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alexbb

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Everything posted by alexbb

  1. Thank you! It might be possible to do a star test tonight, otherwise I will make a proper artificial star test. Nice tip with the pen ball! I found the backfocus to work well with the SW72ED somewhere at ~68mm. Focal length is ~430mm so I assume it should work fine with the TS scope too at the advertised ~432mm focal length. The colour image is made by all the data combined, both SW scope and TS scope. I did not post the result from the SW scope only because it seems I did a poor job when I put the Canon sensor back and I have some tilt.
  2. It was ~10m away. But shouldn't it be good enough to verify the colimation at least?
  3. I did a pseudo star test this morning. The star hole was a bit large (~1mm) to asses more optical defects, however, the out of focus disks appeared round with concentric circles.
  4. Thank you, Vlaiv! I will try a star test, not sure when it's possible again. However, the flattener worked well in combination with the SW72ED. These images were shot with the SW72ED, the Orion is luminance and the elephant trunk is hydrogen. I used the same reducer/flattener and filters and the same backfocus. The focal length of the SW72ED is ~430mm, measured with astrometry.
  5. I ordered Monday a TS Photoline 72 F/6 from Teleskop Express. https://www.teleskop-express.de/shop/product_info.php/language/en/info/p8866_TS-Optics-Doublet-SD-APO-72mm-f-6---FPL-53---Lanthan-Objektiv.html Yesterday I received it and today I got it under the stars. I also ordered a Baader filter to mod my 550D which I managed yesterday evening. So, under the stars, both scopes (the TS and a SW72ED) this evening. I didn't pay too much attention when focusing, but now I verified the stars and they seem horrible. I also recall hearing some crackle sounds which were resembling ice cracking. The target I shot was Rosette with both scopes. Below are some crops from the stacked and stretched luminance, single 120 subs stretched L, Ha and OIII + a quick combination of RGB with the SW72ED and Canon 550D mod + L and Ha and OIII. Is it probably a sign of pinched optics? Does anyone has first hand experience with these scopes? What should I do? Ask for a replacement or a refund? I'm afraid that another example can behave the same way. PS. I used a TS flattener/reducer 0.79x which worked well with the SW72ED.
  6. Very few of my images are captured with a single camera/optics combination in fact
  7. Yes, they seem quite stiff. I never used the polar scope, I found the polar alignment routine good enough even for longer focal length photography. 2 iterations and you should have an error less than 10". Check your power source. Does the power led blink when the mount is slowing down? 11V is not really enough, regardless of the current, even if the specs are 11V-16V. I switched to a 15V power supply and everything is smooth now.
  8. You made Rob less fissionable on the FLO product page
  9. That happened to me too some time ago. There might have been multiple reasons for this, but I tried to do everything right. Same temperature for lights and dark, same temperature for flats and dark flats. I also see that you're using a newtonian so make sure you don't have any light leaks. I cover the end of my newtonians always (lights, calibration) and try preventing light leak through/around the focuser too. I suspect you might have some light leaking into the OTA.
  10. Thank you so much! Congratulations to the other 2nd, the 3rd place, all the other participants and especially to the winner! Alex
  11. Indeed. I've never bothered spending a lot of time convincing eqmod to connect to the mount. I managed on the AZ-EQ5, but never on the EQ6-R. Regardless of the combinations, eqmod refuses to create a stable connection. OTOH, the SynScan app connects without issues and allows pulse guiding too. You can connect to SynScan mount with any other app, pulse guide, etc. Moreover, you can polar align without seeing Polaris using the SynScan polar alignment procedure which I found accurate enough. I didn't find that feature within the eqmod ecosystem.
  12. Thank you very much! It is similar to that one indeed, Dave, except the coloured stars. I might shoot some colour one day some nights. I do have some real RGB, but at a much lower resolution so it's not really worthy to combine them.
  13. Thank you Adam and Tom! For the starless versions I used the Starnet plugin in PixInsight. You can either generate a starless mask or a star mask. Any subtracted from the original image results in the other one. I generated starless images, used the healing tool in GIMP to remove the remaining large star traces, removed the starless images from the original images, removed the non-star traces from the star masks and then removed the final star masks from the original images. This has to be done on the stretched images.
  14. I've been very fortunate lately and had more than a week of consecutive clear nights. Since the first of them had the moon around, I started recording some Ha and ended recording OIII for the Rosette nebula. This year I used an AstroProfessional 102/714 FPL51 ED reduced at 0.8x. I bought this scope mostly for visual as it came at a decent price and I couldn't find somewhere close a used SkyWatcher 120ED. I thought of putting the camera on it and the results were good in narrowband. For this image I shot 2 panels, 5.5h Ha and 4h OIII for each panel. I made 2 starless images for each channel, I combined them then I added back the stars. A full resolution 6410x4586 image + the starless components can be found on astrobin here: https://www.astrobin.com/ral6gn/ Now back to cloudy nights, but there's so much left to process Clear skies and thanks for watching! Alex
  15. I've never been able to connect my EQ6-R mount through EQASCOM as it never recognized the COM port. ?! However, the SynScanPro app manages to connect to the mount and it provides all the functionality I need. I can drive the mount via the app interface as I can with the handset and I can connect with every other program through it, PHD included. You can give it a try, maybe it's even enough.
