rorymultistorey

HI, I've done a review. 😁 https://astrobiscuit.com/2023/02/07/cq350-mount-review/ I think its pretty good. Tar Rory

Just to say MASSIVE thx to this thread. My new threadripper amd desktop did not work with my old usb2 asi120mm. Driver issues. Cost me the good part of a precious night of imaging. SOLUTION (as said above): Download this firmware update (windows) : https://download.astronomy-imaging-camera.com/download/usb-camera-windows/?wpdmdl=258 and update to the asi120mm compatible firmware option. You loose a little bit in the framerate dept but that's not biggie when guiding. Thx so much all.

Actually we're having a town hall about choosing the next target tomorrow 8pm in "the bat chat" channel. You'll need to have passed the bat exam first before you can join - which is as easy as dropping a pic that you've taken in the bat exam channel. One of our team will then let you in... hold on a minute, your already in aren't you. You should have had a notification about the meeting.

this is very interesting I didn't know about the Altair model... Also noob question what are the different modes/different coloured lines about.

Yes of course.😊 The WHOLE point of the Big Amateur Telescope is to test stuff out and that is what we are setting up to do. Its a journey we are going on together. So far we have 60 amateurs so far from all over the world. Many very knowledgeable and a few with surprisingly big scopes (like 50cm). (We might even be getting one of these big scopes paired up a large pixel low read noise full frame camera which potentially could have a go a 10ms imaging on the brighter targets- wow) BTW according to they guy who images at keck there is still a benefit from 2 second exposures. Not as much benefit as millisecond exposures but it is significant.

vlaiv first off thank you for being such a gentleman. Sometimes I am an idiot. I would put a ruder word in here in place of idiot but you know kids and all... The other thing is that it feels like you think I don't know this stuff but I guess you're not actually talking to me. However I do worry that your missing the big point. The big point is that the biggeest source of blurryness dominates all others (thats the sqrt(FWHM_seeing^2 + FWHM_aperture^2) equation talking) If you boil it all down to something really simple then you can say... like I did in the video - that the biggest source of blurryness for a telescope larger than 6 inches in diameter is -assuming its a good scope that has been well collimated - more often than not the seeing. And as you know I'm interesting in overcoming the seeing. One of my members is directly imaging exoplanets at the keck observatory and pointed me towards one of his colleagues rather interesting scientific paper on lucky imaging. https://www.ast.cam.ac.uk/sites/default/files/nlaw_lucky_thesis.pdf We can't shoot millisecond exposures of course but even second long exposures reduce dramatically the blurryness from the seeing. For me its like us amateurs have only been imaging in 2nd gear. Its exciting to think that we can go much further. Many of our members don't have scopes that are sharp enough to lucky image with (collimation is a big problem actually) and many don't have cameras with a low enough read noise to lucky image with. I'm still keen that they join in bc we will help them improve and advise them on buying better equipment and we can use their long exposure non lucky imaging data to help reveal detail in fainter structures that are too dim to see through lucky imaging. Some have the equipment but don't yet have the skills to pull off lucky imaging, again we can help them. This is exciting. And if us amateurs pull together and share our data we can to an extent negate the inherent problems associated with short exposure deep space astrophotography and that will give us the power - especially on the bright targets - to match or even better the 1.1arcsecond FWHM that giant scopes like the 4m Mayall on Kitt Peak achieve.

I am truly sorry. Sorry vlaiv. I saw red. I suspect it has as much to do with other things happening right now rather than you. Either way I was out of order.

I just like to say to other readers unsure about whether lucky imaging works or not to check galaxies on astrobin and see how the sharpest ones had exposure lengths of just a few seconds. The proof is in the pudding.

Sounds great. And your absolutely right about having the right camera for the job. I found that in London (bortle 8/9) with my f6 newt I had to shoot out 20 second subs to get enough stars to stack (around 20 is enough) but when I went into the bortle 5 field outside london 5 second subs worked fine. Your cameras pixels are bigger than mine (asi178), and your scope is probably soaking up a similar number of photons. The best thing to do is forget about what the naysayers tell you and just try it. I have APP loaded on my laptop so after I've taken a few subs I can quickly check that they stack. I think your esprit will work very well.

a chap called @geeks on the server is heading that up , at the moment I'm just using google drive bc its so user friendly but when we properly get going I don't know what we're going to switch to.

Yes or at least an HDR image, lucky imaging for the bright bits and regular imaging for the dim bits. It all depends on how many good astrophotographers we get to join up so please spread the word. Thx

thx and you're totally right apart from one thing. Finding quality astrophotographers is harder than finding the IT wizards who sort out how to upload the data😊

SGL is a really great forum. Hats off to FLO for making the community a better place. Cloudy nights has some agenda that i don't quite understand and is full of elitist astronomers. They banned me for posting this request for imagers for instance... To be fair its not going to be easy and you do really need a modern CMOS camera to make it work with the kind of scopes we can afford BUT it will work and ultimately the naysayers will have to admit that they are wrong 🤣

I'm going to have to be brief ....(time). The heart of the theory goes like this. If you had a magical camera with zero read noise you could take million of micro second exposures over the course of a minute stack them up and your stack would have the same snr as a single 60sec exposure.. Obviously we don't have magical cameras yet but we're getting close. Modern CMOS sensors manage about 1e/pix of read noise. The read noise is low enough for us to stack thousands of subs that are only a few seconds long and get good results. The the BAT team we have a guy that images at Keck. He's produced a graph that shows you start to see the benefits of lucky imaging when your exposures drop below 10seconds. You see a really good increase in resolution when you shoot exposures of about a second. And in the future if the next generation of CMOS cameras reduces the read noise further then we will be looking to shoot at about 1/10th sec exposures bc thats when you get even more benefits from lucky imaging. Thats the theory. The reality is that most folks have issues with their set up that needs to be sorted before they're set up is sharp enough to even begin to think about lucky imaging!

Its time that's my problem I don't have time and now I feel bad. I probably deserve to feel bad. Apologies