Adreneline

This is 20 x 180s of Ha and OIII and 12 x 180s of SII (neighbour's roof stopped me getting another eight subs of SII) taken with a Samyang 135mm / ASI1600 combination, using Astronomik 6nm NB filters, unguided on an iOptron CEM25-EC. I've cropped the image to make it square but it is essentially full width. More data would obviously be helpful and if CO is to be believed I may get some before the week is out and the moon reappears. Calibrated and integrated in APP, stretched in PI and followed by minimal noise reduction in PS. I've tried not to overcook the processing and I have also tried to stretch the three channels to exactly the same extent in an attempt to preserve the relative brightness of Ha, OIII and SII and keep the background levels the same to avoid an overall colour cast. All C&C welcome. Thanks for looking. Adrian

Welcome to the Samyang 135 clan. Great first image! Adrian

Glad you've got it nailed. Is this image cropped at all? The aspect ratio looks almost like 16:9. What was the final spacing between the sensor and the lens end plate? Was it bang on 44mm? Adrian

Just to provide a comparison I set up a Canon 70D with a 50mm, 24mm and Samyang 14mm lens in Sky Safari to compare FoV. There are plenty of online sites that allow you to do similar things. HTH

Very nice and very informative - thank you Gav! 56Mly is impressive but hats off to detecting something 2300Mly away. Thanks for sharing. Adrian

It's like trying to grasp the Holy Grail - it might be as well to give up while I can! Thank you - I've tried binning the OIII data but there was no discernible improvement. “The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating them, till they are left living with half a heart and half a lung.” Definitely better stop! Mind you I should have stopped punishing myself when I read Moby Dick as well. Once I got to the end I'm not sure I was the better for it. 🤔 Adrian

10/10 for effort and dedication above and beyond the call! Going for 10mins with the ASI1600 would be a complete waste of time with the Bortle 5 skies I have to deal with here. There is a hint of a squid lurking in both your image and mine but if you didn't know it was there I'm not sure you'd spot it. Maybe I need to take myself off to a dark sky site one night and see if that helps! - not sure there are any round here

I'm coming to the conclusion that the Samyang 135mm + ASI1600 might not be the best combination to capture the Squid nebula within the Bat Nebula (Sh2-129). This is 60 mins of Ha and SII and 180 mins of OIII (all 180s subs). I'll go for more OIII but I'm not confident I have the resolving power! There again my processing skills may be the limiting factor. Thanks for looking. Adrian

Thank you. I was surprised how much detail stacking 45 frames revealed compared with just one, especially recognising they were only 0.5s each. Adrian

Second night running NEOWISE was nicely visible in the north eastern sky, this time without a cloud in sight. This is 43 x 0.5s taken with my new Canon M6 MkII fitted with a 200mm EoS f2.8 lens; tracked manually on a regular tripod so lots of cropped edges. No calibration frames of any sort, integrated in APP, stretched in PI and tweaked in PS. The end result exceeded my expectations. Thanks for looking. Adrian

Worth waiting up until 3.00 am. A single 1.6 second exposure using a 50mm f1.8 lens on a Sony A7. Adrian

Yes it works, or certainly can be made to work. At it's simplest I use this arrangement: Absolutely no frills here. It's a ZWO ASI120MM-M and a ZWO EoS adapter in this case on the end of a Samyang 85mm. The nose piece is on the CCD with (in this case) a 7nm Ha filter fitted on the nose piece. I manually set the focus position on the lens and then carefully move the nose piece in/out to get a rough focus and then fine focus with the lens focus ring. Very manual. I can see no reason at all why you couldn't use a colour camera with a similar setup. I've used exactly the same arrangement with my 70-300mm and 200mm Canon lenses. It's rough and ready but it works. I've also attached my ASI1600MM-Pro in exactly the same way. I also use a Samyang 135mm on my ASI1600MM as my main wide field imaging setup complete with ZWO EAF and ZWO EFW all mounted on an iOptron CEM25-EC. HTH Adrian

PI does it easily with the StarAlignment process applied to you master frames. If that doesn’t work then DynamicAlignment will do the trick but with more input from you to help it identify corresponding stars in the two images. Personally I prefer to use AstroPixelProcessor - it makes combining subs from different sessions and/or different setups a breeze. It’s also amazing for mosaics. It’s like DSS on steroids! Adrian

