geoflewis

I considered both the TV Panoptic 41mm & Vixen LVW 42mm, but after asking around purchased the Explore Scientific 68 40mm (ES 68/40) last year and have been very pleased with it for wider FOV with my C14 at F11. It gives me stunning views of M42 which just about fully fits the FOV, which was main reason for purchasing it.

Geof

A very nice image Emil and over 20 hours for your 1st NB image - impressive..!! I don't think I could wait that long to see how it turned out - actually I don't think I've ever shot that long for any image, but then other than Ha for enhanced red in RGB I don't shoot NB.

Geof

A superb image Alex.

Geof

Ditto here and I just have my rear lawn a high cut as it’s been growing away the last week or so - earliest I’ve cut the lawns in many a year, as normally end of March for the first cut....

Thats looking SW, an horizon that’s improved since my neighbours very tall willow tree came down in the high winds 2-3 weeks ago ??

3 minutes ago, Ags said:

My skies are Bortle 7 according to the site, which would mean M31 would be possible naked eye, which hasn't been my experience.

I think that M31 would be very challenging from a Bortle 7 sky - maybe just visible with AV when fully dark adapted and with excellent transparency, but I wouldn’t hold my breath....

Here's mine...

.....though my iPhone DSM app has given several readings better than SQM 21.3, so potentially Bortle 3 (21.3-21.5), but then the iPhone app is likely not reliable.

Cheers, Geof

Hi Leon,

I used to be a member of Farnham Astro (http://www.farnham-as.co.uk/) until I moved to Norfolk a couple of years ago. They are a great bunch and I have no hesitation recommending them. They meet at Aldershot Cricket Club and during the Fall/Winter months try to get out for observing once per month at Alice Holt Forest with whom they have a specifc arrangement.

Cheers, Geof

20 minutes ago, Jbro1985 said:

I didn't realise there was an option to not guide through autofocus - I'll have a look for that in SGP (or do you mean to manually do this?).

Look at settings in control panel - 2nd item under other options on right side of the panel (screen shot is from autoguide section of SGP manual)...

29 minutes ago, Toxophilus said:

If the filters are not particularly par-focal then the focus may be so far off that PHD2 is not able to select an appropriate guide star or it can but the seeing was pushing the star mass out too much or it was loosing it all together. This would be apparent for just viewing the screen and your stars would be obviously out of focus or really faint. 

What I suspect is more likely is that as the SII filter is so strong it needs longer exposures to get sufficient data to calculate the focus on. If PHD fails to obtain focus on its initial run it pushes the focus even further to try to find focus at a different range of values. This can push the focus out sufficiently for PHD to give up as it has lost the star.

I agree with Mark. I don't have PHDLogviewer on this laptop, but just opening the log in a text viewer shows that the last dozen or so lines were PHD2 reporting lost star due to change in star mass and low SNR. I also suspect that is due to SGP's autofocus routine taking the guide camera too far out of focus for PHD2 to hang on to the guide star. Mark's suggestion to pause PHD2 during autofocus runs sounds like a good option worth trying.

Good luck, Geof

2 hours ago, swag72 said:

Such a massive difference ......... Clearly a very beneficial addition to your imaging software  

Thanks Sara, I thought so too, but I wasn't sure if I was just convincing myself into justifying the expenditure.... ?

2 hours ago, jock1958 said:

Fantastic images Geof, looks like you've opened a box of sparkling jewels ?

Many thanks, that's a very nice way to think of them. That said the amount I've spent on this hobby I could indeed have purchased a very large box of sparkling jewels - just don't let my wife read this....??

1 hour ago, MikeODay said:

Lovely images Geof.  Thanks for sharing.

Thanks Mike

14 minutes ago, groberts said:

Thanks Geof, again that's very helpful. 

Sounds like we're on a similar journey as I moved to mono + filters at the beginning of last year with a ZWO1600MM-Cool camera.  I am in general quite adept with a DSLR camera and now it's processing requirements in astrophotography but have been surprised at the difference with the new - hitherto unkown - challenges with the mono camera, of course, ultimately with it's benefits too!          

Graham

14 minutes ago, Hallingskies said:

I have exactly the same problem with alignment of colour stacks and have also contemplated going down the Registar route.  I do wonder what the root causes are.  I manually refocus between filter changes (and the filter wheel is also manual) so I am motorising both to see if that eliminates image shift.  I also wonder if the slightly imperfect colour correction of my old Vixen refractor is having an effect as well.  I use the image registration feature in Astroart to align my stacked channels; sometimes this is quite effective, other times, not so.  If all else fails, it could well be Registar for me as well.  Your results look quite unequivocal.

Hi both,

I've been aware of Registar for about 5 years, with some folks on the ImagesPlus user forum swearing by it even for DSLR stacking, but especially for combining data from mutiple imaging rigs, e.g. to add higher resoltion data for the main features in a widefied image such as M81 & M82. The annoyance of 'nearly but not quite' channel alignment with mono LRGB channels finally got the better of my astro pockets....!! ??. Given that I've got literally £'000s tied up in astro equipment and based on the 2 images I've reprocessed so far, I'm confident that the additional £140 will prove to be a wise investment.

Geof

41 minutes ago, groberts said:

Thanks Geoff, that's very interesting.  Like you I've seen the recommendations from others in favour of Registar but thought (a) what can be so wrong with DSS which I currently use and (b) the price.  I wonder if you have processed the image processed with another method whatever that is and what does it look like for comparison? Furthermore, what is your post processing - Photoshop?

