Adreneline

I don't seem to have the order details anymore but you need to mount the EAF and then measure the length required to go round the lens and pulley you choose for your mounting arrangement. I'm pretty certain mine was the 3M HTD Timing Belt that is 375mm long - the B3M125. I was in the same position but then I used the 120MM on my ED80 and can also use it as an all sky camera - no real loss - and to be honest the 120MM being USB3 was a bit of a pain at times and has caused me probelms in the past with limits on cable length. All in the past! In the current grand scheme of things if that is the only infuriating thing then you're very lucky! True!

Thank you Andy - that's very kind of you. It is an excellent lens and every bit as good as my more expensive Canon 200mm. I tried (and subsequently sold) the AstroKraken solution. It works very well but I found it is a little fiddly to achieve a good level of focus. Without a doubt the Astrojolo (or the equivalent sold by FLO) is a must in my opinion as it pretty well totally solves the issue of droop and/or misalignment in the optical train. I have tried most of the EoS adapters and found the best one to be the ZWO solution but it is still not as good as the M42 screw solution offered by Astrojolo and others. I have found the EAF to be excellent; I have found focus positions to be repeatable and it only takes a moment to refocus between filters (which I now change manually anyway). The belt and toothed pulley were both purchased from Motionco. I have to admit that I purchased a separate belt which I butchered so I could stick it to the focussing ring on the lens. I decided I would do this as I bought the Samyang purely for astro imaging; I decided a similar step was a step too far with the Canon which I also use on my dslr for regular photography. Plate solving with the ASIair is a dream, especially when linked to Sky Safari on the iPad. I have used plate solving with SGPro but not without some problems. I've never had plate solving on the ASIair fail; it typically takes just seconds to complete and sync the mount. I have no experience of using APT but by all accounts many people have used it very successfully. I love using the Samyang 135mm - I love the wider fov and seeing these targets in their surrounding space. If there is a downside to the lens it is that star shapes are not perfect at the extremes of the image (especially corners) but they are no worse than my Canon. By the time you have cropped of edge effects most of the dodgy stars have gone too! Good luck! P.S. I think @Ginasolution of using two 135mm in tandem looks a great idea - I would love have two 135's and two 1600's with a Ha and OIII filter capturing at the same time. That's what dreams are made of Dream on

Hi. I started nearly four years ago with an ED80DS + NEQ6 + guidescope/camera and loads of cables and had a lot of fun - I also learnt a lot - and spent quite a bit! I've kept the ED80 (although it is rarely used) and now use a camera lens (Samyang 135mm or Canon 200mm) with a cooled camera (ZWO ASI1600MM-Pro Cooled) and an iOptron CEM25-EC. If I had appreciated then what I know now I would have started with the setup I have now. It is light weight, less demanding on tracking (180s exposures with no guiding) and at f2 hoovers up photons like there is no tomorrow! With an ASIair it suits me down to the ground. Distant galaxies are out of my reach (but they were with the ED80 as well) but beautiful nebula targets are a perfect match. And don't let anyone tell you narrowband is more difficult than broadband - Ha is just so satisfying to image, essentially immune to light pollution and you can image with a moon in the sky. Keep it simple is definitely the way to start as you will have far more successes and it will be far more rewarding. Adrian

If you use something like BYEoS (or APT) then you can periodically pause the image capture and use the built-in FWHM function to see what is happening to a star in the field of view. It would give you a quantitative value to work with. You can also monitor the sensor temperature as you go along. Hope you manage to get to the bottom of this - all very frustrating - a word that applies to the whole hobby really! Good luck! Adrian

This may be irrelevant but when I use my 70D - controlled by EoSBackYard - for long exposures I notice that as the imaging session goes on the sensor temperature creeps up - not by very much but nevertheless it gradually increases as the evening goes on. Increasing temperature means increasing noise. Just a thought.

Can you tell us a bit more about the equipment you are using, e.g. is the camera a dslr/cmos cooled/ccd cooled? Are you using a telescope or a camera lens.

Well this is a quick go - registered and background extracted and RGB channel combined and stretched in PI. The Ha was layered with R in PS and then all the rest of the colour enhancement and noise reduction in PS. I might try the binned images tomorrow but this is more the sort of colour I would expect for the Heart using Ha-RGB. Hopefully someone else will have a go who has more skill than me in RGB processing. Adrian

It is true many people use PI but a very significant number also use PS - exclusively - with the help of books like this. I think you've got some very good data and one thing you might like to consider is uploading your individual L, R, G, B and Ha masters so others can have a go and see what they can produce. You could always use something like DeepSpaceStacker to produce the calibrated masters. When using PS have you used plug-in/actions like Annie's Astro Actions or Astronomy Tools - these represent excellent value for money and can be very helpful - I particularly like AAA at just $15. Hopefully we won't have to wait until next year to see another image! I'm certainly hoping there will be some clear nights Good luck! Adrian

I think it may be the L that is bringing noise as well. I think it might be worth a try not using the L just to see what you get. If you use Ha as L it tends to give the image a characteristic pink colouring. I am sorry I cannot help with reducing green in StarTools; I used PixInsight to reduce the green but the colour balance still looks strange even though the individual histograms are essentially aligned. I also moved the black point a little to reveal a little more of the nebulosity. It's a tricky business! HTH Adrian

