this reducer not be performing at its rated backfocus? The focuser tilt? Not optimised for my bigger sensor? Just plain needs more backfocus despite advertisement?

Seems like something has been knocked out of kilter then. Struggling with something like it on mine right now too : /

Looks like tilt to me, but discerning the various misalignment optical effects from eachother has always been challenging for me. Egg shapes on one side, and defocused and round on the other makes me think tilt at least. This may manifest if the focuser has slopped somehow. Maybe if it's a crayford, the tension is not high enough or unbalanced, causing the camera to present to the objective lens at different angles? I am unsure how to solve it if it appeared suddenly, but for manufacturing faults you either return the scope (if scope is at fault, i.e. lens cell collimation) or use a tilt adapter for the camera. Good luck!

Congrats! And yes, sadly uneven backlight bleed is unavoidable for edge-lit screens (the LEDs are around the edge and their light is diffused by multiple layers of film). My PG279 (original ver, no Q or QE etc) was almost £800 and still has this problem to a pretty great extent. Here's a photo I took of it when new in 2018, fresh out of the box. Obviously the camera exaggerates it but even quality LCD displays suffer. Regardless of this flaw, you'll find it a very capable photo editing and gaming monitor. My recommendation is to find the "sRGB" colour setting preset and use that for editing photos if possible. On my screen it makes the yellow and red colours seem much more natural than the other modes.

Pixinsight's mosaic workflow is rather painful, but pixinsight can help you with distortion correction and i think only needs two images to do it! Star alignment script, split mosaic mode for example has a distortion correction setting which I have found very effective even when only merging two images. I don't know if the result afterwards can be used in other programs that will actually be easier to merge mosaics together with... But it could be an option if Pix is part of your workflow already. Your mosaic looks excellent to me already though!

I'm only next door in Devon and feel almost as lucky with 5-6 astro nights and dark *enough* skies to get away with imaging at home. I often see clouds loitering near the horizon on clear nights in the north. Not sure why but maybe proximity to the coast helps slightly?

My belt modded HEQ5 can't even really handle my 13kg payload of 200mm f4 newt+guider, so given as (as I understand) the EQ6 isn't supposedly a massive upgrade from there I too would feel very uneasy about loading 22kg onto that mount! Also re: fixing vignetting with Abe/dbe. Every time I have tried to correct for vignetting with those gradient extractions I end up getting ringed banding of some sort. I can't show examples right now being at work but on my newt, DSLR+lens, and phone camera Abe/dbe have always failed to remove vignetting fully despite a fair bit of tinkering. Good flats (easy on DSLR and lens, but never worked well on my newt or phone) were absolutely necessary even in the absence of dust for me. But those systems all have vignettes of 33% up to 66% so very strong, maybe that plays a part here?

I've noticed that because the camera doesn't seem to perform "blinks" or have a mechanical shutter, any pictures I take after s short pause in imaging can either contain ghosts if what's been seen over the last few minutes or have a horizontal banding effect. For example after platesolving, I run my guide routine. Then the first picture that comes off the risingcam contains the star trails if my PHD calibration! No doubt this will mean my images end up containing things like dither movements and such too. Has anyone else noticed this with theirs? Wondering if I can make it blink before every exposure in ekos or mitigate this some other way...

Looking at your budget and desire to game AND do photo editing you'll run up against some serious compromises. That said, I think displays are better at the low end now than they were in the past. I would discard the super high refresh panels (i.e. the 240hz+ ones) as they are least likely to produce a suitable photo editing image in exchange for their fast refresh rate. Another thing to consider is you ideally want to look at independent colour reports of the monitors before buying. I googled some for the Asus and the Gigabyte, and they trade blows in various ways seemingly. I might lean towards the gigabyte based on the charts I saw but it's hard to say. Personally I don't believe having more than 8 bit colour will be beneficial for print. And I think all of the displays you linked to are IPS and not QDot. If you wanted the best of all worlds in terms of screen quality you'd probably go looking for a QD OLED, and forget about the HDR features unless you want to produce HDR content or view video games in HDR (I think very very few support it, fewer implement it well). Sadly they are right at the end of your budget and come no smaller than 55" as I can find so rather massive. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Samsung-OLED-Built-LaserSlim-Ultrawide/dp/B09YMFT5MQ

For what it's worth, it seems like the phone may have done some denoise whereas my images were all in DNG RAW format, which helps immensely! And I also had the benefit of an hour of 17 second exposures and not just 1! Also, quite excitingly, these phones are getting better at an astonishing rate. Have a look at what the Samsung S22 can do for milky way shots on youtube and be amazed! Here's what a basic stretch of a single sub looks like, I took a screenshot of it too so it's a bit low res but you get the idea!

