wimvb

I do. I have a thread on it here somewhere

Kill the apt processes and retry.

Great capture. The structure in the faint outer ring is just starting to show. And you kept the core under control too. I’m still struggling with my version. This is a hard one to get right. 👍

Definitely. I have a Baader coma corrector with mine.

I've been reading up (aka googling) on multi star guiding, and it seems that Maxim used it in 2015 already. Back then, PHD2 developers were also looking into it. There seems to be uncertainty whether it is better than single star guiding. My guess is that if guiding is stable and not too much influenced by seeing, then naturally multi star guiding would give the same results as traditional single star guiding. But I have found that my guiding depends a lot on seeing, even if I use 3 - 4 seconds guide exposures, and I will definitely try it next season (astro darkness is still a month away up here).

The t-ring will screw into the coma corrector. That should be enough. Without a cc, you will need a nosepiece that can slide into the focuser drawtube. https://www.firstlightoptics.com/adapters/flo_2-inch_T_adapter.html

Great to hear that ekos uses multi star guiding. I learned about this a few months ago, when Tommy Nawratil used it with his next generation Lacerta Mgen guider. Time to update my indi/ ekos system. Do you know if phd has something like this in the works? Btw, nice ngc6992, but the dinosaur should be a velociraptor. 😉

Nice start. It seems to me that you’re trying to do too much at once. For one, don’t bin rgb data when you use a cmos camera. Binning cmos data doesn’t give you the same advantage as with ccd, and it adds complexity. Focusing will be a lot easier if you use a Bahtinov mask. In dss use one and the same sub to align all others. That sub doesn’t have to be part of the stack. good luck and have fun

All images you take include a bias signal. Unless you need to scale (=alter) dark frames, there really is no need to use bias frames. For ccd and dslr images however, bias frames can (sometimes) replace dark frames, ie flat darks and ordinary darks. Whether that's the case for you, only experimentation can tell.

You can also rotate the crop. Doesn't need to be horizontal landscape. Any orientation with the largest rectangle that will fit and exclude the black areas, will do. Any image processing software will allow you to do that.

No. Not even after googling. That must be why. 😉

Not much of a problem, but you need to crop so that the final image doesn't have those black areas. In general, it's good practice to align one edge of your sensor with RA. Take a 20 s exposure, and about 5 s in, slew ra at 1x sidereal speed. This will give you star trails. Rotate the camera and repeat until the trail lines up with the edge of your sensor. If you do that every time you set up, you are sure that your images will have identical orientation.

There's only one way to find ou: test it. 🙂

With these "budget" mounts, there will always be a trade off between slight backlash and slight uneven movement. If the mount runs free for one complete rotation of the axis, you're very likely to have backlash. I would accept some uneveness. In the end, your guiding statistics and star shapes will tell you if you need to adjust more or not.

mid August for me.

My suggestion for speaker/subject: Jasem Mutlaq on INDI, Ekos/Kstars, StellarMate. Considering the discussions on SGL, and the growing number of astrophotographers using INDI and Raspberry Pi, I'd guess he will be appreciated by many.

The images are a bit blurry, so definitely UFO’s. The comet is only a distraction.

Don’t forget the power supply of your computer. From the same research facility https://cyber.bgu.ac.il/new-malware-jumps-air-gapped-devices-by-turning-power-supplies-into-speakers/

My first thought too

FWIW, here's my stab at the data. I'm not at all familiar with NB bicolour processing and tried various palettes. In the end, simple HOO with SCNR green, won. All messed up in PixInsight, as usual. (click on the image for a larger version)

Yes, two important rules in this hobby are: "KISS", and "If it ain't broke, don't try to fix it". But if you want to keep using your software, you could just follow @MarkAR's advice and get a small windows computer.

I've downloaded your data, and am playing with it in both PI and GIMP. In GIMP I cheated a little, because I first removed the gradient in PI and also did colour calibration there. But after that I moved the image to GIMP and played with levels and curves. In levels: midpoint slider to about 25% (so midway between its original position and the black point). adjusted the black point (left slider) to just below the foot of the histogram, so as not to clip any pixels. Repeated this procedure twice. Then went to Curves and applied a gentle S-curve, lowering the curve a little just at the peak of the histogram, and raised it a little at about 60-65% of the hoizontal axis. In curves, targeting the red channel only: I put a marker on the curve at 25% and at 75% to fix the dark areas bright areas. This to make sure I didn't end up with a colour cast in the background or pink stars. I then raised the middle section a little to enhance the nebulosity. Finally I rescaled the image to 50% and saved as jpeg. This is my first time using GIMP for image processing, so be gentle with me. 😋 And the image after pixinsight (arcsinh stretch, lifting the nebulosity with exponential transform, and star reduction. No resampling) (click on the images to enlarge)

Stellarmate, asiair, astroberry and Atikbase use the INDI protocol, which is the linux alternative to ascom. Indilib consists of a (or more) server and hardware drivers. The server is the software that controls your setup, from camera and mount, to weather stations and observatory (dome). The server connects to one or more clients for user interface. The clients can be Ekos/Kstars, cartes du ciel + ccd ciel, the asiair app, stellarmate, phd guiding, or pixinsight. This means that you could control your mount from cdc, guide with phd and capture your images directly into pixinsight. The drivers and servers run only on linux. Any linux machine will do, and not much computing power is needed. That’s why most people use a cheap raspberry pi or clone. But you can run it on a (linux) laptop as well. Although a windows version of INDI was developed at one time, it is not maintained anymore afaIk. So you need to run the server and harware drivers on a linux machine. But you can run the client (user interface) on any platform. But the client must be able to talk to INDI. Most ASCOM based clients can’t. the stellarmate website is from Kuwait, because the main indi and ekos developer (Jasem Mutlaq) is Kuwaiti.

It’s raining again. Lots of clouds, but only of the dark kind.