souls33k3r

I guess I'll email FLO tomorrow and bring forth this issue to them. Let's see where this leads me because I'm just not pleased with the results no matter how I look at it. 

49 minutes ago, knobby said:

I'd contact Chroma as @whipdry says, they sound very helpful 👍🏻

I think I'll go via FLO since I bought these filters off them. FLO are great and I take comfort in the fact that I'd be well looked after as always. 

46 minutes ago, knobby said:

I maybe talking rubbish but is it worth trying to bin as the 1600 sensor at 1400 or 2000 mm is quite a high sampling ?

I haven't thought about binning but not sure how that's supposed to help with this mate? 

37 minutes ago, Ken82 said:

Hi souls sorry just to be clear the image I posted was from a 7nm baader filter and not my chroma filters. I haven’t seen this with my chroma filters yet and I’m very very pleased with them. 

I didn’t change the orientation of the baader filter as this is a mounted filter and can only be screwed into the FW in one orientation. 

Honestly I wouldn’t be upset over this just yet, both chroma and FLO have exceptional customer experience so I’m sure they will come to an acceptable conclusion. 

Do you have a different scope you could try ? Where are you I could give you a lend of a refractor if your Midlands ?

You may even find by changing the orientation it’s resolved the issue ?! Although chroma now say the orientation doesn’t matter I know they recommend changing if there is an issue. And I’m sure I recall reading on CN someone having to do this which solved the issue. 

As I suggested earlier let’s see what Chroma think about it first.

ken 

 

Cheers for the super valuable inputs Ken, ah I thought the image of elephant was from the 3nm filters. Jesus, you did give me the scare there mate

Yeah I don't doubt FLOs customer service but before I started to bug them, I thought I'd check here first and see what users of Chroma 3nm experienced and apologies I should've asked you first before tagging you but made sense in my head at the time to do so because it was your super useful thread here which lead me to the CN thread and also I thought it would be best to hear from you since you noticed the issue quite recently so it might be something fairly new people have started to notice. 

Too kind for offering to lend me a refractor mate, I'm no way near Midlands unfortunately but I do have a refractor of my own. I am happy to test this out with the refractor but before I do that, I'd like to go back to my EdgeHD scope and see what that stars behaviour looks like after that I've flipped the filters. 

Yeah the filters and camera are square to each other. 

49 minutes ago, groberts said:

I take comfort that there are many accomplished imagers on Astrobin using my camera (ZWO ASI1600MM-Cool) with these filters and getting great results.  I guess I'm about to find out!

I suggest three lines of enquiry:

• With the retailer
• With the manufacturer
• Perhaps post on CN for wider discussion.

Keep us all in the loop with any feedback + good luck.

Graham   

  

Yeah I absolutely went for these filters because of their reputation, the results achieved and of course pairing it with the camera that I have. I just wanted to get in touch with the community here to see what anyone else thinks about it or if they have experienced it themselves. 

Will get in touch with FLO tomorrow and see what plan of action we come up with. Will keep you posted Graham. 

Unfortunately they are worthless to me if it doesn't work the way they are intended. I don't have to put up with software wizardry to fix something that shouldn't even be present in the first place. I really can't put up with this especially I paid nearly £500 per filter. If I was imaging a bright star then yes it makes sense for the microlensing effect to be very much visible and may even have the newtonian rings but on a small star? Certainly something is not right here. 

30 minutes ago, Ken82 said:

Interesting topic. I seen a similar halo/diffraction  effect but only with my 7nm baader filter and the star was also off axis. 

