Stub Mandrel

So ... bin the ASI 2x2 🙂

Hah! 'tis @Davey-T who missed an "0" off - hoist by his own petard! Methinks the two sensor are so different other considerations are more important - such as sensor size.

? using the figures given... 5,000 x 6 = 30,000kb vs 1x16,000kb.

I have three, and assorted hand lenses. Does this mean I am totally loupey? I rarely use any of them, I am so short-sighted, but there is a joy to using a good hand lens.

Sometimes I feel a bit guilty, but the objective is to enjoy myself, so why bother if I don't feel up to a late night?

At 5 minute per ASI1600 sub that's only twice the storage space. And storage is cheap I bought two 1TB USB3 WD hard drives for £42 each today.

Nice one Charl, lots of detail

I was expecting to see you post how a monocle is SO much better than an oscle, beacsue it collect three times as many photons...

In which case you deserve extra congratulations! Keep your unprocessed data as with time and new skills you will want to go back to it.

Assuming you have accurate figures for guidescope focal length and guidecam pixel size, then trying to get beyond 0.5" regularly with HEQ5/EQ6 is pointless as they resolution of the steppers is the limiting factor. My 'rule of thumb' is that a guiding RMS close to the imaging pixel size is the ideal, but even an RMS of twice that is hard to spot, especially if that's evenly spread between RA and DEC. My 130P-DS/450D/coma corrector combo has a pixel scale of 1.83" per pixel, I have no trouble with it. The 150PL/450D is 0.89" per pixel, so I prefer to get sub-arcsecond guiding with it, although slightly worse doesn't seem to cause problems. I use a 183mm f/l guidescope with the 130P-DS and 66 ED, and a 220mm f/l guidescope with the 150PL, both with the 120MC camera. The usual cause of trouble is when one of DEC or RA is showing spurious peaks once or twice per sub, even if the RMS is only a bit high, as this means bright stars come out as 'doubles'. Usually badly balanced DEC and sometimes solved with resist switch.

It's nice detail, but it looks like you may have clipped the highlights so the stars look a bit 'flat'. Have you tried making a separate 'star' layer and then mixing it back in?

You can also make great guiding look crap by setting Y=4 🙂

Started with Jupiter. Seeing was awful. No detail to speak of... Surprised how Saturn came out - long exposures, only about 120 subs to choose from, and poor seeing. Conjunction of Neptune and Phi Aquari was higher up, but needed longer exposures... Finally, Uranus which took some serious tracking down. Drizzled, but only to get a bigger dot...:

Not easy as deep down in the light pollution and moonlight. Stack of ten images from the ASI 120MC, inverted: With Stellarium image for the same minute overlaid. Interestingly two brighter stars not keyed - show up as black dots. Several stars dimmer than Pluto match up: The little spot that lines up with Pluto:

Cooled mono camera and a set of 1.25" narrowband filters. Probabaly.

Absolutely!

Those power connectors are so badly designed, music effects pedals use them, I have a 'daisy chain' lead with multiple conectors, some are unused, which I have wrapped in insulation tape to prevent them shorting by accident.

AV mode works fine with a scope. Have the histogram peak at about 25%. I always rotate the scope and take flats at about eight different orientations to even out any unintended gradients. Variously I use a plain painted wall in diffuse light, a card in the garden or a light panel with a sheet of A4 paper over it. For very long focal lengths the sky works better, but still rotate.

Here are two logs: Three hours with the 130P-DS: Just for completeness, the calibration: With the 150PL during the excellent seeing on the 25th. You can see a couple of big DEC swings, after this star quality and guiding nosedived as cloud came across:

Those are little airy discs. Focus is not good...

I use the defaults, the guidance is that changing them should be approached with caution.

Oh well. Add Crater Vikram to the maps... 😞

Bluto was the original name for Brutus in the Popeye cartoons 🙂

AH! I am using the PHD2 vesrion. My advice is try it as (a) it only takes two worm rotations to start working and (b) you can gather subs over that period.

Have you seen: https://openphdguiding.org/man-dev/Guide_algorithms.htm