Stub Mandrel

Your ability to guide with an EQ2 is impressive.

Just give me ten seconds...

In Victorian times I could have sold that as evidence of ectoplasm!

Well, five-minute guiding with an EQ3 (here with an Ha filter) works! The stars are round, but unfortunately a thick layer of ice/condensation completely ruined all my subs, still the aim of the exercise was to get guiding working. Next job, fit a different resistor to the cold finger heater. Boy I learnt a lot last night! Close up of an unstretched 5-minute RAW showing reasonably round, tight stars (with condensation haloes and a few hot pixels)! A recognisable Eastern Veil with awful condensation doughnuts. The Ha is so strong you can see tendrils behind the condensation blur! Worst ever Ha image of the Pelican. So bad I'm not even sure it is on target. I think I'll send @Uranium235 a copy to stick on his observatory wall I need to get rid of a lot of backlash in DEC if I am to image high up. Veil at ~67 degrees ALT was fine, Pelican at about 78 degrees ALT was all over the place. I've found this a problem with unguided imaging as well. The RA guiding was very good, with a long-term RMS of between 0.13 and 0.25 Arcseconds, which is apparently quite creditable. Hmm... I coudl pretend I took those on my phone and enter them as a StuPod...

Click the top of the 'date column' and your subs will all be grouped in the order taken, and separate from the stacking data files. (Don't feel foolish - I have been through all these problems too!)

When you have stacked in DSS, you get the option to save the file list. If you get more images, load the file list and all your old files will reappear. At the bottom you will see a tab called 'main group' and next to it is 'group 1'. Select Group 1 and add your new files, and any updated flats, darks etc. (not essential if nothing has changed, but you can do things like add, say, 1-minute subs to your 30s subs). If you don't add new ones, it will use the main group ones. Then stack as normal, and it will choose the best across both sessions. You can re-save the file list and add more subs if you have another session. I have combined sessions a year apart to get improved results, but they must use the same optical setup (scope, any lenses, and camera) as it won't stretch images at different scales to match each other.

Keep going, there's lots of nice detail there, if you can get loads more frames the detail will leap out and the noise will fade away.

They are good aren't they! Delighted with mine

Yes PHD2, original PHD refuses to talk to my camera.

I now have a cooled DSLR and a guide camera! My next session I will be trying to get guiding to work on my EQ3.

Agreed, I was just worried he might expect not to need flats once the collimation was spot on.

Wow, that's the first Startools tutorial I have seen that I could actually understand and follow, kudos to Ecuador!

I would guess that correcting collimation will put the light patch in the middle, but not get rid of it. You will still need flats.

Yes. If you use photoshop, consider getting gradient exterminator, it also does a brilliant job of balancing the background colour and would get rid of the slight magenta cast you have. In you image you woudl just draw a selection around the nebula, invert it so the nebula is excluded, then run gradient exterminator. I would use coarse (as there are no fine or complex gradients), agressive (as there are no real subtle gradients to keep) and balance background colour.

I have to wonder if the 'attack of the killer tomatoes' is a moderatorial plot as revenge for me posting a mini-gin gif in a light pollution thread?

Here we go, still a bit short of blue, with Lum partly from the reprocess and partly from last year's version. About 100 minutes with modded 450D and Zeiss Sonnar:

Ok, this has sent me back to my data from last August, with my 135mm Sonnar.

Fill the corners!

I vote for ethical tomatoes...

"Following last night's freak gusts can anyone suggest how to get tomato puree off my mirror..."

Give up now, before it's too late...

I suspect something less likely than the bit in Life of Brian where he gets kidnapped by aliens will happen...

I'm starting to feel really nervous about my next session... I normally change on or two things, whether its exposure or a new piece of gear but on my next session I have a whole truckload of changes to adapt to. Cold finger fitted so I need to get it working, together with setting a current for the warmer for the front glass. Guiding - I need to make sure the camera works properly with PHD2 - so far I have managed to find a star but nothing else. I have to hope the code to operate my GOTO unit will work! I have to decide if I will be using my 7nm ha filter! What could possibly go wrong...

I know it's irrational but the disconnect between your pleasure and excitement and your avatar is really winding me up

Well spotted, that must be deeply hidden! Advanced debayering gives better results, but needs more data.