Sadly I never got this to the point where I was happy to add it to the recently closed phone imaging challenge. But I felt like I should share the best result I could tease out of it anyway! Despite how sharp the camera on this phone is, I could never overcome the ultra-harsh vignetting and super-hot pixel count. Not to mention colour balancing which always lent itself to be weirdly green, and manual stretching of the RGB channels in pixinsight only allowed me to correct this somewhat. The vignetting I originally planned to solve with flats, but alas they would always over-correct for reasons I am yet to discover. perhaps internal reflections (the moon causes issues for sure if present) or maybe some automatic business that even deep sky camera doesn't have the ability to control, such as white balance? In the end I did what I could with it. Marginally pleased but would have still been embarrassed to enter it into a compo personally! Perhaps a new challenge of the sort will appear next year or the year after and by then I will have ironed out the issues I see with this phone as an astrocam. Who knows?!

I am not sure that this is a spacing issue. In the top and bottom left you see one corner with saggital shaped stars and the other corner with tangential shaped stars. If it were a spacing issue, as I understand it, both corners should exhibit either tangential OR saggital distortion? The opposite sidenon the right seems to be much rounder, but I am zooming in on a phone right now so it might be a trick of the eyes!

That is an absolute monster! Envious of the views you're going to be getting of planets and galaxies through that when the clouds clear! I wish you, your new scope, and your new back problems all a great time! 😆

I'll start by saying a few things: one is that you only need HDR if you plan on mastering your content in HDR format. Otherwise there's no point in having the feature. Another thing is that many local dimming backlight displays (the tech that makes HDR possible in most cases) will not be overly suitable for astro images as stars are likely to mess with the algorithm that determines cell brightness, you are likely to see a lot of haloing on all but high end screens with that tech. When it comes to bit depth per pixel, I would be wary of monitors that have HDR claiming 10-bpp colour as they MAY only support it in HDR mode. I do not know about dithered 8 bit however, as it relies on the program and operating system and graphics driver supporting it. It would however be relatively effective if it does work. When it comes to astronomy image processing however, I think that while having a 10-bit or even 12 bit display would be NICE, I think it wouldn't help you improve your images much. You only notice banding on 8 bit displays in very low contrast and consistent areas. But our images are typically noisy enough to mask that entirely. Even then, everyone viewing your images probably uses an 8 bit display anyhow, and your images are likely to be exported as 8-bit jpeg eventually! Colour accuracy and contrast are the most important factors, and then you need to consider the gaming use case too. I currently use an ASUS PG-279. It's a great monitor but as you say the IPS panel leaks light in low brightnesses and the backlighting isn't 100% evenly illuminated as it is lit from the edges. This is a slightly older model mind you. The current HOT topic is LCD-OLED fusion displays. These combine the best of almost all worlds by allowing OLED tech to be brighter, and LCD tech to have perfect blacks AND good response times. They are pricy though as it is an emerging tech. Many in the tech scene right now would suggest looking at TVs, but they tend to be bigger... If your budget stretches to it, I would also suggest 4K. My 1440p screen is great but compared to the 6000x4000 images my camera spits out, it's nothing! And sometimes it does feel a little cramped, especially doing mosaic work. My personal choice would be to accept the poor backlight leak and go for an IPS panel with good colour and gamma accuracy. It's what artists lived with on professional screens for over a decade before laser projectors and OLED came along! There's also quantum dot screens, which produce LOVELY colours, but the backlight bleed is absolutely atroceous so in the end I would choose to avoid, unless you can afford a screen using QD-OLED https://www.samsungdisplay.com/eng/tech/quantum-dot.jsp Monitors are a very hard space to get your head around right now. But hopefully some of what I've said is helpful! If you can suggest your budget range that would help us help you as well!

