wimvb

That's a nice start. With the weather the way it has been, you may be able to do another sub before it disappears untill next season. If / when you do manage to add to this, also take flats, bias frames and darks. With some gentle processing, this can become a great image. Good luck

The whirlpool looks nice. If you can add flat frames, you can improve the vignetting near the corners. You also caught a nice flame and horsehead. Alnitak and the flame/horse nebulae will always be difficult due to the huge dynamic range of this target. I would be inclined to reduce ISO, because it should give you more dynamic range. ISO is the DSLR equivalent of gain (and offset). Lower gain will generally give more dynamic range and less noise. As long as you stay above the read noise floor, you should be able to stretch the image to compensate for the lower ISO. As always, try to go for the longest single sub exposure that your gear can handle. Adjust ISO to get the best possible trade off between signal and noise/light pollution. If you can collect data for 3 hours in one night with 1 minute exposures, this means that you can collect about 150 frames. Even if you need to throw out 50% of these due to trailing issues, that leaves you with 75 stackable subs. It usually pays off to investigate time in setting up your scope. Polar alignment, star alignment and balance (with probably an intended off balance to improve tracking) have to be spot on for best results. Thanks for sharing, and good luck

Kstars apparently also does the guiding, but it seems to use lin_guider on the client as its native guider. That must put a heavy load on the network, I think. According to the docs/forum, it's possible to do the guiding in the driver on the server side, but I wonder how that works. Do you have any idea? Atm, I use lin_guider on a RPi strapped to my mount. (Actually, not at THIS moment, since it's solid clouds for the next week, and has been for the last two weeks.) Seems to work ok, but lin_guider is very basic, more "just push here dummy" than PHD.

I heard a loooong, loooong time ago, that weather prediction models, when left to their own devices, predicted a white earth, where the weather stabilized to an equilibrium of a snow covered earth. Maybe those models weren't so far off after all ... And totally unconnected to this: Gina, congratulations on your latest victory over Raspberry Pi. I have been following your struggles, but had nothing to contribute.

Since you already have PixInsight, why not use its noise reduction methods. They do wonders with most images, and retain detail. Here's my noise reduction recipe http://wimvberlo.blogspot.se/2016/07/noise-reduction-for-dslr-astroimages.html?m=1 If you have Warren Kellers book, he describes his method in detail. I've tried it, and it works just as well.

You are too modest. It's not just a touch. Besides a new mount, I also invested in a coma corrector last summer, after this image. Next major investment will be a camera to replace my box brownie (aka Pentax).

Here's an image I took last April, and which I hope to revisit in March or April. NGC 2903 is a barred spiral galaxy in Leo. It is sometimes called the galaxy that Messier missed, since it is as large and bright as certain Messier objects. This image was captured with my 150PDS on the EQ3 Pro, unguided 80 and 120 seconds exposures at ISO 1600, 24 subs in total. 120 seconds means that this target is underexposed, but in this case the mount was the limiting factor. Processed in PixInsight. The fuzzy on the left is another NGC object. Next time I gather data on this target will be with my AZ EQ6 and guiding. That will make for a nice comparison.

For an alternative to the lrgb method that I suggested earlier, here is one that may be more suited for photoshop and gimp. The blending methods may have different names (value instead of color?) As always, DO try this at home. (As opposed to what they say on tv shows)

You're right. I had seen one example of it withe the asi, but it seemed much weaker. It must be the sensor that is the culprit then. I wonder if all Sony exmor sensors suffer from this. Prior to the qhy image, I hadn't noticed it.

To be honest, I think the noise you still have will come into the way of processing this image properly. Your best option is to gather more data to bring the noise down. If you can increase your single frame exposure time at a lower iso setting, your data will have less noise. With this image I would forget about the stars, and concentrate on the nebula. One option you have is to create a b/w copy of the image and process this (mainly noise reduction and some very gentle stretching and local contrast enhancement). Then blur the colour image and do an lrgb combination. In PixInsight there is a function for this. In photoshop/gimp there is very likely a layer blending mode that can achieve the same. Good luck.

Morphology transformation (MT) in PixInsight is your (/my) best friend for star reduction. Deconvolution would work, if the stars are round and regular. But I've always had more success with MT.

Great result for this little camera. Since you are using PixInsight: the vertical bands are easy to remove with CanonBandingReduction (just rotate the images 90 degrees first). As for the ASI1600 vs QHY163, they both use the same chip, so as long as the back focus is similar, they should both accept 1.25" filters. There is a thread with images from the QHY163 somewhere in this forum. Here, actually: You might also want to check out the published dark frames from both cameras. It seems that both suffer from amp glow, but the QHY possibly a little more. The QHY also has some (in my opinion) ugly diffraction patterns from its microlenses, that shows up when imaging bright stars I very much like the new CMOS cameras, but results like these would make me hesitate to buy one. Cheers,

... more of the same. Lots more It's a good start.

Lovely image. Nice to see these two targets together. They seem almost the same size, but one is of course MUCH larger than the other. Flats will take care of the vignetting. Adjusting colour sliders should clean up the green colour cast, but scnr in PixInsight or hasta la vista green in photoshop work better.