I have previously owned a 5 position ZWO-EFW and now own an 8 position ZWO-EFW and they seem pretty light tight to me. Having said that I have always followed advice given by others on this forum and removed the camera, fitted the end cap/cover and even covered the end in tinfoil and placed it sensor down on a (ceramic) floor - in the dark! - when taking darks. I only shoot darks once (maybe twice) a year so no great hardship but understand your setup may make that option difficult. Adrian

Great image Ciarán and I love the colours you've achieved. I've been wondering about Topaz DeNoise for some time. I know it must be me doing something wrong but I find denoising in PI very variable. I currently use a version of Nik Dfine2 in PS (from when it was free to download) and find the end result much more controllable and much more pleasing on the eye. To my eyes definitely an improvement on last year's version. Thanks for sharing. Adrian

Congratulations on getting 35 hours on one target - that is some serious commitment! The result is almost 3D with a real sense of depth in the spiral arms which I like a lot. For me it is a little too colourful but that is just me preferring the slightly more pastel look. Thanks for sharing. Adrian

Hi Carole, It's not easy to answer your question, however, let's say I set up a camera with a lens and set the focus position on the lens to a little before the 'L' and adjust the spacing so that the image is in focus. If I then move the focus ring on the lens to the mid point of the 'L' I have to move the sensor away from the lens, i.e. increase the spacing, to achieve focus. This would seem to imply you need to decrease the spacing a little, probably by something as little as 0.2 mm or maybe less. Just for your information these are the focus positions for my setup of Baader filters. The numbers represent the focus position of the ZWO-EAF: If I were to set the focus at the Median position the end result for narrowband would be disappointing. The filters might be supposedly parafocal but I'm not sure the lens treats all wavelengths equally! I hope this helps. Adrian

This link appears to work for all three versions (OS, Win, Linux). The Win version works as a module from within PI. Follow the PI instructions for how to install a new module into the Process list. HTH Adrian

Indeed it is an aeroplane - at about 500 feet - never mind the belly nav lights, in daylight you can see the faces at the windows! Moving from CCD to CMOS has been a benefit for me inasmuch that I no longer try to get 300+ second exposure subs. Settling for 180s/120s has reduced my discard rate a lot. At night a certain carrier's planes can be landing at roughly 5/6 minute intervals. I don't just pray for a clear night I also pray for a westerly wind! We are indeed unique - and maybe that's how it should be. Some were getting excited about Betelgeuse going supernova a few months back with little apparent thought for any life form that event might extinguish either in it's own solar system or a close neighbour. I just hope we earn the right to travel to another star system long before we gain the ability and with what I learnt when I did my physics degree it is perhaps no bad thing that we are destined to stay right here. Right - that's enough deep thinking for today - I'm off to paint a wall. Adrian

It is frustrating but the satellites wouldn't be there had they not been approved by the US Federal Communications Commission who clearly know what is best for the whole world! Whilst we're on the topic of frustrating I set up to take a few (20) OIII subs of Sh2-129 last night - this was the first 180s sub I collected. Doh! I'm not aware of any software that can fix that one other than the Trash folder! Fortunately the other 19 only had the odd satellite trail to contend with - and a sizeable LP gradient. If it wasn't a challenge it wouldn't be worth doing CS Adrian

Haha - I did exactly the same with my Z4 - except it was all of £8.50! - worked though.

"Yes" and "Yes" in my experience. Ran Linux Ubuntu perfectly as far as I could tell and certainly well enough to allow me to make an informed decision about whether to have a dedicated Linux machine. Adrian

Hi. Unzip the contents of the StarNet++ zip file and copy all the files to the bin subdirectory within the PixInsight subdirectory (C:/Programme Files/PixInsight/bin on my Windows laptop). Open PixInsight and goto the Process menu and select Install Modules... Browse to the bin subdirectory and click on Search and select StarNet from the list. Click on Install In my case the StarNet process appeared in <Etc>. HTH Adrian P.S. I gave up trying to use it on my MacBook - too much hassle using the command line option and the install option is not available.

Both very nice but I'm an early morning person - but not when it comes to getting up

This is an interesting comment and does not seem to be in line with this page which list 12 colour cameras that have been discontinued and four mono cameras and the 1600 is not amongst them - at least not yet! I guess everything gets on this page eventually.