  16. I didn't save any notes on this one, it was only to test the performance of the scope/flattener combo. But, as I blended all the data I had available, I don't really believe it's relevant. Perhaps the old data was shot through the Esprit and filtered by Optolong narrowband filters (which I sold as the OIII filter was really reflective), the new data was through the 102ED and Astronomik 6nm filters. The flattener on the 102ED is a push-fit one. It might have been tilted a bit as other times I didn't notice any deformation on stars. OTOH, all the connections with the Esprit are threaded, but I noticed elongated stars with that too. Easily visible in this one: https://www.astrobin.com/362549/. Note: it is made of 2 panels in portrait orientation.
  17. Hello and thank you! Not sure about your user on astrobin, but I've more than a thousand recent notifications that I wasn't been able to follow yet due to many other activities. Will check them all one day. I've one example of narrowband image at hand, but I believe the data was blended with some Esprit data too. https://drive.google.com/open?id=1VR3CCD_hTJYEsWAHHXXL7HbYl8CMphHO Narrowband stars are good. Broadband? Not so good, the following image was taken solely with the 102/714 ED with its dedicated 0.8x flattener. You can make an idea about the stars on the whole image. https://drive.google.com/open?id=1xIM4ZSBuBLhNw9omr11uFYH8krmqXw4u I bought my Esprit 80 from FLO and it was checked by Es Reid. My copy displays some dark gap in the stars halos, but I don't see a symmetrical opposite gap. If I remember well, in the lightpath I saw a gap in the O ring holding a lens so that might be the cause. You can see at full resolution here https://www.astrobin.com/362549/ or here https://www.astrobin.com/389908/C/ Overall I'm happy with the small Esprit with regards to its broadband performance, but I'll probably use the larger ED for narrowband. Also probably, I will sell the 80 Esprit and buy the larger 100 with a good matching flattener that can deliver a corrected flat field for a 43mm sensor. Have a lovely day too and clear skies as well!
  18. I found the same with my Esprit 80. I focus manually using a Bahtinov mask. The stars in narrowband through the Esprit are A LOT softer/larger than through a recently acquired AstroProfessional 102/714 ED with FPL51 + 0.8x reducer. In fact, I didn't really check, but I believe the stars are softer in narrowband through the Esprit 80 compared to those I get through the SkyWatcher 72ED + the 0.85x reducer for 80ED.
  19. Thank you, Alan! After I connect all the cables, my habit is first to start cooling the camera. Then I proceed with the alignment, focusing, calibrating guiding, etc. By the time I finished setting up, the camera is probably cooled. Thank you, Craney! I used a few more MLT layers than usually and I also increased the parameters values higher too. It helps in making the spiral arms stand out more obviously. My 150PDS was a bit tuned. It has everything flocked, the focuser was tightened, the secondary mirror was replaced with a larger one too. I could have been more careful with the collimation/tilt, you can see to the bottom-left corner that the stars become elongated, but after the first night of lights I didn't want to mess up with the camera as that would imply to re-adjust a few things and retake the flats and it didn't actually bother me that much. Thanks! I found M31 much easier to process than M33. I didn't give M81 and M82 a real try yet as from where I live I get some nasty gradients depending where I'm pointing the scope. The IFN stands no chance to be obviously distinguished from the gradients so these have to wait until I carry the scope to somewhere dark. I do have good highlights for these 2 galaxies though.
  20. At the same astro party where I shot the Pleiades and partially Iris + the surroundings, I started gathering data for M33. For this image I used only a SkyWatcher 150PDS through which I recorded the photons on an ASI1600MMC. Curiously enough, I shot ~3.5h of luminance there under Bortle 2 skies, but a simple STF in PixInisght revealed less details than in 4h of luminance (through a LP filter) shot from home under Bortle 6-7 skies. Nevertheless, I put all the luminance together, I shot another 40mins of each RGB + 1h45min of Ha and made an image. A bit of colour only I also borrowed from an image I made 2 years ago, but in a small ratio. For full resolution: https://www.astrobin.com/yqr8xe/
  21. Yours looks smoother than mine, I really like how you brought up the dust, those hours of luminance really paid off
  22. Thank you, Alan! Indeed, there are a few dark skies around us. Some of my astrofriends went from Bucharest to somewhere in Bulgaria last week to another astrofriend. I'm from the western part of Romania so I travel to other places than they do, but my girlfriend's parents live at a village ~2.5h drive and the sky is Bortle 2 there. Good enough for imaging and being able to get inside after everything is set up is a big advantage
  23. Some excellent images you showed us, Richard! I love both this one and the Witch head! I'm never able to get results so good in such short integrations, despite traveling to dark sites for some targets.
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