cjdawson

You can most definatly make a Dark and Bias library. Both of these types of images, can be taken anytime, as they only need the camera, and no light leaks. To help you get the best from them, you should make sure that you match the temperature of the darks and bias, so the temperature of the image frame. i.e. if you shoot the image when the camera is at 5°C, then shoot the darks and bias at the same temperature. Having a library of darks and bias for each temperature that you shoot will make like a little easier over time. Flats on the other hand are transient. As has already been mentioned, dust bunnies come and go, so you should make new every time. The things that change are the focus position, and the specs of dust in the sensor. The differences will have a profound effect on the image. Specifically a slight shift in the focal position will change the vignette pattern. Each time you attach and detach the camera, the optical train gets opened to dust, which may enter or exit. Hence it changes. So take these every time, they only take a few minutes, depending on your settings.

Hi Haydn, If you are talking about a USB EqMod cable, I thought they were ESB to RJ45, not RJ11. Just looked up an EQMOD cable and found this one from RVO, which shows to me that it is indeed an RJ45, so shouldn't be able to fit into the autoguider port. https://www.rothervalleyoptics.co.uk/EQMODHEQ5.html

Yep, it's possible to shoot bad darks. Light leakage would be the first culprit for that. For a DSLR, you have two places where light can leak into the sensor, first is obviously the lens. The second less obvious is the viewfinder. When shooting darks, it's important to make sure that both as properly covered and are not leaking light to ensure that dark frames really are dark, without other influences. Putting the dSLR in a box, then putting that in a cupboard usually works, however be aware that the temperature of the dark will therefore change, as the camera will get warm and may not have the ventilation needed to keep the temperature down.

With any luck, I think I have solved the issue with the L filter. I think it was a bit of muck of some sort, and cleaning with a lens seems to have solved the issue. Had just enough time to setup the scope, polar align but didn't get to M45 before then clouded over. (boo) so I took a 60 second exposure close to that part of the sky, don't think I caught any bright stars though. But couldn't see any spikes on anything in the FoV. hopefully it won't be an issue going forward.

It would be fantastic to be able to access the fits outputs and use some of it for walk throughs on how to process astrophotos.

It's only on the Subs when the L Filter is in play. And it's always in the same place. Hence why I've already taken the filter wheel out, and given the filters - especially the L filter a clean with a lens pen.

Hi all. I had a go at taking an image of M45 using my SpaceCat51, and ASI 1600MM-Pro. The image is a stack of 100 subs, in LRGB (100 of each) 60 second exposures, taken at 139 Gain. Stacked in APP, then processed in photoshop. It's turned out much better than my previous attempts on this target. However, there's something that has been puzzling me. The L subs have diffraction spikes from the bright stars. I don't understand why, it doesn't happen on the RGB filters. I took the camera apart and checked. From what I can tell everything is optically clean. but I did hit the filters with a lens pen just to be 100% sure, so do need to run some test images to see if the problem was solved by that. Any other suggestions for what could be causing this? p.s. the image is 4 hours of data in total (1 hour on each filter) and guided in RA using a Star Adventurer.

Don't worry about Satellite trails. Unless it's the cluster thing that's like a meteor storm. The more images you stack the better, the trails will get averages out of the stack as they will only appear on one given frame.

Here's confidence for you. Yesterday I put in an order with FLO. The order includes some AstroZap dew bands, which are not in stock at the moment. They told me that it's most likely that they will be through customs for next week. So, I should have them, and the other parts of the order (which is all in stock) before xmas. Yay, for my christmas present for myself

With help from @Wayne_Ford I figured out the problem and will be doing a release tonight with the fix. Turns out it was a little gremlin hiding in the code.

The output of the SPC900 is 640*480px at it's best setting. So you cannot get an image bigger than that no matter what you try.

I'm making progress on this, in the end I needed to split the work into two parts. The first is a PHP script that grabs the data and does the scraping. This saves json files, and images that will be used later. This script is going to be setup to execute on a CRON job. Before I'm done with it, I'll make sure that the script stops if it does not have an internet connection. The second part is running an Apache2 web server on the PI, turning OFF all caching (this is deliberate) so that the updates are passed properly. Then I'll create a page that gets queries something like index.php This will then server up one of the "slide" screens, i.e. one of the html files that I'm creating to display each page of data. This script will keep track of which pages it can serve, and which page it just served. Each time it is called, the next page is served. This way, I can have 2/3/4 browsers requesting data and each will then display a different pages. As long as no. of Pages > no. of displays, it no two displays will have the same information on. This way, I can start Chromium in Kiosk mode, have it load the page and hey presto it's got a unique display. By making sure that each HTML file has an auto refresh set, they will rotate happily without any extra effort. How to ensure that all pages have the refresh? easy. I'll get index.php to insert the tag into the html heater or the http header (which is better imo)

I'll be using Chromium on the PI, running in full screen mode. I've been thinking about this and first things first, I want to build the pages that will be displayed. Getting close to the first one. Just need to find a place where I can get the current number of sunspots. It's proving a little tricky to find on the NOAA website.

