Midnight_lightning

Thanks pipnina, my office is only 4ft x 4 ft I have purchased an MSI MAG274QRX, only had it half an hour but it seems ok so far, some edge bleeding but I think its fairly minor (I don't really have much to compare it to), the glo is worse than expected but I don't think it will be noticeable in use. Other turning brightness down to 30% I haven't changed any settings yet and I will calibrate it when I work out how. Fingers crossed!

Firstly thanks for your very helpful response, apologies for slow reply, only just saw it. I'm not sure what mastering in HDR would involve so sounds like I don't need it, particularly if stars could cause issues. Most of the monitors I am looking at provide sketchy details about colour depth - usually the just say 10bit. Then reviews will often say its 8bit+FRC and only works up to 120hz and only in HDR. I feel really out of my depth with this, I do like to print Images and have a library of Tiff's many of which are 300MB+. That said I only use sRGB even for printing, Adobe RGB sounds a bit scary. But if processing in 10 bits would make a noticeable difference to prints it is important to me. I can't go 4k unfortunately, I would need a better GPU and also viewing distances wouldn't be ideal. I am looking at monitors like: Gigabyte M27Q X 27" QHD MSI Optix MAG274QRF-QD MAG274QRX Asus ROG SWIFT PG279QM I think some of these use Quantum Dot, I will check. There are also some nice Acer screens such as Acer Nitro XV272U Kvbmiiprzx but I am ruling these out as when using VRR they lock overdrive to "Normal" which produces ghosting at 60hz and I expect my gaming will be in the 60hz to 140 hz region. In terms of budget I was looking around £400 but I would go up to £1000 if it made a big enough difference - A big part of my problem is not really knowing what I need to optimise the AP side of things - pretty much any of these monitors is fine for gaming.

I want to buy a 27" 1440p gaming monitor that will also be good for Pixinsight processing. Finding something for gaming is easy but when I really think about it I don't know what I need for astro processing. I can find any number of IPS monitors with wide gamut but IPS seems to typically have poor black consistency, contrast and HDR. Then there is the choice of colour bit depth - 8bit, 10 bit or 8bit +FRC. Very hard to see what bit depth gaming monitors have, many claim 10 bit in HDR mode but reviews suggest they are only 8+FRC - does it matter? Basically I have spent a week reading reviews and ended up being put off every single one of them for one reason or another - I am going mad 🤣 I would be grateful for any guidance on what is needed for PI. What do you use, how good is it? Do I need a HDR1000 mini IPS or is this just wasting ££'s ?

Thanks Steve, that looks really helpful, will spend some time going through it all. I spotted another issue, not sure if its connected to the woes above, but using SGP if I take a short 1x1 Frame and Focus shot (Scope Cap On) I get a nice smooth image. If I do the same at 4x4 the image has horizontal lines and some vertical banding. I have tried a wide range of USB Traffic settings and they don't make any difference. Also, I don't get this issue in Sharpcap or EZ_cap. If anyone has come across this please let me know.

I did see that thread but thanks for raising it. I have gone through power settings on the laptop and USB controllers but will have another look. I haven't checked BIOS so that is worth a look. Not part of the current issues but I have on a couple of occasions been imaging fine for several hours and then suddenly had lots of issues, which could be indicative of the point you make above. The last time this happened the EFW driver got corrupted - took me hours to work out and only fixed by reinstalling the driver - again , maybe pointing to laptop issue?

Thanks David. I have wondered about my Laptop, its a Dell XPS and the best, most powerful, laptop I have owned but I cant be sure its not implicated. I have an old, underpowered, lap top and will try using that and see if it makes a difference.

When you say "HC connection" are you referring to a USB cable connected to the handset or the handset port on the mount?

I have been having gremlins for the past couple of months, devices disconnecting, camera won't work, Polemaster/PHD locks up etc etc and have been trying to get to the bottom of it. I suspected my USB hub and poor cabling so got a Pegasus Power Box ultimate (UPB) to allow a tidy up. I have been migrating devices to the UPB over the past week and testing. Last night I had major issues with the mount and COM ports - still on the old hub at this point. EQMOD kept crashing and seemed to be causing PHD/SGP/Polemaster to lock up (when I closed EQMOD PHD and SGP came back). I found that EQMOD couldn't find the port that the FTDI cable was using, as shown in Device Manager, and nothing I tried would fix it, including a dozen reboots and trying different USB ports and the UPB. I wondered whether the FTDI cable was faulty and tried a direct connection to a different laptop and it suddenly worked fine. So knowing the cable was OK I connected back to the UPV and my original laptop and it all worked fine. It wasn't a great imaging night, too much cloud around, but I lost the whole session and am worried this will happen again. I have no idea what the root cause of the issue was or why it suddenly started working. Does anyone have any thoughts on this, and perhaps a process for debugging and fixing COM port issues. Finally, my mount is an EQ6 R Pro with a USB port. I haven't managed to find any information about this on the Sky Watcher site but have seen some threads that suggest this port can be used with a standard USB-B to USB-A cable. Does anyone have any experience of using this port?

Just been testing my new Pegasus Powerbox Ultimate and thought I would post my approach to a mounting solution. The PB is a nice, but insanely expensive, unit and when it came to having to pay another £35 for the official mounting angles I baulked at it. So, I made a cradle from scrap plywood to allow me to mount the unit directly on the OTA. Two bits of Aluminium angle left over from my greenhouse were used to mount the unit to the cradle (suitable aluminium can be bought for a couple of quid from the likes of Screwfix). The mounting is then held in place on the OTA with a non-slip Velcro packing band (Amazon). It took around 2.5 hours to make and cost a couple of quid. This approach allows plenty of movement to facilitate balancing and in my case is particularly useful in helping to offset the asymmetrical balance on my Dec caused by my EFW and Focus motor – something which has so far made it impossible to balance my mount in all planes and angles at the same time. Hope someone finds it useful. My next mini-project is to build a “third-axis” counter weight from scrap plywood, screw rod and 2” washers.

Thanks for the detailed reply. My scope is 926mm f6.8 so with the full frame QHY600 the moon will Only fill a tiny proportion of the sensor. I will look at sharp cap.

I have only used my QHY600L for deep sky but would like to get some lunar shots. I could take a standard approach and use SGP to take lots of subs and then stack but I am wondering if there is a better approach. I have read a bit about lucky imaging using video but download times for single shots are 7 seconds full frame so not sure if it is an option - perhaps it is possible to only use part of the frame to make video run? Any suggestions for how to approach lunar imaging with this camera?

Sorted. I just installed everything that could be of use and kept all items ticked regarding existing drivers. The 4 pin EFW driver seems to now be included in one of the other drivers where it used to be a separate item. I couldn't initially connect to the camera despite rebooting and reconnecting cables but for some reason once I went into the driver information and changed the gain and other settings it started working. Not sure what it was that caused the issue.

I am struggling to load drivers for my QHY 600 and filter wheel using the all in one pack. I have watched the official video and it seems to be out of date and generally not helpful, particularly wrt installing the 4 pin driver for the filter wheel which is no longer an option in the installation process. does anyone have any instructions or advice in installing the 4 pin driver etc?

A smart plug solution would work fine, just wondered what others were using. Scripts - sounds useful, do you know if this would also allow SGP to disconnect all equipment before shutting down PC - is it necessary to disconnect equipment or is it ok just to turn PC off?