I don't know the right answers to your questions I can only comment based on my personal experience of using an ED80+ASI1600 and LRGB+Ha filters. Living in a Bortle 5 area my personal experience of taking Luminance is that it contributes nothing of value in the final image; it is better to spend the time taking more R,G and B. Maybe my negative experience with L is due to my own processing shortcomings. All my Lum subs seem to do is to exacerbate the light pollution problem I have in this location. I believe it is always preferable to combine Ha with the R. I combine Ha and R in Photoshop by copying the R layer and adding Ha as a 'lighten' layer. I experiment with the opacity of the Ha layer to get the best result. I then replace the R layer with the new R+Ha layer. I'm afraid I have no experience at all of StarTools so I don't know what is possible in terms of adding Ha to RGB. Regarding your image above I have to say I cannot recall seeing that much green before in the Heart nebula - very unusual. HTH Adrian

I'm sure you're not alone! I have to admit I only use it for combining NB data and infrequently for creating a synthetic luminance. The LVA tutorials are very good IMHO. I found it best make a few handwritten notes of the key points in each step rather than wade through the full text each time. LVA is good because it explains not only what to do and in what order but why you do it that way and what each process does. It is also worth stepping through the target tutorials on M31 and NGC7000 if you have your own data (or comparable data). Good luck! Adrian

In the past I have always followed the methods set out in the LightVortex tutorials - they have always worked for me. So that would be StarAlignment, DynamicCrop, DBE/ABE and (maybe) LinearFit, and then colour combining with ChannelCombination (or PixelMath) followed by LRGBCombination. After that it's a case of using various PI tools/masks to tease out the colour and suppress the noise. HTH Adrian

I really like that - very edifying. How extensive is this region of IFN? Are regions of IFN catalogued/mapped anywhere? Thanks for sharing - very inspiring. Adrian

This is ~150 mins of Ha collected last night using the Samyang 135mm and ASI1600MM-Pro; gain 139, offset 50, exposures of 180s x 147. Calibrated and integrated in APP, processed in PI and finished in PS. First successful attempt with the ZWO mini guide scope (finally got it focussed) and ASI120 mini combination providing guiding better than 0.5". ASIair set to dither every three frames but for reasons I don't understand it did nothing like that. Whatever the end result is not too bad. Minimal cropping just to remove edge effects. CED 214 Not sure when conditions will be right to grab some OIII so Ha will have to do for now. Adrian

Very nice. Love the framing. Adrian

Well I am afraid I didn't use PS - I used PI to register and combine the RGB and stretch the image and then PS to lift/balance the colour and perform a little noise reduction. There is some amp glow visible on the right but the darks should sort that; there is also some dust bunnies which the flats will sort. I'm sure there is more colour there but I didn't push it too far. I didn't use the Lum data. I'm sure a PS guru will pop up and do the whole thing in PS. HTH Adrian

Interesting. You might want to give some thought as to how you are going to combine the data from each filter into your resulting mosaic.

A promising start! Definitely something to build on. What was the camera?

This is 2 hours of Ha and 3 hours of OIII taken with the Samyang 135mm at f2.4 + ASI1600MM-Pro at gain 139 and offset 50 all captured unguided via the ASIair. Calibrated and integrated in APP and fully processed in PI with a final small amount of noise reduction on the HOO image in PS. I think I've finally got the spacing/alignment as good as it can be so I don't think I can improve on the star shapes anymore. The png file looks better than this jpg but I felt at 77MB it was a bit big to upload. Thanks for looking and as ever C&C welcomed. Adrian

Weird. I downloaded it last week and I'm now part way through my trial period - I've got 20 days to go still. Not sure then as the site says you get 30 days.

You could download a 30-day trial version of CCDInspector and run your subs through that and see what it tells you.

Well I’d leave mine until tomorrow morning. I’m doing IC1396 in OIII right now - due to finish at 03.45 and I’m certainly not doing them then! 😊

Glad you're up and running Carole; it's all looking very good and the results speak for themselves. Adrian

Hi Everyone. I've downloaded a 30-day trial of CCDInspector and I am using it to assess my Samyang 135mm + ASI1600MM-Pro imaging train. I took forty 180s Ha exposures last night and put them through CCDInspector and it produced this graphic summary. Where am I on a scale of 0 (rubbish) to 5 (excellent)? My imaging scale is 5.8 arcsec/pixel. Is Curvature purely a function of the optics? I am assuming unless told otherwise that my Tilt figures are pretty good (less than half a pixel) - or have I got it all screwed up? The collimation figure of 24.3" would seem to imply a misalignment of ~4 pixels - or have I got that wrong as well? Does 4 pixels matter? Any help and advice would be much appreciated. I am trying not to get obsessive about this - not sure though if I am succeeding! Many thanks. Adrian

Here's my latest effort with the new setup - IC1396 in Ha only. If the forecast is to be believed I might get lucky and get some OIII in the coming nights. This is 40 x 180s of Ha taken between 00.30 and 04.00 last night, all unguided. I took 60 in total but discarded the first 20 as IC1396 was so low in the sky. All calibrated and integrated in APP followed by ABE, HT, LHE and HDRM in PI and finally a little bit of noise reduction in PS. The Garnet star is looking a bit dodgy but on the whole the others don't look too bad. Thanks for looking. Adrian