Stub Mandrel

That's your helpful anti-virus blocking it, not W10.

W10? When it says 'blocked' click ''more information' and you should be offered the opportunity to allow it to run.

Perhaps why I reach for the 130 more often than the 150PL which is HUGE by comparison.

I am, - I just think it's ironic that twenty years ago you had no choice but to wait - now we expect next-day (or nearly) delivery as of right. I'm not sure that our lives (or purchasing decisions) are made better by this almost-instant gratification, although I am sure Carole will be well happy with her 130P-DS :-)

'Please allow 28 days for delivery'

Except most of us 130P-DS folk use a CC as well ;-)

Getting much better! I suggest shifting the colour balance, push it slightly from cyan towards red , the slightly move magenta towards green - great care as you don't want any actual green. This seems to warm it up a bit and differentiate the outer blue a bit more, more effectively than just moving blue towards yellow.

The autosave uses a real number format for the TIFFS, unless you have the new 32-bit GIMP it will convert to 16-bit and that's where you lose data. That's a really weird requirement of ST, it should be able to detect teh compression and only reject TIFFs that use something like JPEG. You can save the original image as an uncompressed tiff in DSS by telling it to (1) use 32 bit TIFF, (2) no compression, and (3) embed adjustments but do not apply them.

Yes but it uses 'deflate' which is lossless compression so you don't lose any data.

DSS shows the four-coloured squares icon next to my RAW files.

DSS uses lossless compression.

DSS seems to judge frames on how round the stars are and how many stars it finds. You set a percentage of best frames to stack. You tell DSS the percentage to stack. I get rid of obviously cloudy or otherwise spoilt subs and then tell DSS to stack the best 90% of the rest. If you untick 'register previously registered frames' it will be a lot faster second time around.

Just for comparison, I've got a quad-core 3.4 GHz machine with 8gig of RAM, which although it sounds impressive is far from exceptional these days. As an experiment, I've just done a stack of 159 lights, 154 darks, 36 flats and 70 bias frames from two sessions. DSS took 1 hour and 18 minutes, hardly instant but worth the wait for three hours imaging time.

NGC7217 is an unusual galaxy with an outer ring of blue stars around a redder core of old stars. The HST pulled out incredibly fine detail, including more concentric rings. There's debate over whether it is the result of two galaxies merging, but its near-perfect symmetry suggests otherwise. It's tempting to crop, but it is at the West end of Pegasus and close to Cygnus and the Milky Way - how many reasonably close galaxies lie in such a rich and colourful starfield? Certainly deserves more/longer subs, and perhaps a visit with the 150PL

I started a thread for people to show what they are doing with EQ3 mounts. I've just posted an image of M27 using 68 minutes of 120-second subs using the 130P-DS in the thread. Looking at the subs, a few are 'eggy' but not enough to worry about.

Here's the result of my experiment with 120-second EQ3 subs, 68 minutes RGB on M27:

I'm experimenting with 2 minute subs on M27 right now! First check showed round stars.

I've been finding the 'No EQ DSO Challenge' thread an interesting read as the 30-60 second subs are comparable to the 60-second subs I habitually use with my 130P-DS and EQ3 mount. Just like ALT/AZ mount users, us EQ3 owners are often told that we can't do astrophotography, or if we do we are limted to wide angle shots or very short exposures. May I start this thread as a place to start busting the myth that you can't do DSOs and other astrophotography using an EQ3 mount? To make sure I don't disqualify myself can I make it clear that modifying your tripod to make it less flimsy or using a tubular stainless steel tripod is allowed. Let's see some images at all focal lengths and all sorts of targets to show beginners with deep pockets and short arms what can be achieved on a budget! Here are a couple to get us started:

A Crescent nebula from last night, only about 30 subs as the scope was about to hit the mount! This had the same gradient issue as my Andromeda elsewhere, but not as severe and gradient exterminator got rid of it. I have tried not to stretch too much to limit the noise, and cropped a bit to keep some nice minor asterisms and colourful stars.

Astronomy is the cure for SAD!

BBC forecast allows more cloud before its stops saying a clear night, so a Clear Outside amber can show as a BBC cloudless and they are both 'right'. But they also use a different mix of data sources.

Have you tried removing an reinserting all the ribbon cables? I had to.

No news from Nige, I hope he hasn't dropped a clanger...

Call me an idiot, but I have read the explanations for the various opening options in Startools and I really don't understand how they relate to output from DSS.

I've looked at a couple of runs of DSLR darks and DSLR lights and the temperature stability. I will post results in another thread.