vlaiv

Could you upload a few bias subs with ISO 800?

I did not keep old ones and old upload was deleted by WeTransfer (it expired)

27 minutes ago, ollypenrice said:

Woo Hoo, I can see a whole new set of variables appearing here! Just what we need! 

On the left, posh Japanese 4 inch F5. On the right, budget Chinese 4 inch F5. Which is faster? Now we have to look at the image circle (say 80mm on the left, 40mm on the right) and the sensor size. The imager with the small sensor says, 'They are the same.' The imager with the giant sensor says, 'The one on the left is twice as fast.' They are both right if the target needs a 2-panel with the smaller circle and smaller sensor. After all, a larger sensor collects more light, does it not?

It just goes to show that no one number, in isolation from the rest, can tell you what you need to know. (Even Vlaiv's 'aperture at resolution' which is the best candidate so far, in my view.)

Olly

Yes, way to too complicated to formulate a single number, and there will always be that edge case.

Let's say two completely same setups - one at dark site of mag21 and one in LP skies of mag19. Is there a single number that can specify the difference? No - it will depend on chosen target - fainter the target, larger the difference.

1 minute ago, wimvb said:

But here there is so much light pollution that even lights have a high intensity level.

In only 120s with 72mm scope? Don't really think so ...

Offset is low - so it can't be that, average value of dark is around 80e (120 gain is close to unity, so I'll just use 1e/ADU).

On the other hand green background level is about 6000e.

That system is sampling at just a bit over 2"/px (somewhere around 2.3 or so - not sure if it is using reducer or not).

I image from mag 18.5 skies, and my sub 1 minute long, in green filter with 80mm scope and sampling of 2"/px has something like 200e background value, which means that two minutes would be 400e or about x15 less. That is 3 magnitudes difference.

Or 15.5 mag skies. I don't think there is such LP - worst that I could find would be center of Rotterdam with mag16.5

Center of Melbourne is mag17.75 so not so severe.

I think this points again to light leak - that can also raise levels of image.

8 minutes ago, wimvb said:

That wouldn't surprise me too much. The sensors that zwo uses come from various "families". Larger sensors are generally used in consumer cameras. Smaller sensors may be developed for machine vision an surveillance applications. Some basic on sensor image processing isn't unheard of. 

Otoh, that should affect darks and lights alike. 

Quite right. Strange thing is - it does not affect Flats either.

Btw - I did the same thing you did above - debayer single sub without calibration, and here is my result:

I guess difference is to the fact that you are wiping your image, and this one is just with aligned black point. It sort of looks like light leak maybe?

Is there any chance camera/scope connection is letting some light pass in?

2 minutes ago, Louis D said:

But, if the same imaging sensor was used in both scopes, would there be any way for the f/10 to rule the f/5?  I guess throughout my thought process, I assumed that the same imaging sensor would be used to eliminate that variable from the equation.  After all, what happens if you stuck that larger sensor from the f/10 example on the f/5 system?  I would assume it would create like-density images more quickly but at a different magnification.

Yes there is a way for that to happen as well.

It is in part to processing - so it is not down to scope as such - but to the way it is used.

Imagine using same sensor in my above example on 6" F/10 and 4" F/5 scopes. Since we use the same sensor - it is obvious that FOV is going to be smaller on F/10 scope, but let's for argument sake make target fit smaller FOV - it will then fit larger FOV as well, so both scopes will image what we are interested in with single frame (no need for mosaics).

Now we want to match sampling resolution and we decide to bin x3 pixels when using sensor with F/10 scope. That will make pixels x3 larger and paired with x3 longer FL - we will have same resolution in arc seconds per pixel.

What really determines speed of imaging setup is - "aperture at resolution". We again have same resolution but F/10 scope has larger aperture (and x2.25 light gathering surface - so x2.25 more signal).

If you want general "speed number" of the system it would be pixel surface * aperture surface or (pixel_size * aperture)^2 - that will give you comparable numbers whose ratio will give you roughly total integration ratio to get same SNR.

Even if you use large sensor on small fast scope - you can still be faster by using even smaller sensor on slow larger scope - provided that in both cases intended target fits FOV, so difference in FOV size is not important - again it would be matter of aperture at resolution or above given  (pixel_size * aperture)^2.

