Adam J

I don't think that blue bloat is the issue rather a more general colour balance issue. Have you attempted to naturalise the background and align the histograms of the RGB channels? Apart from that the image detail looks good. Maybe just a tad more spacing as you say. Adam

As in the OSC camera? I don't think there is anything wrong with it as such, not sure it's the best choice for your money.

Just a HARGB test Shot of an interesting area 30min RGB per channel in 20second subs and 34min of Ha in 240second subs, this is all about getting things running smooth for when I can eventually do a imaging trip further south with the mobile rig. The thing I like about the FMA180 as opposed to most lenses at this focal lengh is that it is sufficiently sharp such as the stars do not merge into each other and for the most part are resolved as indevidual points. Although it has to be said that it fairs less well without the L3 filter. Adam

I think that the biggest issue is that I at least have never found any documentation properly explaining CCD inspector. It's like they want you to work it out yourself.

My feeling looking at the star feild is that it is close to the oIII wavelength but not an OIII filter also you can tell just by holding the filter up to a light, if it looks teal then its a OIII.

not identical the last time i looked the ascom interface has less functionality.

I think this is being over complicated you did not need to ditch the focuser. There is a stand alone Pegasus astro app (focuser setup v4.4.5) that you get from here: https://pegasusastro.com/downloads/ It will allow you to reset zero, remove motion limits, reverse the direction of movement, set limits of motion and everything else you need to do. You really don't need to be removing grub screws and should not be trying to set it up via Nina. Adam

So either 1.25inch mounted or 31mm unmounted in the 8 position wheel, you don't need 36mm.

It's a funny thing as the old Baader narrow band filters where always really reliable and although not the narrowest they had some advantages over the likes of optolong and ZWO, out of band blocking for one. It would not be good if they have removed the old filters and replaced with a less consistent offering.

It involves three factors: 1) the size of the sensor. 2) the f-ratio of the scope that you intend to use the filter with. 3) the distance of the sensor from the filter. This tool will help you. https://astronomy.tools/calculators/ccd_filter_size Remember that there is a difference between clear aperture and filter size with the clear aperture always being less. What camera and scope are we talking about here? Adam

To be honest looking at relative star brightness I think they are both OIII. The red giant star to he 2 o'clock of the central bright star would be much brighter if this was SII and not OIII.

I think that main thing i would do here is instead of stacking all the images i would use the extra images to enable stacking based on star sharpness that will likely yeald an increase in detail, if SNR is good adding more will not make things much better.

So it should be So it should be 51.8mb per file or 50586KB so with some meta data the 50673 is going to be the correct figure. No idea why the other file is larger..

Huum 50673 is closest to the mark but slightly smaller than I would have expected give the quoted number if pixels. In each. Case what's the size of the image in terms of pixels?

It's just marketing. Basically CMOS sensors have higher surface reflectivity and so benefit more from better AR coatings (which are still better on AD and chroma anyway). Hence they have attempted to improve those. The naming is simply marketing to convince you that you need to upgrade, when if you are not suffering from reflections in the first place the benefits of the wider set at least will be marginal.

No something would have to be more significantly wrong than just that as the low speed filters will still pass the centre of the light cone and so should do as well as the slower scope. Remember it's all to do with the angle of incidence on the filter and the light cone covers a range. Hence it would not be optimised but you would still expect to see something.

Yes optically I expect so. Better to get the star 71 too as it's a pain adding autofocusers to helicals.

Yes that is dust the size of the circle suggests on the filter.

Stellarmate would be the equivalent.

The 269c for me, bigger sensor bigger pixels. But honestly I would go with the ASI533mc pro over either of those choices.

To me this says that the filter is leaking something through that's in the sky flats but not emitted by the panel. So UV or IR maybe.

As discussed something seems wrong about this but I have no first hand experience with this camera or filter. I know that you can get blotchiness in the flats with this camera though. Someone must have experience of this combination.

No question in my mind that if Ha is your thing and you want something that's going to last then mono is the way to go. On a tight budget the 183mm will serve you well.

So a L3 in line with the B filter will clip it down to 430nm. I do this on my ASKAR FMA180 and it works really well, but the initial amount of blue bloat on the ASKAR FMA180 is quite a bit less than seen here on your lens. If you are thinking more about the new FMA230 then that is a unknown but it as a quad element reducer to the FMA180s tripled reducer, so my guess would be that the correction will be similar between the two. Personally if I had the cash I would be going with the Borg although even in this case and using fluorite at F3.6 i would say the correction still will not be perfect in the blue so a wide blue / lum filter would not be the best idea. look at page 2. Adam

Lol yes 3/4 is not possible unless you guessed two of them as the same moon. Conversely if you guessed they are all Callisto then you are guaranteed to get at least 1/4 correct. 😉