I almost gave up in 2008, when I realised that my first guide camera (It was a Phillips Tucam Pro II) wasn't able to see stars to guide on, the laptop that I was using going flat all the time as the power supply didn't like inverters and runnig a DC-DC adapter didn't work either as the input voltage was too low from a leisure battery. A few years later I set about creating the alternative setup, using a SynGuider II and a Sky FII so that I didn't have to have wows of laptop battery going flat. It worked great the first time I tried to use it - took a photo of the Ring Nebula and was guiding on Vega. Only to find that when I tried to line up on anything else, guess what..... no stars! Yep, almost gave up... again. But went on a visit to Greenwich Astronomy in batley, (now closed down ) and bought a Starlight Xpress Superstar, then to PC World and bought a HP Pavillion laptop. Over night, everything changed completely. There was a 12v power supply for HP Laptops that I bought and it works great. The battery on the laptop lasts for ages too. Stars show up without effort in the Starlight camera. Things are much much better now. The only thing that gets me down is the weather now. But at least it's not the gear that's letting me down anymore.

On reflection I think that Dashboard isn't the right way of describing what I'm wanting. It's more like a continuous slideshow. And I'll be running on on a PI3 initially, maybe even my PI2. The PI4 dual display idea is something for "later". The idea is that it's going to be a display that shows information, then after a short delay (to be decided, something like 30 seconds or a minute, it will show the next "slide", once it gets to the end, it'll start over. The slides will be things like.... 1. Clearoutside forecast for the next week 2. Aurura information 3. Sun spot info 4. Current Sky chart for my location 5. List of "Tonights best" observing targets. something like that. The web pages "slides" I'm sure will change the content over time.

Why should I worry about robots.txt? That's for search engines. What I will be doing isn't a search engine, it's effectively caching data so that I can display it in the way that I want.

I’m thinking about a project for a raspberry pi. On a recent trip to Kielder observatory I saw they had some dashboard screens that I liked the look of. I know they were running from raspberry pis cause I saw them. I’d like to make something similar myself. im hoping there’s people here with loads of pi experience and can offer some useful pointers. firstly, I want to do this on top of raspbian. My initial thoughts here is to split thproject into two parts. part 1 will be a cron job or something similar that will scrape information from websites and store the bits locally. ive got no experience with scraping websites part2 will display a web browser a display in full screen mode. The browser will display pages in rotation. Like a billboard. for fun as I have a pi 4. I’d like to have two displays each showing a different page. This can come later though. does anyone have any ideas where I can look to get started on this?

In addition to using plate solving to line up the image night after night. I also use plate solving in my polar alignment process. I've used both the ZWO AsiAir Polar alignment (I think it's running PHD2 under the hood) And Sharpcap Pro Polar alignment tool. Both use platsolving to visually track that the scope is correstly aligned on the pole star. Doing this has made my polar alignment a whole lot easier and much much much better at the same time. I was lost without it. Using platesolving to frame an image is also a nice to have for multiple sessions.

Yep, that's the same entry as the dialog that you saw on screen. Shame it's not giving me any extra information as to what's going on Still have my thinking cap on. My thought is that maybe we could setup a skype call over the weekend, so that I can talk to you direct and get things moving at a much much faster rate. I'm in the UK, judging from the timings of your posts, I'm guessing that you are somewhere down under.

The more that I'm thinking about this, the more I'm convinced that everything is installed as I'd have expected. Which makes this really confusing. So next step in trouble shooting is can you look in the windows event viewer and see if you can find an application event that shows any more information about what's failing? At the moment, all I know is that something isn't working right, but I don't have much in the way of a clue to tell me what. Whilst you do that, I'll be thinking what else I can come up with to help diagnose this one.

I don't use NINA myself, but do use SGP successfully, also checked and was able to open the settings in POTH as well. I'll admit this one has me stumped at the moment. I'm going to do some more investigation and also ask some other developers.

I've just taken a closer look at the install log and it looks good to me. It does tell me that there was a reboot pending after the installer completed, I hope you did that 😉 I think I'll need to know more about what you were trying to do to make the error happen, as it was the calling program that threw the error not the driver itself.

@Wayne_Fordwhat program were you using when you got the error?

Just make sure that if you get a bracket like the one I linked, that it's got the correct dimensions for your scope. Would hate to hear you get one, just to find that it won't clamp on your eyepiece or something like that.

Thanks Wayne. I'm at work at the moment and have taken a quick look through the log, it looks ok at first glance. I'll take another look when I'm home this evening and can compare against a test install. hopefully that will shed some light.