Here is another interesting find:

- dark sub in zip above - 0 pixels that are not divisible with 4

- flat sub in zip above - 0 pixels that are not divisible with 4

- light sub - ~37.5% of the pixels have value that is not divisible with 4 (and therefore wrong value if we take it that ASI294 is 14 bit ADC and we compare to other 14bit asi cameras and flat from this camera).

And now for final surprise:

0 green pixels have wrong values

~75% of red pixels have wrong value and ~75% of blue pixels have wrong values

Huh, hold on, is there setting for ASI294 in drivers to adjust B and R value? Maybe this has been fiddled with if exists?

25 minutes ago, Louis D said:

So, about the photographic equivalent of moving to a larger format sensor and increasing the ISO at the same time while maintaining similar SNR.  For this to actually work, though, the f/10 would need to have a significantly larger image circle than the f/5 if the f/5 were already maxing out the fully illuminated image circle.  I'm thinking of a 4" refractor versus a 6" SCT where this probably wouldn't hold true due to the the rear baffles.

Don't mix ISO into it - it's just numeric conversion factor that will not impact signal levels or SNR.

Above was true even if we made FOV and sampling resolution the same. If we don't take that into account things can get even crazier.

You don't necessarily have to have very large illuminated/corrected circle on F/10 scope for this to be true. This is because one can get dedicated astronomy camera with rather small sensor these days. Sensors of 8-10mm in diagonal are not uncommon.

Couple that with variety of pixel sizes, and you can see that novice astro photographer can find them selves underwhelmed by their result from their very fast F/4.8 scope in comparison to someone else's F/7 or F/8 slow imaging rig using APS-C or full format sensor.

Or you can think of it even like this:

4" F/5 refractor with camera that has 2.4um pixels vs 6" F/9 RC with pixel size 12um size pixels - F/9 is going to "rule" F/5 scope in terms of speed as long as both scopes can fit target in their FOV (but sampling will be different).

37 minutes ago, RolandKol said:

Blink vid here

https://youtu.be/Z03XYj-6h6c

The more I look at it... the more I think it was frost..... Not sure....

50% stack incomming

P.S. it is my first Blink vid, - not sure how to increase the quality...

on PI it looks a bit better

I agree, there is some strange effect - but I don't see it be on front of the lens - it will not spread like that what ever shape it has on front of the lens - things will only get darker and that is about it.

It needs to be somewhere inside system - flattener probably as sensor is not cooled and it is warmer than rest of the gear and it will not allow for frost / dew to form.

36 minutes ago, wimvb said:

It seems from the light frame, that the offset is already low. However, several people reported the same problem, with the same camera model. To me, that suggests a camera issue, rather than a flats issue. The uncalibrated light frame has the same colour blotch. It is also very weak, and needs to be stretched a lot to reveal any signal. 

I see what you mean - it looks like over exposed flat is only part of the story.

What do you think about odd pixel values in the image? I have ASI1600 and it uses 12 bit ADC - every number from raw image that I ever got was divisible with 16 (2^4). I also have ASI178 - it has 14bit ADC - again same thing, only this time all numbers were divisible with 4 (2^2). Never had odd pixel values in raw image.

8 minutes ago, wimvb said:

It seems from the light frame, that the offset is already low. However, several people reported the same problem, with the same camera model. To me, that suggests a camera issue, rather than a flats issue. The uncalibrated light frame has the same colour blotch. It is also very weak, and needs to be stretched a lot to reveal any signal. 

If we go by darks (and I'm hoping that darks are matched to lights), here is histogram for darks:

Minimum value is way above 0 at 68, histogram is nicely shaped and there is no clipping to the left. Even if short exposure bias has issues with offset - that is not going to impact lights and darks because both have histogram way higher than 0 and no clipping occurs (and bias is not used for calibration here).

But there are couple of things that are surprising now that I've taken a look again at subs:

1. Both darks and flats have following data written in fits header:

What I don't understand is camera gain and EGAIN part. Camera gain of 120 should give us less than 1 e/ADU according to ZWO data on the camera:

For EGAIN of about 4e/ADU, gain setting should be at about 0 gain. This is confusing but can be bug in drivers with EGain being reported for gain 0 rather than actual gain setting (one can calculate actual e/ADU for 0 gain and any gain setting for ZWO cameras because gain is in 0.1dB units).

