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In my opinion, yes, definitely. You won't get round stars without one, except in the very centre of your images.

I use a Meanwell 12V 150 W switched power supply to which I've fitted 4 pc 12V car outlets with fuses (5A each). All diy. I use it to power the mount, ZWO camera, strip heaters and a small fan. Never had issues with it.

If you order from FLO, just drop them an e-mail with information on your scope and camera. The ring and Baader mpcc is what I used. It works.

Have you checked the ZWO site? Assuming the coma corrector has 55 mm backfocus, like this https://www.firstlightoptics.com/coma-correctors/skywatcher-coma-corrector.html Just make sure the threads match (M42, M48)

You need a T2 ring for your camera and a coma corrector. The Baader mpcc coma corrector will screw directly into the ring and slip into the focuser as a 2" eyepiece.

Great first image, and welcome to the dark side. 😉 For focusing, your best investment is a Bahtinov mask. Either buy or diy. I think you can get a little more out of your image with proper post processing. Just darken the background a little and play with colour balance and contrast to lift the nebula a bit. Image processing is where the real fun is.

+1 for guiding first. For nb as well as for general image improvement, you need longer subs, and without guiding you won't get there. To combat LP, you can invest in a good lp filter. After that a cooled (cmos) camera with filter wheel. Choose the camera to give you a pixel scale of 1"/pixel or a little less. Pixelscale = 206*pixel_size/focal_length Pixel_size in micrometers, focal_length in millimeters As @tooth_dr showed, use a field of view calculator to figure out sensor size.

No need to bin the images with satellite trails. Stacking software can take care of them.

You also have to factor in pixelscale (arcseconds/pixel) to get "deep" detail. Obviously with the right focal length, you can fit M31 on even the smallest sensor, but it won't become a "good" image in terms of preserving faint detail, because the pixelscale is too coarse. If you want detail and still capture all of M31 (even the fainter dusty regions), you would need a large sensor with very small pixels, and enough dynamic range. You might be hard pressed to find a camera with such a sensor. Although some CMOS cameras with 2.4 um pixels come close.

Excellent catch, Rodd. Much better than my attempt from two years ago. It's really amazing what details we can capture in far away galaxies. There are also quite a few globular clusters in your view, if I'm correct. If you like the colours in v1 better, but also the detail in v2, you can try this trick in PixInsight: Extract L from v2. Then use channelcombination in L*a*b mode and insert v2_L in v1. Leave the a and b sections blank in channelcombination and drop the process on image v1 (pull the triangle into the image). Cheers,

A proven concept, I'd think 😉 https://sv.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Hasselblad_(företag)#/media/Fil%3AHasselblad_1600F.jpg No need to rotate the camera and no one telling me that images must be landscape oriented. Just crop the final image to get the best composition. But back to the original question : the 533 promises amp glow free images. That might be worth considering.

Surgery went fine, thanks. Beautiful rendering, Göran. Regarding the colours, even with the same dataset, your image and mine came out different. In my opinion, the colours with which we depict DSOs will always be a matter of personal taste. Although we have more or less scientific methods for colour calibration, those only give a foundation to work on. Later in a process we constantly make decisions and experiment to get to a rendering we like. This is the artistic aspect of our hobby. It is like painters sitting at their easel in front of the same subject, and with very much the same materials, but producing widely varying renditions of that subject.

All this hassle with bias/no bias, dark scaling or not, is why I've never really tried anything other than calibrate my lights and flats with their respective darks. Seems to work ok. Actually, I took bias very early on when I got my ASI camera, but very soon settled on darks only.

Not quite. A yrue diffraction grating must be much, much finer. Diffraction occurs at the edge of every line in a Bahtinov mask. Having more lines only gives a better definition and a stronger pattern. You can make a Bahtinov mask with only one Y. The edges of the lines in a Bahtinov have to be very straight to get a well defined diffraction pattern. Here's a simulation using Maskulator. The dotted pattern is from a true Bahtinov mask, while the continuous pattern is from a Y-mask. Only three wavelengths were used (blue, green, red).

My first reaction to that bino-scope was "Gee, look at all that dust on the ground, just waiting to waiting to be blown onto the main mirrors."

You can do the scaling, of course, but the general experience of cooled cmos users (ZWO mainly) is that scaled darks won't calibrate out amp glow properly. So far I haven't heard about anyone saying "scaled darks work for me." A more cautious phrasing in my post should probably be "scaled darks generally won't work for CMOS".

A flat dark is a dark frame taken at the same settings as the flat frame that it will calibrate. You take them the same way you take darks, but use the exposure, gain/iso, and temperature that you used for the flats.

A master bias is only needed if you want to scale darks that were taken at another exposure than the lights. But with cmos you can't scale darks, so you don't need a master bias. Only use darks, flats and flat darks. The latter to calibrate the flats. Any bias signal is already in the darks and flat darks as well as their corresponding lights. Pixinsight now has an option to use flat darks in the batch preprocesser, afaIk.

I have v1 of that cube, and on my MN190 I had to mount it in such a way that I can't use the temperature probe. V2 looks indeed a lot better, and more professional with the print on aluminium rather than sticker on plastic.

Why the double spikes? The minor spikes do have coloured bands inside the halo, are these from a refractor?

I agree, Mark. But your post needs an addendum, imo. Artificial spikes won't show banding, but absence of banding doesn't mean that the spikes are therefore artificial. With my 150pds I've never managed to get banding in the spikes. My suspicion is that the "quality" (ie, sharpness, banding, length) of spikes in a stacked image is determined by several factors: focus, polar misalignment and collimation, and maybe others. Focus is obvious because it blurrs any detail. Polar misalignment introduces field rotation which, with stacking and pixel rejection, results in shorter spikes. Collimation is somewhat uncertain, but probably similar to poor and uneven focus.

Great initiative @FLO. I only see one major problem with this: one scope won't be enough. 😉

I had issues with mine in cold weather. It worked fine indoors but was totally unresponsive outside. I contacted Pegasus Astro and got very good customer service. I sent it back to Pegasus for a usb chip upgrade and got it back promptly. The cube has worked flawlessly ever since. So, I only have positive experience of their customer service.

Excellent image! In all fairness, I think what you see here is (chromatic) noise. M110 needs more integration time. But very good nonetheless. https://www.astrobin.com/372976/C/?nc=user

Great image, Dave. Subtly processed. Not really, Göran; I don't know APP. In PI you would use various tools to get the best results. And you could certainly adjust the integration process to yield the smallest fwhm or the lowest noise. Maybe some of the same tools that PI uses are incorporated "under the hood" in APP's standard processes. All I know is that PI is very rigorous mathematically, and allows you to tweak all kinds of settings. The thing that makes PI so powerful also gives it its steep learning curve. And at times that rigour can be counterproductive. But in my opinion, in the end it's the pilot, and not the plane, that gets you to your destination.