If 10 min subs @ iso 1600 is too much, why not decrease iso? That should give less noise, and slightly more dynamic range. Somewhere in my collection is an image of the california neb at 4 minutes per sub. It shows the nebula, and I was also able to reveal just the slightest hint of dust. Unfortunately, I had too few subs at the time, and haven't been able to add more data yet. But it is high on my to do list. If you can get guided 10 min exposures, then my advice is to go for it.

Then the 80ed may be the one. There is a difference in fl and speed (f-ratio), but with coma correctors, field flatteners and focal reducers, this different may not be so much.

Do you like or hate diffraction spikes? 130pds has them, and the 80ed lacks them.

Great start on Leo. If you have the possibility to increase exposure time (to 60 secs perhaps) and double the number of subs, you will still be under 1 hour total, but have a massive improvement in image quality. Decrease iso if your sky is the limit.

NGC 1499, Jan 2016, SW EQ3 Pro, 135 mm @ f/5.6 Pentax K20D (unmodded) 4 minutes subexposures, unguided M31, Jan 2016, SW EQ3 Pro, 135 mm lens, Pentax K20D, 3 and 4 minutes sub exposures, unguided NGC 7000, Aug 2016, SW 150 PDS on AZ EQ6 with Pentax K20D (unmodded), 4 minutes subexposures, unguided NGC 7635, Nov 2016, M52, SW 150 PDS on AZ EQ6 with Pentax K20D, 10 minutes subexposures, guided On my drive I have data from a grand total of 41 imaging nights during 2016. That's an average of 5 nights per month (May - August it's too bright to do any imaging). In August I upgraded my mount (from EQ3 to AZ EQ6) and in November I started guiding.

Some of my wide fields. Now (since august 2016) that I have an AZ EQ6 for my scope, I use the EQ3 Pro exclusively for wide field imaging, mostly with my 135 mm Pentax lens. M31, 135 mm f/3.5 lens on a Pentax K20D, 20 x 240 seconds (unguided) at ISO 1600 M38 & co with the same setup. 43 x 60 seconds at ISO 800 This is with the SW 150PDS (from before I got the AZ EQ6), M3. 17 x 60 seconds at ISO 1600 And the most recent image, M45, 35 x 420 seconds (unguided) with the 135 mm f/3.5 lens at f/5.6, ISO 400

Nothing really new here. But note the tripod pads on the ground. I drove post anchors into the ground (cut off the standing part), where I put my tripod. This greatly reduces the time needed for leveling and polar alignment. On this occasion, the mount was level from the start, and I only needed a slight adjustment in polar altitude. The pads are low enough for the grass to grow over in the summer. (And relatively easy to find under the snow.) The guiding scope is barely visible behind the main OTA. I'm considering longer (14") dovetail bars to reduce differential flexure. So what do you think, should I go for Vixen or Losmandy style bars? Will Losmandy bars fit to my scope (SW 150PDS, currently with cone error correction screws in the dovetail bar)? Cheers,

This is what I did: http://wimvberlo.blogspot.se/2016/08/vibration-damping-eq3-aluminium-tripod.html I also tried to fill the legs with sand, but there are too many openings in the legs, and the tripod became too heavy.

Lining up the camera with the ra axis is good practice if you want to do dso photography. The first concern should always be to frame the target properly. But if you want to image iver several nights, or do mosaics (even just 2 panels), it's easier if the camera is lined up. My recipe: target a bright star and expose for 20 to 30 seconds. After about 5 secs of exposure, press the ra+ button. You star will now trail. After the exposure, look at the trail and rotate the camera in the same direction as the trail is pointing. Then repeat the exposure. Do this untill the trail is parallell to either the long side or the short side of the view finder or screen. Now your sensor's long or short side is lined up. On a next night you do the same. When you stack images from several nights, there may be a shift, but at least no rotation. The amount of shift depends on how accurate your star alignment is. If you don't have goto, you can try to get bright stars in roughly the same position on the various imaging occasions. (Consider this poor mans plate solving) Hope this helps,

@Peco4321: Looks nice. Two tips from another eq3 owner; 1 if you move the camera to the opposite side, it will give you somewhat better balance (and if you rotate it so the sensor lines up with the ra direction, it will make imaging over several nights easier. Plus the possibility to reuse flats from several occasions.) 2 the weak point of this tripod/mount combo are the aluminium legs. I used the tripod at its lowest position, until I reinforced it. Happy imaging with your setup

If you find it difficult to get a staralignment, try this. Go behind the scope and look along it. If the star is far from aligned either disengage the clutches or set the slewspeed to high (5 - 7 on the synscan) When the star seems aligned, switch to viewing through the finder scope. When aligned here, switch to viewing through your longest focal length eyepiece (usually 25 mm). Once the star is centered in the eyepiece, switch back to the finder scope, and use the small screws to align this properly. Having a properly aligned finder scope makes things a lot easier. It took me a long time as well in the beginning, but with time you'll get there. Good luck, and happy viewing/imaging