That aside, only channel that has not got clipping in flats is blue channel, and here is calibrated single sub and blue channel extracted:

It has classic LP gradient but I don't think it has anything else in there? Let me remove linear gradient to see what is left:

I would call this reasonably flat fielded. There is little under correction - but that is due the fact that no flat dark was included, just to attest it is flat under correction - here is blue part of the flat:

Hm, that does not explain top left corner.

But here is one more oddity for the end. These are supposed to be raw files straight from the camera, right? ASI294 has 14bit ADC and 16bit FITS is written in MSB - that means all numbers in the image should be divisible with 4.

There are bunch of odd valued pixels in the image and all numbers divisible with 4 are even. This should not happen - either drivers are buggy or image has been tampered with. Maybe there is issue with data transfer or storage (data gets corrupt for some reason).

1 minute ago, wimvb said:

The suggested solution is to lower the camera offset. Have you tried that?

As far as I could tell from supplied subs, offset is just fine - issue was due to clipping of the flats - look above histogram

1 hour ago, Louis D said:

Please explain one example where an f/10 scope produces an image of equal density in less time than an f/5 scope at equivalent magnification, noise level, and level of detail.  My curiosity has been piqued.

Ok, here it is:

F/10 scope is for example 6" (or rather 150mm to be precise) F/10 scope and F/5 scope is 4" (again 100mm) F/5 scope.

F/10 scope has 1500mm focal length and F/5 scope has 500mm focal length.

We put sensor A on F/10 scope and put sensor B on F/5 scope.

Sensor A is 3 times larger than sensor B and has x3 pixel size of sensor B.

Due to fact that F/10 has x3 focal length of F/5 scope and sensor A is three times larger (x3 height and x3 width) than B - both F/10+A and F/5+B will provide exact same FOV.

Due to fact that A has x3 larger pixels than B and F/10 has x3 longer FL than F/5 - again F/10+A and F/5+B will have same sampling rate / resolution in arc seconds per pixel.

So both FOV and resolution of these two setups are the same.

However light gathering surface of F/10 scope is 75^2*PI centimeters squared vs 50^2*pi centimeters squared of F/5 scope or calculated this turns out to be ~17671.5 : ~7854 = x2.25

F/10 scope will gather 2.25 more photons in same amount of time as will F/5 and those photons will be spread over same FOV and sampled by same number of pixels. Measured signal will be therefore larger by factor of x2.25 and resulting SNR will be at most larger by factor of x1.5 (at most because SNR does not depend only on signal level and shot noise, but other noise sources as well).

Here we have shown that F/10 scope when paired with carefully chosen camera and pixel size will be faster than F/5 scope with certain camera and pixel size. We have shown another important thing - speed of astrophotograpy setup depends on other factors than size of objective and focal length and thus those two alone can't be used to determine speed of of setup.

55 minutes ago, Marmo720 said:

That is interesting and I really hope it was just a cloud and I can salvage/learn from this. But I think I also had the same issue with M42 which was much later in the evening. I will check once I get home from work in a few hours. 

@vlaiv If almost 50% have a cloud then it is possible you chose single sub with a cloud? Also, this might be a combination issue where single subs show the issue with my under exposed flats while full stacked image shows the impact of the clouds more? 

I don't think that clouds have anything to do with it. Clouds can make target dimmer and background brighter - but all of that is light reaching sensor and subject to any vignetting / dust shadows. Flat calibration should work regardless if one is shooting clouds or clear skies and there should be no vignetting and dust shadows visible in the calibrated sub. Perhaps uneven background but not vignetted.

7 minutes ago, RolandKol said:

Problem hides in the Lights.... Cloud came in....

half of them should be deleted before stacking....

Are we talking about same set of subs posted earlier?

How do you explain my calibration with single sub and the fact that central part is over corrected while edges are under corrected?

30 minutes ago, dannybgoode said:

This is interesting stuff and my apologies for confusing the terms. A little knowledge and am that   

@vlaiv and others - are there any good primers/books on the more advanced and technical aspects of AP; the subject of SNR, well depth, gain iro of CMOS etc?

I have pretty much got to grips with the ‘physical’ side of AP; actually getting there whole thing set up and imaging and am keen to gain a better grounding in the technical theory behind it all. 
 

I can't really recommend a good book on all of that, but I don't think it would require a whole book to put all there is to it either.

I learned all I know by reading articles online and applying some logic to it all - what counts for signal level how is it related to noise, how telescopes work (focuses all incoming parallel light rays to a "single point"), etc ...

