Anthonyexmouth

I'll give it a go later. What I didn't want is NINA changing the exposure length. I want to change the brighness of my panel so I can easily have 2.5s flats and matching flat darks. 

I just bought a new printer for some home prints. An Epson XP-15000 to replace my dead printer. I bought this so I could make some half decent prints and in the process ended up buying a use Spyder 5 Pro too to calibrate my monitor. Now the results are 100% sRGB but only 78% AdobeRGB. Now I know nothing about printing, is this going to cause me any headaches printing images? I am not looking at spending more money on some fancy shmancy pro photo editing monitor. Just looking for some pointers to avoid any issues I might come across and hopefully not waste too much of this expensive paper. 

43 minutes ago, scotty38 said:

How do you have the minimum brightness set? I have seen this issue come up when it's set to 0, might be worth a try changing if it is.

I'm running it as sky flats as I manually adjust my homemade flat panel. 

I keep getting an error when doing flats with the wizard. I adjust my panel as requested and it seems every time I get to the right brightness it throws up a "Matrix is singular" error. I end up just using the sequencer but wondering if anyone else gets this or has any idea what's causing it. 

3 minutes ago, CraigT82 said:

Yes this garage at our new house is single skin brick with tiled roof, just like our old garage, but whereas our old garage had roof vents and no condensation issue, the new one is practically air tight... no vents anywhere.  I've just this week installed 4 air bricks just above the DPC and also a bunch of circular vents in the uPVC soffits so that should ensure a good flow of air now 🤞.  I've also got some Thomson water seal to spray onto the exterior brickwork to prevent damp getting through the wall after heavy rain.

FLO are looking at the mount right now and hopefully there isn't any other damage caused.  All the electrics worked ok and the Dec axis moved freely after the RA seized up, so i'm hoping it's just the RA bearing that needs replaced.

They ain't the best bearings anyway. There ok and they do the job but swapping out to good skf or similar makes them run silky smooth. Mine has been under BBQ covers for 5-6 yrs 365 days a year, even through storms and only issue I have is the powder coating on the counter weights. I'm a mile from the coast too. 

1 hour ago, CraigT82 said:

Wherever you end up keep it make sure it’s well ventilated and not at risk of any condensation forming on it.  I’ve just had an issue with my AZEQ6 due to being stored in the garage at our new house, which I found out (too late) to my dismay was a condensation factory, as it is completed unventilated, once I knew this I moved the mount into the house but it was too late as moisture had already gotten inside. After a short period of the mount not being used I came to try it out to find the RA axis locked solid. The moisture has found its way into the RA bearing and rusted it to the point it wouldn’t move. 
 

Moral of the story is: if you keep your kit in a shed or garage make sure it’s dry and well ventilated to avoid condensation

Garages can be a nightmare for condensation. 

Guess you had a good excuse to to a bearing upgrade. Was everything else ok inside? 

Keep it setup under BBQ covers. 

8 minutes ago, ollypenrice said:

I'd start by thinking about image scale. You may find it difficult to get beyond about 1.5 arcseconds per pixel when it comes to finding real detail. You can certainly get decent galaxy results at that and you need a guide RMS of about half that. 0.75"RMS should not be too difficult.

Next, you want as much light as possible at that image scale, which means aperture, but it must be within range of what your mount can carry. 

Basically, I'd focus on those numbers, image scale and aperture.

Olly

a 1.5x barlow would give me 1.2 ratio and I normally guide between .65 and 1 depending on seeing. 

I just tend to avoid galaxy season because i'm never that happy with my results, although this is the first year with my triplet so maybe they'll look nicer anyway. 

2 hours ago, Clarkey said:

Definitely.  I have the Rising Cam version of the 2600 and use it at a number of FL's. Yes, there is a theoretical sweet spot, but there are a lot of other things that will impact the quality of your images long before the pixel scale starts to come into play.

How are you getting on with the rising cam? I've always had ZWO cameras, mainly because FLO is just a few miles from me and can cycle to pick up kit. But seeing as the Altair version and RC versions are so dramatically cheaper I can't justify what is £800 extra  for the tilt plate on the ZWO version and am I right in thinking the Rising Cam is the same as the AA one?

Ok, so I want to get a bit closer to the galaxies this year but don't really want to spend a lot to do it.

Is

1. getting a cheapish barlow for my 90mm triplet a good idea? 

2. Use my uncooled 290mc instead of my 294mc

3. try and find a used 6" RC scope 

4. Something else. 

1 hour ago, dark knight said:

Thnx for advice folks, I've now ordered a Mele Quieter 2 windows based mini pc. To be honest I'm really looking forwards to using Nina again, just going to have to remember how to set everything up again and what software for plate solving etc. 

I run the quieter 3 on my pier. It's so nice having Nina and stellarium running on it and it maps to my nas so when it shuts down at dawn all the images are on the nas for processing. One tip, download the os image from mele and load it into an nvme drive. Works so much better. 

3 minutes ago, wimvb said:

Can it be dew? Just wondering since it showed up after a certain time.

Maybe I guess. Pretty well setup for dew bands and just leave them on all the time. 

9 minutes ago, Ratlet said:

I usually do the same troubleshooting for weird artifacts, blink through the subs to make sure there aren't any dodgy ones, maybe some cloud or a light shining on part of one of the images.  If that's good stack the lights on their own, then add darks, then bias and flats.  Most of the time I get trippy results it's either a dodgy sub or a dodgy dark/flat.

The artifact is faintly in all subs for the Leo triplet but not in the flaming star that was in the sequence before. Never seen it before. It was in the sequence from 1am to 4am . Maybe a neighbour light but unlikely. Just one of those weird things I guess. 

