blinky

Had another play, this is a little better and maybe as much as I can get with the data I have?

I linear fitted the Oiii and Ha to the Sii since it looked the weakest, this meant I didnt get too much green but not sure if thats the best way to do it?

Ive added in a few hours of Sii to my tadpoles image so I now have around 3 hours in each narrowband.  I must be doing something wrong as I am getting no colour around the tadpoles and the star next to them - they are just grey, but in other images, they have a lovely colour to them....

Tadpoles-Added-Sii.xisf

Just a note - your VCurve might not look like the above, that screenshot is from the previous version, where the best focus was the crossover points of the 2 lines.  Now SGPro uses a best fit curve and best focus is the lowest point on the curve. 

The other thing that can mess things up is high cloud, often I cant even see it but when I try and focus my focus points are not great meaning the best fit curve is not totally accurate either. It does all work though, just takes a bit of tinkering to get it right!

Im having a nightmare tonight getting SGPro to work with PHD - I can see that Im guiding under 1 arcsec but SGPro is reporting completely inaccurate figures  - the screenshot shows PHD with the scale set to 2 and guiding seems to be under 1.5 at this point but SGPro still reports it as 2.5!  Any ideas?  I've checked my focal length etc and it all seems fine.  

I could not quite get the secondary centered, the screw it right up against the secondary holder.... then it dawned on me, the focuser I have is a Baader steeltrack for a frac, but Bern said it fits the same thread on the newt I have. I think I might need to adjust that a fraction and centre the focuser.

Nooe, sent it back and got a refund, tried 2 cables and never figured it out, sorry

I’m not doubting that it’s improving things, but has anybody got any images to show? Really interested in somebody like myself, my mount averages around 1” and my imaging cam/scope combo gives about the same, so any improvement should be visible in the images. I’m in Scotland, weather is crap as usual so who knows when I will be able to try it out!

There are a few Facebook pages for Scottish astronomers. Look for central Scotland observers group, there others as well.  Harperrig reservoir is one place we meet and if you come further out my way, just south of Edinburgh, moorefoot reservoir is very dark or whiteadder reservoir but thats maybe a bit too far to travel, although its pretty much as dark as you can get

I'm not bothering, want to get some more data of the tadpoles but don't think its worth it

Typically its clear up here in Scotland and the moon is up, is it worth imaging anything, even in narrowband?

Lovely data, as has been mentioned the Sii is cracking!  Not much processing required when its this good - just a few curves to get the colour how I liked, HDRWavelets and a teeny bit of noise reduction and finally, fixed the magenta stars.

Very nice, the Pelican is dead centre I believe, the little streak coming out of the brown'ish dust

From what I gather, it adds up the values from all the pixels inside the boxes and subtracts the background to get the stars flux or brightness - my thinking is that the ratio of this to other stars should remain constant except if there is a transit and at this point one of the stars brightness will drip, which would show up on the graph of all stars.  I may be wrong here and probably am!  I also realise that Ha data of stars inside a nebula does not make for a good target but its all the data I had to hand!

I think Im graphing the intensities of the stars detected by the script over time, so columns M through to AF 

Table_PSF_Flux.csv

I must admit, I dont know what Im doing having more or less just accepted the defaults and not really having any idea what aperture photometry actually is, other than reading a little on wikipedia!  The multiple lines are the intensities of individual stars (I think!) - my thinking was that if there was a transit, then one line would dip lower than the others for the duration of the transit.  I may be totally wrong here as I say, I really have no idea what Im doing!  AstroimageJ just looked too complicated and I wondered if Pixinsight could be used instead.....

Ive found the aperature photometry script in Pixinsight..... Seems that it might work for exoplanet transits, unless Im missing something?  I ran through my data from the other night, not that I was expecting to get an exoplanet transit, just to see if it worked!  So I basically just added the images and let it rip!  10 mins later I have a nice csv with the star flux, I then opened this in OpenOffice and graphed the flux - as can be seen below, all the stars follow the same curve, which I would expect, since there was not transit - do you think this method would work for a real transit?

Its good fun at least, coming up with all the different combinations

Thanks for the comments and the pointers, I always find i end up doing about 3 versions before I'm happy! I did a linear fit of the Oiii to the Ha, will try it the other way round and see if it comes out better.

Took this on Sunday night, managed a couple of hours of Ha and Oiii but never got any Sii so this is a bi-colour image.  I cant seem to get the nice deep blue that others manage, maybe due to the lack of Sii?

I think it depends on the imaging camera - there is now a flattener available for it I believe but from what Ive seen (Im sure there was a thread with a link to a you tube video on here, I think the producer is a member of this forum) you wont be able to get good stars across a DSLR sensor but might well get acceptable results from some of the smaller CMOS sensor cameras.

To be honest I could not get it completely centred in the co centre either!  although I did sort the rotation and make the secondary round.  Really need a clear night to star test now, clouded over immediately after I collimated!

That has just dawned on me in the last 5 mins after packing it all up and coming inside!  I think I made it slightly better and the stars look round etc - how can you tell if a newt is in perfect collimation if the secondary is offset?  I assume mine is since its an F4 scope.....  I originally used one of those co-centre devices and tonight made tweaks to the primary and secondary - Im now worried that I should have left it alone after collimating the secondary with the cocentre and the primary with the laser and Ive made it worse - but Im telling myself the stars were round and the out of focus star looks better now than it did and to leave it be and not let the laser near it till it needs recollimated!  Does that sound good?

Im using live capture on an out of focus star - I can see the big circle (I assume the primary) is presenting a circle, but the smaller shadow (assume the secondary) is not - does this indicate the secondary is not collimated?

Its a decent enough image but not sure why/how it made the news!

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-england-nottinghamshire-54798539