Here are some guidelines for deeper understanding of it all:

- understand two main types of noise: Gaussian and Poisson

- understand four main sources of noise: read noise, dark noise, lp noise and shot noise (first one is gaussian others are poisson distributions)

- figure out formulas for sampling (focal length / pixel size stuff)

- understand how and why stacking improves SNR.

And after that just think about how things vary and what you can do with them

1 hour ago, Marmo720 said:

Thank you - helpful advise and appreciate the support.

I will do the flats/bias and share so we can work through them.

Based on the last part then, is it ideal then for the histogram for lights and flats to be in similar position? Or at least not too far apart to result in over/under correction without the use of large number of flats? I guess going further, I am imaging from bortle 8 location so at some point I would need to maximise my sub duration/iso settings so will be interesting to know where the light histograms should be? Around 80% to maximise SNR without clipping? I have guiding so I could technically do 5 min subs but without LP filter, I am easily pushing the histogram too far to the right even at ISO800 and sub lengths of 3mins. 

For reference, the images I attached have the histogram for the lights at about 50-60% while the flats are around 30% although I am not so sure on the flats reading as they took 10-30 seconds to capture. Both taken at ISO800 and lights duration is 60 seconds.

 

While you can apply similar logic to lights as to flats - there are differences which in practice prevent you to do so.

For lights you also want as large signal as you can get in single sub within certain we could say constraints. Flats light is way too brighter than stuff that we image and it is really easy to achieve 75% or above of histogram. With lights it is much easier to go the other way around - gather as much subs as possible then it is to push histogram past 75% or so - as that would require multiple hours for single exposure - maybe one would not even manage to do it in a single night.

There is rule that will help you with understanding relationship between best SNR possible and sub duration and light pollution, but that requires you to know things about your camera - namely it's read noise and gain factor.

What is always true is following - fewer longer subs will be better than more shorter subs - totaling to same imaging time (it's better to have x12 5 minute subs than x60 1 minute subs - both total 1h or imaging time). This is true always, but how much difference there will be - depends on read noise of the camera and light pollution, or rather other noise sources. Once any of other noise sources "swamps" read noise (is higher in intensity about x4-5) there will be minimal difference in end result. This is why you can use shorter subs in higher light pollution - as there will be no difference (visible) to using longer subs (shorter up to a point - there is always that point of diminishing returns). You need to know specs of your camera (not something that is readily available for DSLRs unlike dedicated astro cameras) in order to calculate optimum exposure length for your conditions.

In absence of solid numbers, there is simple way to determine your exposure - expose for "reasonable" amount of time so that your guiding works well (there are no signs of star trailing and stars are round and tight), you gather enough subs for your imaging time - advanced stacking algorithms require some amount of data - they work better if you feed them 20, 30 or 50 subs as opposed to 2, 3 or 5 subs, and be careful about wasted data - if there is wind gust or cable snag or passing airplane or anything happens to make you throw away your data - it's better to throw away 1 minute of imaging than it is to throw away 20 minutes of imaging.

For this reason - pick exposure times in range of 2-3 minutes (1 minute is ok, 4 minutes is ok - as long as it is "reasonable" amount of time in above sense).

1 hour ago, joe aguiar said:

yes cause the maks 1250mm fl ON a 90mm is long on a 10" scopes its short

1250/90 =13.8 focal ratio equals slow and narrow fov

on a 10"scope that's 1250/250=f5 which is fast and wide field views

Here is comparison of field of view between 8" F/6 with 32mm Plossl and 90mm heritage virtuoso with 32mm Plossl - virtually same field of view.

So how can one be wide field and other narrow field when both give same field of view?

Field of view depends on apparent field of view of eyepiece and magnification used. Magnification depends on focal length of scope and eyepiece. There is no scope aperture in that equation and indeed both scopes of same focal length give same field of view with same EP regardless of their speed and aperture.

16 minutes ago, DaveS said:

This was 2 mins with an f/10 'scope

And then people go around saying - don't use that scope for AP, it is F/10 and therefore slow

20 minutes ago, joe aguiar said:

But with the mak being slow telescope long FL high power narrow fov, it will be harder for new people to find items in it.

Interesting thing is that for 8" F/6 scope or 6" F/8 scope no one is saying it is high power narrow FOV scope - and most will qualify those scopes as ideal scopes for serious beginner - ones that can turn into life long instrument, but telescope with same focal length (ok, not the same but 50mm longer 1200mm vs 1250mm) is suddenly long focal length / high power / narrow FOV scope?