Set NINA off to do it's thing last night. First target the Flaming Star and then at 01:00 the Leo Triplet. The triplet stack and barely visible in the subs has this weird glow pattern on the right with a bit of a whippy tail thing and funny arch artifacts. All streetlamps were off at that time. I wasn't up so can't know for sure what it was but does anyone else have any idea? I can't see the arches in the Flaming Star image or subs. 

Here's a double nuked screen grab from Pixinsight. 

ok, so i had a play this morning and using the drop down works. Any idea where WPBB stores the master flats it creates fo I can rename them for easy selection? Also, after that in post calibration it still seems to insist on stacking the lights in separate bundles. Now of course I need then separate for calibration but after that I want them processed into a single stack. 

Any ideas? 

Guessing it's something simple but I'm missing it. 

2 minutes ago, scotty38 said:

Yes you can pick whichever is in the list. Click on the dropdown and all the loaded flats will be there to choose from.

 Cool. I'll have to sort out a naming convention for my flats and maybe add something to Nina so I know which flats to choose. 

26 minutes ago, scotty38 said:

You can use keywords if you wish but maybe the easiest way is to select as below. Select the light and then pick the flat you want in the Calibration Settings box.

So you can manually set the flats?

Am I right in thinking there's a way to make WBPP assign different flats to different nights lights via the grouping? If so can anyone point me to a tutorial. To be clear, the flats aren't necessarily taken on the same night as the lights as I tend to only take sporadic flats due to permeant setup and zero shifting of image train. 

11 minutes ago, Stuart1971 said:

You will get much better results if you set the PSF, rather than the auto setting….

Didn't quite understand the docs when i read them. Maybe I'll have yet another read through. 

2 minutes ago, vlaiv said:

Ok, so if I understand correctly now - you have old sessions without flats but with stacked data and with separate subs (which are sort of useless now that you don't have flats, right?), and you wonder if it would be good idea to use those stacked masters with your current data.

Well, I'd say it is very easy to try out. It would be better to stack all the data in one stack - but since you are lacking flats - that is a no go.

Take your current stacked dataset, and perform following:

1. keep one copy of just new data

2. make mix of old and new data in 1:1 ratio

3. make mix of old and new data in several more varying ratios - based on say total imaging time or "perceived" quality - maybe even let software determine weights.

Then simply compare results and select one that looks the best?

Next period of bad weather I'll sit down and do that. 

What I should do is get into the habit of copying the current flats into the session folder and then learning how the grouping works in Pixinsight so I can stack multi nights and it uses the correct flats for the correct night. I think thats possible anyway. 

1 minute ago, vlaiv said:

I'm sort of confused about what you are actually asking.

Will throw out some thoughts that I think might be applicable, so let me know if I got it right:

- stacking flats from multiple sessions to produce super master does not make a sense since flats are per session calibration files. Unless you can guarantee that your setup did not change between sessions (like observatory pier without taking apart things and with precise repeatable electronic focuser) - you should not do it as dust particles and vignetting won't align.

- stacking darks from multiple sessions is totally doable and, while it will suffer from same things described above - in principle it should not matter as darks tend to have very uniform signal (if cooled to same temperature and having well behaved sensor). My only advice would be to weight final stack of stacks according to number of subs each have. Say that you want to stack one stack made out of 10 subs and another made out of 40 subs. Final stack should be (first * 10 + second * 30)/40. It's a bit like "undoing" initial averages, summing things up and doing global average.

- lights behave as described above and I would avoid making stack of stacks if at all possible.

Ok, let me try and explain better. 

1. I'm rubbish at file organisation. 

2. I have lots of old historic data 4+ hour in each session thats been stacked but still have the subs but no linked flats.

Is it worth stacking those stacked masters?

going forward I'd like to think I'll be better with the flats but as I've got a permanent setup I don't do flats for every session, more like bi-monthly, maybe If I bought one of the deep sky dad flat panels to integrate into NINA I might but too expensive at present. 

2 minutes ago, bomberbaz said:

You have got me thinking now!

I'll set it going again tonight before I go to bed and see if it replicates overnight. It should otherwise there could be something awry.

I could be wrong but I think your RAM is probably your bottleneck. I've got 64gb, would have had more but I built a nice little mITX box. 

2 minutes ago, bomberbaz said:

You have a look at the read and write times of the Nvme vs HDD and the differentials then the time taken becomes a little easier to take in. 

Anyway, like I said I switched back to the nvme drive for processing and may add another yet. 

I'm kinda comparing to my setup where I'm using a 15yr old NAS with spinning drives over WiFi and still not getting anything like those times. 

I tried the trial of BlurXterminator a while ago and was impressed, recently shelled out for it and trying it now I'm not sure if I'm doing something wrong. I only seem to be able to achieve star reduction. 

Here, forgot to stretch them, can do that if anyone wants stretched versions. 

3 minutes ago, vlaiv said:

Depends on stacking method and number of subs in batches.

Look at this for example:

1,2,3,4,5 - average of that is 3 right (15/5)?

Take first two - average is 1.5, take second three - average is 4 - average those two and you get 5.5 / 2 = 2.75

2.75 != 3

Similar thing happens with noise and you get different SNR depending on the way you stack - not to mention sigma clip or quality weighing - that work differently depending on what is being stacked, so sub that is low quality might end up in partial stack (because "surrounding" subs are lesser quality as well so it does not look too poor) while it might get discarded if we stack all together (too low quality compared to average of all stacks).

 

What i'm thinking of is my older data where I haven't saved the flats or can identify what flats go with the subs. I have the masters created in WBPP. So what I'm really asking is, does stacking the masters of historic data compare to stacking all the subs over multiple sessions produce the same super master.