It looks very good! It took me quite a while to get images to this standard when I started. I don't notice it mentioned here, but what ISO are you running the camera at? Noise should in theory be less noticeable at higher iso, maybe 1600 or higher? I believe read noise gets lower as the iso increases. Agree with others here that if you just manage to dither or drift a little things will improve a lot. Have fun with your next target and congratulations!

I looked at it, but some anecdotes suggested it wouldn't really satisfy an APS-C without considerable vignetting. I am struggling to find hard stats or a spot diagram to show me the level of quality and correction and illumination so I could compare it to the riccardi. As I understand the small riccardi and large starizona are similarly priced.

Indeed I have noticed my own camera lenses suffering from some questionable coma relatively close to center as well. That said the sigma 105mm f1.4 pro art seems to claim what looks like a far higher MTF... At least in the center?, but I haven't found anyone using the lens for astro to try and judge the quality/sharpness in real life tests. Sigma claim it uses "FLD" (fluorite equivalent, supposedly) grade elements in these lenses which would imply it is very up market if telescope marketing translates here. That said, the 70% vignette shows up very strongly and represents an insane almost 2 whole stop difference between the center and edges, I can only imagine that becoming visible in final corrected images where the center looks cleaner than everywhere else... As for the riccardi, thinking about it, what would the real benefit be of the m82 version if the m63 can actually illuminate all but the very corners of a full frame sensor to 100%, and full frame is illuminated by 97% even at the very edges. Just for illumianting even *bigger* sensors like 36*36mm square sensors or items like the ZWO medium format? Or maybe it depends on the light cone and focuser, where some telescopes might vignette more easily on the smaller riccardi? Either way, I guess 130mm triplet at f5 would still be better for speed than my current 200mm f4 newt on account of the lack of central obstruction combined with 33% off-center vignette, compared to no obstruction and no vignette. Certainly better than my old 130P-DS newt.

Woops, yeah I was looking at m63 Vs m82 Maybe I'm just getting confused by the way those correctors are advertised, but a typical FF sensor is 42mm diagonal I think, and given as the M63 model lists only 3% vignetting at that radius it would seem very suitable for FF sensors to me, but that relies on the marketing material being trustworthy I suppose. https://www.teleskop-express.de/shop/product_info.php/language/en/info/p11122_Riccardi-0-75x-APO-Reducer-and-Flattener-with-M63x1-Thread.html https://www.teleskop-express.de/shop/product_info.php/language/en/info/p5125_APM-Riccardi-APO-Reducer-and-Corrector-0-75x---M82-connection.html I do note though that the m63 only mentions the 42mm figure while the m82 actually advertises FF coverage. But only the m63 model includes a spot diagram and vignetting stats, so it's hard to see what I'd be gaining if the stat sheet for the smaller one already shows near perfect coverage... As for superfast lenses. Oh yeah I suppose they aren't close to diffraction limited like most quality telescopes, but the quality ones do have very good optical qualities regardless such as almost 0 distortion, extremely consistent star sizes across the field etc, although at f1.4 the vignetting can be as strong as 70% as per the sigma 105mm pro art. But I think if the intention is to use the camera's native pixel scale for that lens, being diffraction limited would cause an f1.4 optic to be insanely oversampled. But if the desire is for speed and forgoing extra Res from drizzle, then the softer faster optic might be preferable as long as the image isn't oversampled I suppose? But yes I suppose it is true a telescope like the RASA will have much more contrast in a given spot diagram than even a very expensive f2 camera lens.

I'm making the move to a 130mm f6.6 triplet, but even though the flatteners seem very high quality and can bring it down to f5~ quite easily, I would preferably go a bit faster if I could! Seemingly the bigger refractors just don't go below f6 natively which is a bit strange since smaller optics can go to f1.4 and be very sharp, while having say a 75mm aperture. I see flatteners like the Riccardi style, the 2.5" variant having s very good spot diagram and only 3% vignetting at full frame sensor sizes, but I only have an aps-c sized sensor and there doesn't seem to be a high quality flattener like that with a stronger than 0.75 reduction and no vignetting. So this makes me wonder if instead of the M68 0.75x Riccardi, I went for the M68 1.0x Riccardi instead, but used a dedicated focal reducer as well to get say 0.66x magnification and get an f4.3 experience instead of an f5 experience? My gut tells me it will hinder the setup in some way, by adding abberations or by causing reflections or messing with the corrected field flatness etc. But I could be wrong, would it work?