57 minutes ago, joe aguiar said:

It would be fast compared to a scope that's 32 inch f10 let's say.

And we always still use fast and slow term still to describe if a scope is short or long.

That scope being fast at f2.8 is also low power wide field making it fast for the pic, if it was f10 it be much higher power and closer view and more narrow making that image much longer to take.

Yes oringinal use was for camera but we still use fast and slow to tell us if it's short medium  or long. U cant just go by focal length alone cause as different scopes and sizes focal ratio will be different 

Joejaguar 

No, please, don't perpetuate that slow/fast scope - longer/sorter time to take the image thing as it is not true.

It just creates confusion, as a person can come and think, "look I have F/5 scope - that is supposed to be fast, and if another person with their F/8 scope can take certain image in 2h, I should surely be able to take it in less than 2h" - but that might not be the case, and people will have a wrong idea why they are failing to meet "fast scope expected exposure time".

7 minutes ago, Marmo720 said:

Thanks for the advise. I will try this. Just to check:

- The idea is to stack flat1 and flat2 in DSS where flat1 is input as a light sub and flat2 is used as a flat sub? So the DSS process will subtract the two and result in uniform sub? Of course using Bias as well as suggested. 

- How do I view the histograms you shared? I have been using the histogram in APT and you said the split between the peaks is correct but the location of the entire histogram should be to the right about 3/4? I have noticed this is the case if I take brighter flats so just want to check that increasing the brightness of the lightbox so that the histogram in APT is about 3/4 of the way from the left is going to be correct? Or have I misunderstood? I read a few places the histogram in APT should be 1/3 from the left so just checking.

Many thanks again.

 

Maybe it would be best to first just take flats and then we can see how to best test them. I would personally use ImageJ to do all processing and testing. You can use that also - it is free software used for scientific image manipulation and it's written in Java, which means that it will work on almost any computer / operating system. Once you have your flats and bias, I'll walk you thru the procedure how to do various things with them - like check histogram, do statistical analysis (mean value, min/max and such sort of things) and how to do image math (calibrate them, stack them, etc) ....

You will need one more piece of software (also free) - FitsWork. That one is used to convert DSLR raw files into fits that can be then used in ImageJ.

As for lights and histogram position - it is down to two things:

1. linearity of sensor

Here you want to ensure that there is no clipping left / right (low or high values - all three peaks present and looking nice in histogram). There is also concern about linearity of sensor response - it can happen that sensitivity depends on signal level (or rather gathered signal so far). Which means that doubling of amount of light, or doubling exposure length does not produce twice as high recorded signal (ADU level). This is bad thing for calibration and needs to be addressed in certain way. I think that nowadays pretty much no sensors that we use in AP behave that way, but "most linear" region was around 2/3-3/4 back then when it happened. In fact saturation and anti blooming gates cause non linearity in modern sensors - but we consider them to be "clipping" to the right.

2. Minimizing noise impact.

Once you are nice linear region and that part is covered - well, you want to have the least noise in your flats as possible - that is why we take more than one flat as stacking them reduces their noise. This noise will end up being injected back in the image in a certain way so you want to minimize it. There is two ways of minimizing the noise:

1. stack more subs

2. make sure SNR of subs is high to begin with - this part relates to histogram position. SNR is signal to noise ratio or signal/noise. If we want it to be high - we want our signal to be strong. Stronger signal is right on histogram or higher value of pixels (so closer to 1 but not too close as it will star saturating - that is why 80-85% is often mentioned).

bottom line - you can use histogram at even 5% but make sure you have enough flat subs to stack to minimize noise coming from subs.

18 minutes ago, Marmo720 said:

I didn't realise a single flat fielding would show the impact so much so I could spend the next clear night just checking my sub/lights/darks/bias using single files before wasting another evening of lights that I can't make use of.

In fact you can do full calibration with single sub of each - one light, one dark, one flat and one flat dark.

The only reason we use multiple of each is to reduce noise, but if you are looking at general artifacts in the image - like background illumination and flat correction - you can improve signal to noise ratio in another way - you can bin image. I think I used bin factor of something like x10 on above image. Image will be tiny and massive amount of details will be lost - but we don't care for such details in the image to diagnose flat issues.

