wimvb

Today, my hard copy of the book arrived. Of course Mastering PixInsight will be compared to Inside PixInsight, by Warren Keller. To start with, here's the physical comparison. Andreo's book is a two volume edition, which comes in a box. One volume is the main book, Mastering PixInsight, while the other is RBA's PixInsight Process Reference Guide. Other (physical) differences: Inside PixInsight is a paperback, published by Springer as part of the Patrick Moore series. Mastering PixInsight is a soft cover bound book, published by Andreo himself.

Are you sure you’re not aligning on hot pixels? Try increasing the noise reduction levels and noise scale/layers. Or, post the two images here, to let us have a go at it. Seeing the real data is always better than trying to guess what may have gone wrong.

My version.

Before you put a t-shirt over the scope, make sure it points at the sky only, for example zenith. No trees in the foreground. You want a very even illumination to start with.

Have you tried setting the position/time for the flip to occur further away from the meridian? Also, check on the indi forum for possible solutions.

If I count correctly, fourteen images within one month with this combination. You're delivering both quantity AND quality. Great set of images. But please, please, do leave us some photons.

That sounds like a typical imaging night. At least now tou know which button to press next time.

The normal workflow for the scheduler is to take exposures until any one of its stop criteria is met. If you activate the park sequence while scheduler is running, this will ruin the sequence. There is no checking in the scheduler that the park time is set. Ie, if you plan to use scheduler, you should give it ultimate control over your rig. As I understand it, the time park feature is exactly the way you described. If you don’t use the scheduler, but want to park your mount unattended at the end of an imaging session, you would use this feature. Remember that Ekos consists of modules that were developed independently. The idea behind indi is that drivers and clients can be distributed. You can use one client for mount control, another for camera control, and yet another for guiding. But for each client to know what any other client (module) is doing at any time, would be difficult to implement. Consiser Ekos to be a toolbox where each module is an indi client, rather than Ekos being a single program. You only use those Ekos modules/clients you want, and can use other software/clients at the same time for other tasks. If you have Pixinsight, for example, you can use both Ekos and the indi module in Pixinsight at the same time to control your mount, or camera. Now THAT’s a recipe for disaster.

A newtionian with a large chip camera, a barlow, but no coma corrector is a sure way to get coma and colour abberation in your images. With this combination, you really need a coma corrector. Also, the Barlow, unless it’s a top quality one, will introduce som chromatic abberation. To verify if collimation is a problem, take an image of a defocused star. The doughnut should be symmetrical with dark shadow accurately centered.

I think I will try it at the next opportunity I have.

According to the manual, it does, although I have never used this feature. It should not be used together with the scheduler. The clock display next to the start button is a count down timer. More info here https://stellarmate.com/support/ekos/17-support/documentation/ekos.html

Actually, the section you show is not part of the code as I have it on github. Did you copy and paste this from a webpage? If so, I think you also copied a section of html. This is a link to the code https://github.com/wberlo/Arduino_Moonlite_Focuser/blob/master/Arduino_Moonlite_Focuser_V1.ino

I'm not sure. The code you have there looks like html, and could be part of a file which I adapted. I will have to look into it.

The jury is back with a verdict: Now that I have the parameters dialed in, the new routines are definitely going to be part of my toolkit. I don't think I'll be using PHD2 anymore. I do like the user interface of PHD2 more, and all its gadgets, but the internal Ekos guider now works equally well and is actually easier and faster to get starting; more "push here, dummy" than PHD. And I can still use phd log viewer to analyse my guide logs

Another clear night this week allowed me to do some more testing and collect luminance data for this target. This is the original RGB image with added LRGB using 72 minutes of luminance (36 x 2 minutes) The added luminance gave less noise and tighter stars. (click on the image to view the full size version) Enough testing, next clear night I'll be aiming at something more interesting.