I’ve yet to see a repeat of this affect with the 3nm chroma filters I now use. 
 

looking at some of the more recent data I’ve collected if I was to mega scrutinize the garnet star (which is also off axis) maybe it is there but then it’s so small it’s not noticeable. 
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1JHiJTEOlYGJljmBnkXRBiEjRFcWGtxm1/view?usp=drivesdk

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1o7GcEvZbTC8D5nBveJbb8TuliEZmWpoi/view?usp=drivesdk

There is a lengthy thread on cloudy nights which may help out but unfortunately there is no defining answer.

https://www.cloudynights.com/topic/728648-reflection-artifacts-in-the-asi6200/?fromsearch=1

I think it is just a consequence of the scope/filter/camera combination. You may find the same filters/camera wouldn’t have this effect on a different scope. And then the same scope may not have it using a different filter set and or camera. 
 

I would be interested to hear what chroma think ? 
 

ken 

 

 

Thank you for the link and your input Ken. The CN thread is mostly tested on a super bright star which I won't ever be going anywhere near to but your data has somewhat smallish star in the elephant trunk image. Did you try flipping the filters afterwards to see if this effect goes away? 

This really worries me because I've paid a good chunk on these filters which are going to be worthless if they are not going to work for me. It really is heart breaking to say the least. 

4 minutes ago, groberts said:

I'm interested and a little concerned by this as I've just purchased a set of Chroma filters but not yet fitted and used. 

Souls - could you please point me towards the CN thread mentioned + decribe how you indetify one side of a filter from the other?

Graham

Sure mate, it's https://www.cloudynights.com/topic/715162-chroma-3nm-orientation/

13 minutes ago, Laurin Dave said:

This is what I get with my ASI1600 and Astrodon Oiii and Ha filters...  this is the bright star in the Witches Broom, Ha shows it most.  My guess is that its the lack of other filter artefacts that allows it to show through . Might have a bit of tilt to although doesn't affect the star shapes 

 

OK but this is a big boy star. The stars that I am seeing these halos and banding are on smaller stars but bigger of the bunch if it makes sense. 

1 minute ago, fireballxl5 said:

This doesn't look like "regular" haloing to me and I have experience from the bad batch of Baader OIIIs from 2014😉

I now have a set of Chroma 3nm and although not orientated as commonly recommended in my QSI camera (with FSQ85) they are essentially halo-free. I emailed Chroma earlier this year to check this and they confirmed that filter orientation did not matter.

Hope this helps, 

 

True, it doesn't look like a regular halo-ing and I can promise you these halo in the "bottom right corner" image (in the integrated) is so prominent on the TV screen that I use than on the mobile phone. 

I checked with FLO and they were kind enough to tell me the same thing thay orientation doesn't matter but then like I said there's a thread on CN which was from this year shows exactly that the orientation does matter. Now even though my filters were in the "suggeted" orientation, it still produced this. Now I've flipped them to see what happens but can't test them out until wr have the next clear night which God knows when is going to be happening. 

I'm certainly not the first person to use this combination of camera and filters because otherwise you'd be hearing about it all over the web which we're not.

Unfortunately I don't have enough money to be spending on a different camera and neither can I ask someone for it. 

Unfortunately it's not the microlensing effect. That has a total different pattern and doesn't produce halos. 

Hi there, 

I'm reaching out to all Chroma 3nm NB filters users to find out if they have ever noticed what I am doing right now. 

I purchased the filters from @FLOduring the first lockdown. A few things happened in my life which put a stop to anything I wanted to do and AP was one of them and only just started to process images since I've had the filters so I am a little late on testing. I'm seeing halos!!! I did not notice anything in the individual subs when I was capturing it but then I wasn't expecting much to go wrong with these filters. It's only when I started to integrate the light frames is when the issue became quite evident. The first image that I processed didn't have many bright stars to take notice of the halos but the second image showed them. The first time I noticed them was when using Starnet, all the bright stars had a halo around them. Even though I wasn't happy about the fact that the 3nm still showed too many stars and bloated especially coming from 6nm, I thought that maybe I pushed the data too far and carried on processing the data. The first image was fine, only because it wasn't a fended star field but the second image showed the stars a bit too much for my liking that I really had to do star reduction. 