20 minutes ago, Marmo720 said:

There wasn't any change between lights/flats besides moving the scope to better position for the flats. Don't think there was any focus shift as I followed up the M31 Flats with M42 lights and they also have the same issue.

Ok, then focus position is not the problem here.

21 minutes ago, Marmo720 said:

I don't currently have any dew heaters and my original thought was maybe dew had covered centre part of the scope lens but I would think that would be obvious from lights and flats? Is this something could explain my images? 

No, I don't think it can be issue with flats. You can check this with your scope - add central obstruction, but in principle many people provide proof or that on daily basis -  scope with central obstruction acts as if frost is blocking light in central part of the lens (in fact being more severe - as it is 100% light blockage).  Central obstruction or in fact any obstruction before light is bent has no effect on field illumination (that is not strictly true - there are cases where level of obstruction depends on incidence angle - like with very long dew shield that will act as aperture stop at angles).

What can happen on the other hand would be dewing up corrector lens or dslr sensor (or frosting up) - any chance that happened? I mean it's a long shot since it is closed system once everything is screwed together so absolute humidity does not change, but it can happen if it was particularly humid and quite a bit warmer when you put your gear together and it cooled considerably during the night?

I highly doubt it is sensor (as it is not actively cooled), but could be corrector lens (field flattener)

We can test that theory - central blockage of corrector by dew/frost. I need to be careful about this one as it is easy to mix up things, so I'll write down everything to be corrected if I make mistake.

Flat correction = light / flat

In center we have over correction (look at that bright dust shadow) and in outer parts we have under correction - which means

center - higher value

edge - lower value

light / flat = higher value can happen if light has higher value, or flat has lower value

light / flat = lower value can happen if light has lower value or flat has higher value.

I don't think it is this either. Central blockage would cause over correction in the center but it would not cause under correction at the edges (it can't boost flat value or reduce light value).

37 minutes ago, Marmo720 said:

Forecast is clear skies after midnight on Christmas Eve so maybe I will get a gift from Santa and I can have clear images too  

I think there is something that you can try without a clear night as it just involves flats.

Try flat-flat calibration to rule out flat settings as culprit for the problem.

This would mean that you take bias subs (you can do just one or couple - number does not matter here except for reducing noise), at each ISO setting that you will test. Test with at least two different ISO settings.

For each ISO setting - shoot 2-3 different "type" of flats (where type here only means exposure length / strength of flat panel). Aim to have proper histogram each time (no clipping either to left or right) - as you did with above flats, but have different position on histogram each time - around 20-30% around 50-60% and proper one at around 80-85% for highest peak.

Each of these flats should calibrate others (once bias is removed) - meaning that you take any two flats - flat1 and flat2 and divide them, you should end up with perfectly uniform illuminated sub (no vignetting / no dust shadows to be seen).

If this happens and each flat calibrates others - you can be 100% sure that your flats are working as they should - then we need to look elsewhere for the source of the issue.

Don't know if I can answer, but I can sure add to confusion

How about 183mono?

It has pixel size of 178mm, but the size of 174mm (or even a bit more), it will fit whole disc and people use it for DSO imaging

Please don't use fast and slow in astro photographic context to specify any sort of "speed" of capturing an image - as it is very misguiding and often wrong.

Term has significance in both visual and photographic use as has been described, but its use to denote photographic speed comes from domain of daytime photography and lens operation (on a single camera where there is plenty of light and single exposure is taken).

Comparing two scope in astro photographic domain by F/ratio and concluding that one will create image faster - is simply not true. F/10 scope can be faster than F/5 scope, and in here faster means - less time spent to make an image of equal SNR.

Btw, to address original question, In my view 6/9 so less than F/6 is fast, F/6 to F/9 is medium and above F/9 is slow scope.

46 minutes ago, lux eterna said:

I use the Toshiba remote for this, the bottom IR remote, very small and handy to use, is intended for my current project which is a very small and portable imaging rig. Both remotes can be found on Ebay.

Besides a few led´s, the Arduino also has some audio feedback via a buzzer, so I know what it does.

I was looking at this but always "objected" the fact that it is IR type remote and thought that I would need to point it towards the scope / mount for some reason, but you are quite right.

Arduino with WIFI and simple IR detector (there is plenty of tutorials for that online) can pick up remote commands and translate those into UDP packets sent over wifi to command the mount!

Excellent idea!