JSeaman

? It's not brighter than pointing at the sky, just adjust the duration for a mean value of ~30k and away it goes. Worked perfectly

I don't know why I didn't do this before - I have never bothered with flats often and when I have it has been with a T shirt over the scope during the day and I usually end up moving it and generally doing a rubbish job. Today I took delivery of a 40x40cm 36W LED panel (eBay 124209366763) and attached it to the observatory. I managed to make the scope pirouette to it with the roof in place and stored that as an unpark position in EQMod and tested it tonight - perfect. I shoudl have done this long ago! £11 and 10 minutes is all it took

Great for absorbing lots of fluids?!

I did my 300PDS last year, I just used supermarket cotton wool, there was no issue with streaking or contaminants. This removed all of the surface muck and then the most effective thing I found was using a sprayer like this https://www.amazon.co.uk/Hozelock-0-5L-Spraymist-Trigger-Sprayer/dp/B0017RKEJM/ref=sr_1_26?dchild=1&keywords=sprayer&qid=1615718387&sr=8-26 with the distilled water (I have lots of this from working on cars). I found it incredibly effective at shifting any small bits of dust/hairs and left no marks at all.

No laptop, this is a desktop set up. I considered going down the NUC route to resolve this if I can't get past it. My latest test using the motherboard port and shorter cable took 300 pics without issue, perhaps it is just that marginal. I'll keep testing and see what I find (no doubt it will fail as soon as I leave it next time!)

The PC has USB2 and USB3, I have tried both. Currently using Win 10 on USB2, it's the pro camera which has the larger buffer for USB transfer I am currently tyring the motherboard USB port rather than through the case but that shouldn't have much effect. I've gone back to my shorter ASI120 USB cable. My gut feel is that it's the 120 causing the problem although I have only seen it since the 1600 was added. The reason is that it tends to do lots of connect/disconnect if I try APT and I have seen it have more hiccups than the 1600 but I may be wrong.

Thanks, that's what I did yesterday. I now have two separate powered USB-->Ethernet boxes, one goes to the hub with everything connected and the other just has the 1600mm on it. Sadly the problem persists

Interesting thanks, I can't think what would cause an issue to occur once though, very confusing!

No I'm afraid it's not adding anything to PI imho and especially at that price but thanks anyway

Thanks for the suggestion, used 4 different types of usb cable and same behaviour sadly. I downloaded the latest zwo ascom drivers earlier and thought it had fixed it but sadly not

I thought I had put all my USB issues behind me but I still have one left and it's a very difficult one so apologies it's a long intro: My setup is fixed and I have a USB/Ethernet extender (like this: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Extender-Repeater-Keyboard-Gamepad-synchronously-USB2-0-U2EX50/dp/B01EV33R8S) which runs to the scope. My USB devices are a Lakeside focuser, the mount (NEQ6), ASI 120mm mini guide cam, ASI 1600mm imaging cam All has been fine with the set up for a long time with various equipment changes but now I have bought the ZWO ASI 1600mm it will not play nice with the rest of the rig (previously used QHY8L/Atik 314L with no problem) After I introduced the 1600 I had horrendous unreliability, if you took pictures with the 120 and 1600 at a fast rate it would immediately fail. I'm using Nebulosity (but the issue occurs in APT as well) and PHD2 for the capture. Any combination of the ASCOM drivers fails (either the 1600 or the 120 or both using it). I thought I had solved the issue by moving to the ZWO native drivers in both pieces of software but I have a problem that keeps plaguing me which is this... I start imaging and everything is good. After an indeterminate amount of time, I lose ALL USB devices. CDC sees the mount disconnect, PHD2 loses the guide cam, Nebulosity gets CAPTURE ABORTED and everything stops. All I do is reconnect in each piece of software and then it appears to work perfectly and I can't break it again. This is a one time deal, once it has failed it seems to keep working no matter what I do. I have tried USB 2 and USB 3, all devices have power management disabled in Control Panel and it's very erratic when the death will occur but it's generally every imaging session at some point. Today I ran a second USB/Ethernet extender with a separate power/USB cable just to deal with the 1600 thinking that would surely fix things. Alas, no, same failure mode. The only thing common that I have left is the ZWO driver / USB on the PC itself being taken out so I'm running out of ideas. Any thoughts?

I'm not sure which artefacts you are referring to but I decided to try it. I downloaded the 30MB installer, it told me I was already registered (which I wasn't) and then eventually managed to recover my non-existant account with a password reset. I ran the denoise function and it appears to be worse than PixInsight (bad ringing around stars and corruption of star shape amongst other things) and costs $80. I don't think I'll be recommending this. And this is what 'AIClear' does with it's lowest settings

It looks like a good image to me, more data always helps and using Ha as a luminance layer over slightly blurry base layers helps. Below is just a star reduction and removed a bit of vibrance

A quick play in PS, use levels to bring the black point where you want it (I change r, g and b indepedently) I dropped the saturation and vibrance a little and then played with curves. Masking off the centre (trapezium) you can add some green to the rest of the image to brighten it up and then take some out the centre It is crude and lots of artefacts on the background etc. but it gives you a few things to try at least:

Thank you, that's definitely my target audience rather than pixel peepers who will easily find fault with it!!

Woah Stu that's some serious damage, wow!!

That's amazing!

Not a great start to the holiday Andrew, scary stuff!! I did drop my new 100-400 L lens on the first day I used it, I was particularly happy about that one!

Blimey that's a proper disaster! Glad your insurance covered it!

Woah that's a proper horror story, what caused the fire?

Love the wheelchair incident - I was stood on the pavement at midnight the other night walking the dog whilst trying to do some rudimentary trigonometry with my finger and thumb at right angles pointing at the sky. I hope nobody saw me! The camera drop horror story sounds genuinely terrible!!

I just attached a Lakeside focuser to a dual speed on my 300PDS, I used the large focus lock wheel with some washers to hold the focuser in place. You could still slacken off the grub screw to focus by hand but I just use a hand controller to move the focus tube and then I'm not risking dropped grub screws, stripped threads and I'll get better focus than I can manage by hand

I agree with the advice about getting things right before adding guiding, there is a fun learning curve when you add a guide camera into the mix. It's superb when you get it working right though. That said, if I were you I would put the guide camera on and run the PHD2 guide assistant to help point you in the right direction. " I can only get 10 seconds with PA, my PA isn't 100% because I'm not guiding" Note your polar alignment does not improve with guiding. The noise of the NEQ6 sounds normal, mine is the same. A few bags of postcrete and a metal tube offcut will see you have a pier, I built mine for 10s of £s not hundreds. The best bit is you polar align once and leave it forever, set up is a dream! Note that even with a concrete base, vibrations from walking around will work their way through if you have long focal lengths (same with a camera on a tripod) Per the advice above, regardless of how good you think the polar alignment is, if you are getting drift then that has to be a consideration.

Thank you, it looks like you have a very similar set up!

Thanks Paul, appreciated