Now when I got the filters, I did ask if the orientation mattered and I was told that it didn't so I placed the reflective side (top writing) towards the camera and non/less-reflective side towards the scope end. When this issue started to bug me, I noticed that @Ken82mentioned here the filter orientation had to be in a particular way which then took me to a CN thread where it was again mentioned which way the filters had to be. The solution was to flip the filters. When I opened up the FW tonight, I realised that my filters were the positioned the correct (sugggested) way. I still flipped them because I have no other choice.

The scope that I used was EdgeHD 8" with ASI1600MM-COOLED camera. 

This is what my individual subs look like

Bottom right hand corner:

Middle:

It might not look much from these screenshots but I could definitely see this on my PC. OIII for the "middle" screenshot doesn't show much but in the corners it still does. Chose the corner because that's where the bright star was positioned. 

Below is the integrated SII which shows the banding for the middle image

The integrated subs for all channels (bottom right corner) 

The integrated subs for all channels (middle) 

Any advice/help is much appreciated. Thanks. 

3 hours ago, AbsolutelyN said:

I thought the price was quite good. Looked at a few options for a reducer on Esprit 100 last year and they were in region of double this price and needed various adapters. Never got one as was too expensive and felt risky regarding not knowing if backspacing would be spot on and how good stars would be.  

2 hours ago, FLO said:

I think they are priced about right (was expecting £270-300). 

I guess it depends though on what we compare them with. The William Optics 0.72x Reducer costs over double and the Explore Scientific 3" 0.7x Reducer costs roughly the same. 

They do cost more than most reducers designed for smaller aperture telescopes and Sky-Watcher's own Flatteners for Esprit 120 & 150. 

We will receive our first stock delivery Mon/Tue. We will then make some photographs so comparisons can be more easily made. 

HTH, 

Steve 

Maybe you both are right. I haven't checked the price of the reducers in a long time but just coming from seeing what these thing cost straight away felt slightly expensive. This hobby is expensive on its own and I guess it's still £300

This I'm sure is such a welcome news for Esprit owners. Slightly on the expensive side of things don't you think? 

Absolutely stunning Carole

So good to see another one of your master pieces Brendan. We were speaking on Facebook regarding my NGC1491 target yesterday and this is exactly why I think your work should be seen by the world of astrobin

1 hour ago, __Spirit__ said:

I have darks for 120s 300s UGain.

For another gain need another darks. 

Ah ok

Hahahaha I've been using uni gain myself but the darks are really helpful in removing cold and hot pixels. Trust me, you'll find them super useful

What gain and offset settings did you use mate? 

What great result. I've seen so many people jump to MaximDL's deconvolution process. Love the colours. Top stuff mate. 

Absolutely stunning. Mind if I ask what filters did you use and what software did you use for processing? 

Nice one, would love to be on this journey with you and see how you progress through it. Good lucky mate.

On 21/10/2020 at 20:42, Stephenstargazer said:

I have kept my Vixen SX mounts on a pier in the garden with a 365 cover for the last 10 years full time, without any issues or corrosion. My advice is do not heat! Warm air holds more moisture. The  cover is wrapped around the lower pier to provide a good seal in two places and I keep a dessicant canister (Fuller's earth) inside. If an observing  night is dewy I leave the cover loose and take it off to dry the mount in the morning, before sealing the cover. The canister gets dried out about once a year in the oven. Only the mount and pier is kept out, and they get put inside when I go away for any time, just for security.

Got a link to the sort of canister you've been using? Just out of sheer curiosity. Thanks

3 hours ago, tooth_dr said:

Thank you very much 🙏🏻 I think it’s 4.  I do have an SQM I just haven’t got round to fitting it yet 😫

Joy's of living in a Bortle 4 scale. I can not even think of imaging anything remotely rgb in my bortle 8 skies. 🤦‍♂️

What a brilliant image Adam. Not overly stretched, beautiful star colours... Just perfect. 

What's your bortle scale if you don't mind me asking matey? 

Absolutely beautiful Gina... I mean the picture... You as well and you know it