Glad everything else worked well for you. I also bought the Lodestar X2 for guiding just over a year ago and am very impressed + very easy to use.

Graham

 

Thanks Graham,

Yes I too found the price of Registar off putting, plus the trial version doesn't allow you save images and the provided tutorial was poor I thought. Registar does provide a merge RGB tool, but I couldn't see how to add L to that without saving the registered images, so in the end I shelled out with all my fingers and toes crossed....!!

I did previously process the M13 without Registar, so here it is...

Honestly that one didn't turn out too bad, but I spent a lot of time shifting the RGB channels around to get to that and even then when I tried any colour saturation the misalignment showed up.

My background comes from imaging with a DSLR so channel alignment was rarely a requirement, but I've been plagued with that since I switched to mono CCD LRGB about 18 months ago. The software that I use for image processing is ImagesPlus, which handles the initial stack of raw data very well, but I find that it doesn't align the 3 or 4 LRGB channels as accurately as I'd like. It does include colour channel transform and TSR (translate, scale align) tools, but I frequently can't get them to work to my satisfaction, sometimes spending hours fiddling around. Registar just did it first time in seconds.... ?. I will still use ImagesPlus to calibrate, align and combine my raw stacks for each channel and for most of my subsequent post processing, so Registar is a fairly expensive tool just to accurately align the 3 or 4 stacked channels, though it will also allow me to accurately combine data from different FOV, so I'm looking forward to doing that down the line.

Perhaps a better comparision is my M15 image from last year, which I have also reworked using Registar yesterday, so here is a side by side....

M15 Original version

M15 Registar version

The changes are subtle I know, but I think it was worth it. I had to crop the original a bit more as I couldn't fix the star misalignment at the edge FOV, but probably the most noticible difference is in the brightest stars where the original shows them somewhat distorted where the Luminence didn't fully align with the RGB, plus I could get more colour out of the Registar aligned version. I had to blur the RGB in my original M15 before layering the luminance as many of the RGB image stars were tricolour, an annoying 'feature' of lots of my images since I switched from DSLR (OSC) to mono LRGB...!!

Perhaps I could also push the luminence stretch a bit more in the latest M15 version, but so far I'm pleased with the much easier, faster and more accurate alignment provided by Registar (despite the cost ).

I hope that helps.

Geof

I recently purchased 2 new laptops, one for observatory control and the other for image processing. I also purchased the more sensitive Lodestar X2 to replace my old original Lodestar guide camera and added Gary Jarrette's KISS guide camera focus device into the mix. Finally after many recommendations both from users here and elsewhere, I decided to buy Registar from Auriga Imaging to improve my channel alignment.

Here is the result of all that new gear and testing...

Registar has at last allowed me to get much better LRGB channel alignment producing much crisper and colourful stars without the rainbow of colours that I was always getting when viewed iunder zoom previously. This has enabled me to bring out the lovely golden/red stars that feature throughout the cluster, so Registar gets a big thumbs up from me ?. I'm glad to report that everything else worked well too, with the new obs laptop (a refurbished Dell i5 Win7) running all the astro gear perfectly. Gary's KISS focuser really made tuning the new guide camera to the main QSI583 sensor a piece of cake.

Cheers, Geof

On 20/05/2018 at 18:37, SAW said:

I have tried numerous times now to get a decent image of Jupiter with my Mak150. There must be something I am doing wrong ?

As others have said, it's mostly if not all due to seeing. The seeing from my location on the night of 6/7 May was extraordinary, so it looks like you caught some of that on 7th May, but for me most of the nights prior to and since then have been very poor indeed. I've posted my best image from 6 May elsewhere on SGL, but have included it again along with my poor 'best of the rest' since then taken 15 May to show what a difference it makes.

The same permanently mounted well collimated and cooled scope/camera combination, shooting mono RGB-RGB-RGB sequences stacked in AS3! wavelets in Registax6, derotated in WinJupos. Seeing is everything and very fickle indeed from the UK, especially with Jupiter at such a low altitude, i.e. you never know when it's going to be good. Make sure your scope is well collimated and cooled and just keep trying..., though personally I haven't been trying planetary recently due to a combination of holiday and me getting back to imaging DSOs.

Good luck, Geof

On 10/04/2018 at 08:58, kirkster501 said:

Galaxy season is so far a write-off.

Ditto - I took my QSI camera off my 4" APO and swapped out the connectors/adapters, so that I could focus on galaxy close ups with my C14+Optec FF/FR for a few weeks before the run up to Jupiter oppoistion late April/ early May, but so far I haven't even been able to get my autofocus settings for the C14 calibrated, let alone take any images. I'm now thinking that its highly unlikely that I'll get any done before I switch to planetary in a couple of weeks time, so I will probably put the camera back on the 4" to shoot some of the wider field summer targets like veil, NAB for which the C14 is a no go, which of course means reconfiguring the camera/adapters again....!! Oh well, its still a fun hobby and I don't think that I've wasted too much money - though my wife has a completely different opinion on that

6 minutes ago, oobydooby said:

Look like a cheap bit of plastic to me.

....but not cheap....!!

Thanks Charl, Geof

Here's mine taken a couple of years ago with a 10" Meade that I no longer own and a DBK21AU04.AS colour camera processing just the red channel.