alacant

Hi everyone. A mini double-cluster. This is at 585mm focal length. Gotta try this with longer. May have 1200mm for the weekend. Not very nice stars; really clear last night but noticed them bouncing around rapidly during focusing. Difficult with the Bahtinov mask to nail the centre spike it was so bad and phd2 giving me high minimum movement suggestions. Probably 'rescued' too much by Siril's deconvolution. But enough excuses... tell me about the colour or anything else I could improve. Thanks for looking. 700d @ ISO800, eq6, t7m, 90 minutes

Hi. yeah, that's unfortunate. You lost a lot of the galaxy, but I found recently that even with a dslr I was going to have to mosaic or get a telescope with a shorter focal length. I combined the frames in Siril and had a quick poke at the colour. Is this closer? Cheers and HTH

sw130, 700d, eosOAG, t7m, eq6, ~2h light frames, flat frames, bias frames, ISO800, no filter, EKOS, Siril, Ubuntu. Cheers, clear skies and HTH.

PM sent. Thanks

Hi everyone Forgot this was so big. Even at 580mm it runs out of the frame. It looks as though 400mm would do it justice but unfortunately ATM we have only an achromatic refractor to cover that focal length; maybe worth a go as there doesn't seem to be too much which would suffer blue fringes. I also had a quick look at making a mosaic, but the matching from one frame to the next looks difficult. If I did go for it, I was thinking two frames with the camera turned 90º. But may just be lazy see if I can beg a 400mm refractor for the night. Anyway, it was good to see some of those m33 style blue nodule/dots appear in the outer arms, something I've not got before. Any thoughts on the colour, mosaics or ideas for improvement most gratefully received. eos700d @ ISO800

Hi. Nice image. Deconvolution may bring some more detail. Otherwise as you've already guessed, it may be better to use a longer lens, say 300mm. Cheers and HTH.

Hi Park the mount and purge the mount configuration from the telescope tab as below. restart kstars and you should now be able to slew anywhere. If that fails, move the database at ~/.local/kstars/userdb.sqlite to say, userdb.sqlite.old and restart kstars. If that fails, repeat the above and also remove the EQMOD configuration at ~/.local/.indi Otherwise I'm sure the devs would gladly teamview in and fix it. Good luck.

Hi everyone Not sure about the simultaneous. Get the centre spot of the primary coinciding with the cross hairs of the sight tube by adjusting the secondary only. Then leave it. Now -the nice easy bit- tweak the primary. But hey, tell me I'm doing it wrong! Cheers and HTH **edit: +1 for losing the laser;)

Siril with a final colour check in GIMP-2.10. HTH

Oh dear, yes. I agree. But it gets worse; my gf says it looks like 'Christmas'. Help!

Hi everyone What do we think to this? Dunno how to describe it. To me it's too 'busy'. Stretched too much? It's 24 frames from around 04:00. Not sure if more frames would make much difference. The sky was super clear and seeing so steady the mount was around 0.5rms so can probably eliminate atmospheric condition issues. Thanks for looking and all comments most gratefully received. 700d @ ISO800

Hi everyone Disappointed with this. I think that unless you do hours on end night after night, this is never going to reveal much. But would you just look at those blue stars:) Anyway, thanks for looking and do please post your version if you've had a go; can't find much on this at this sort of scale. 700d: 2h @ ISO800

Hi everyone I've been trying this one for ages and maybe I'm getting somewhere at last. In my quest for blue stars, I had to go really in-your-face on this one. Any less and they turned white. Anyway, this is what Siril's -rather nice- photometric colour calibration gave me, so I'm reasonably confident it's at least in the right direction. Maybe a lower ISO would help? Any comments, particularly on the colour, most welcome. Cheers , clear skies and thanks for looking. 700d @ ISO800

Yeah. It puts the user in control; you tell it what to do rather than the other way around. It's very good at stacking, gradient removal and noise reduction. The new StarTools is also very good. Its main advantage is that it holds your image in a database so you can swap backwards and forwards when processing as much as you like. But perhaps its main strength is that it gets you away from the menus-along-the-top-stretch-and-hope style algorithms we've had since the 90s. Just my €0.02 of course; most software gets you there eventually no matter what.

Hi and thanks for your comments. This one was processed using Siril and StarTools 6. Cheers

Hi everyone A hazy October gave way to cleaner rain washed skies last night. This telescope had been sitting for weeks with the camera still attached, so laziness dictated I didn't collimate; poor stars bottom left. Looks like tilt... Ideas? Colour? Blue stars so reasonably happy! Thanks for looking and clear skies. 700d, 3 hours, 150s

With 25 frames, that happens if you want to stretch to that extent. Do another 25, but this time dither by about 6 pixels between each frame. Stack these with the remaining 25 using say, sigma clip 4:3. Cheers and good luck.

Hi. Looks good to me. For just 180s frames, it's amazing. Nice to see so many stars;) Keep going and I think you'll end up with a winner.

Yeah, try it. Nothing to lose. There are also some very good lenses from last century to be had cheaply. Tair and Takumar did excellent fast 300mm. HTH

Hi You may already have it; a 300mm lens. HTH

Hi I think the images are fine. You simply need more of them. Whilst you should be able to record galaxies, the nebula may need the camera to be astro-modified. Cheers and HTH

Hi. Great start and well done. But remember that even with a dslr, you're imaging just the central bit of the galaxy so I think your shots are good. Just don't expect to see the whole spiral. HTH, clear skies and good luck.

Hi There is a firmware patch which may help. The patch also provides usb3 compatibility. You'll need a Linux box. HTH

Hi. I'm using its clone, the t7m on an oag at 1200mm. No problems, even in spring with galaxies. HTH

Hi Secondary: m4. Remove the hidden screws -if there are any- using an allen key and replace with m4 screws. Much easier to adjust like this. HTH