alacant

Hi You may find that you need significantly longer than the OP's 80 minutes to get comparable detail. Cheers

Hi There's a lot of negative hype written about this, usually sourced from old posts when f4s were first mass produced with their hopeless mirror support, inadequate metal tubes and rubbish focusers. I'm certain early adopters all those years ago did indeed suffer, but it's 2021, the issues have been addressed and as @Stu Wilsonmentions, the only essential modification needed for his GSO was replacement springs for the main mirror. I am at a loss as to why the OEMs can't address this simple upgrade. Proper ONTC grade springs cost just €2.30. For a pack of ten. Cheers and HTH.

There are other methods for producing flat frames such as using a t-shirt over the telescope aperture and e.g. pointing at the sky, but they're a bit hit and miss. A light panel costs less than €10 and makes the production of flat frames consistent. I'd recommend one. HTH

Oops, OK. Sorry. This then:

Yes. Flat frames really aren't optional. You're making life a lot more difficult without. Unless you've the 12mp sensor or (one which is at least ten years) older and unless you take them at the same temperature as the light frames (with an unmodified dslr you can't) or have a decent dark optimistaion algorithm (e.g. the one in Siril, but even then...), they will add more artefacts. Much better to use Light, bias and flat frames only, dither between the light frames and stack using a clipping algorithm. Cheers and HTH

Hi Yep. That's the one. Cheers

Hi It's Telia's first myth: you have to square the focuser very accurately. Seronik takes this slant upon the same. A guy at our local group got me to draw it to scale. Until I did, I couldn't understand either. Cheers

Hi The acquisition looks great. There's some lovely detail hiding there Here is the luminance of the stack from the light and bias frames. Best not using dark frames with a 1300d. Could you post -a link to- the flat frames too? They would allow us to lose the dust, the vignetting and enable much easier processing. Cheers

Yeah. Know the feeling. Always best to leave it until the next day, but before the pub! Amazing detail for such a short time. Love it. One thing you may want to check are the flat frames. I made synthetic flat frames with StarTools but still had to lose quite a bit around the edges of the frame. HTH EDIT: forgot. Stu, is there a filter? I can't get much if any colour from the stars...

Hi I'm not at all convinced by the l-enhance, which to our eyes shows little if any advantage over a UHC, but costs €significant more. I've put a little evidence here. Of course, YMMV but I'd certainly recommend borrowing and trying before committing. If you've already narrowed you choices between the two however, I'd go with the l-extreme. The evidence I've seen with the latest generation OSCs paired with the l-extreme or other dual narrow band filters seems to suggest that may be this is the way forward for high end imaging. But try soon of course as suitable targets are sink

That maybe the way high end imaging is going. The likes of the l-extreme with the new generation asi2600 for example gives you H and O without the hassle. For the rest of us, Siril has excellent algorithms to extract the H and O wavelengths. The narrower the filter the better.

Indeed it is. I think however it is more important that after your 1 minute tweak, the collimation holds at any telescope angle though the session, not simply at the angle of the telescope at the time that the collimation is performed. We haven't found a cheap Newtonian that holds out of the box without modification. But hey, we're imagers and so probably have no right posting here anyway. Hoping it may help though. Cheers

Taken on consecutive nights at the same site: eos700d. To look at and through, the filters seem almost identical. Here is the L-enhance. Here is the UHC: Here is the maths: Both with sub €300 telescopes. Unfortunately still anecdotal as not a true side by side. Sufficient however to convince me... Cheers

Taking this the other way, I'm not sure what advantage the €150 L-enhance is supposed to have over a €30 UHC. Same effect. Different price. DSLR. Still thinking, although not many targets left to test until May/June time. Cheers

Hi Maybe post -links to- examples of each file type? That way we maybe able to pinpoint the problem. Cheers