Adreneline

I used to own an NEQ6 and I rotated the DEC axis so the 12 o'clock position was at top when I looked through the polarscope; in fact I made myself a little index mark with a permanent marker so I knew how far to rotate the DEC axis. I now own an iOptron CEM25-EC and the 12 o'clock position is at the top without me rotating the DEC axis. I would say you need to rotate the DEC axis and then use the alt and az bolts to position polaris as per the display on your phone app. It works for me! HTH

Very good Alan - I really like the subtle colours. Adrian

Arguably flats are the most important of the calibration frames to take and whilst your're at it take dark-flats as well. If I calibrate in PI I use dark-flats instead of bias frames with my cmos ASI1600. Flats are primarily used to negate the effects of vignetting and to remove the effects of dust bunnies in the optical train. The vast majority it would seem have to cope with some level of light gradient - I have an airport to the East - a town to the west - a city to the north and my own house to the west - I wonder sometimes why I bother! I have no experience of the Svbony filter - I have used an IDAS LP filter with an osc camera and with my dslr which I think helped. HTH Adrian

@geeklee Really like your version Lee - I forgot all about using HDRM.

I found this challenging! There was a tricky gradient across the image which I found was quite difficult to suppress. The image is stretched in PixInsight and then I removed the gradient (as best I could) in PS. I did a bit of colour tweaking and noise reduction in PS It is quite different to your original image - what do you think? If you can take some Flats that would be advantageous. Adrian

Excellent result Alan - love the depth and clarity and gentle colouring. Personally I don't like an 'in your face' Orion - yours is great. Adrian

Well you could always try creating a duplicate layer and using the Burn Tool to try to recover things a little. I usually set mine to midtones or highlights with an exposure of 10% and craefully reduce and desaturate the burned out region. It's all part of the fun! I'll look out for the tif file - it'll be something to do now we're confined to quarters! Good luck! Adrian

Hi Graham, Here's a couple of photos I hope you and maybe others may find useful. I'll PM you regarding the ASIair and mini guider so as not to send this 135mm thread too much off track. Adrian

A very good start and one you should be well pleased with - excellent! A lesson I learnt early on was not to make the surrounding space too black. I was given excellent advice that if you can identify a region which should represent background space then set the RGB levels to roughly 23:23:23. Your image is quite clipped at the black end of the histogram, in fact the histogram is well pressed up against the end stop! If you set it back I think you will reveal far more of the nebulosity around M42. Your histogram looks like the first of these two whereas you want the black point to move to the right as below: Doing that starts to reveal more precious data that you have inadvertently suppressed: I think you have a far better and more revealing image lurking in your data. HTH Adrian P.S. If you share your final stacked and calibrated tif from DSS I'm sure someone will want to have a go to see what they can find. Another piece of advice is don't use DSS to make any adjustments to the image.

Haha! Another theory bites the dust. Sounds like you've got it covered and so I'm not sure I can help re. the odd shaped stars in the lower part of the image. I use the nosepiece as I have an IDAS filter on the end which I use with my Atik414-osc. Hopefully someone will pop up and offer some advice. Adrian

One problem I had with the ED80DS and FR was that I never sure that once the FR was tightened into the focusser that it remained concentric - it always seemed to droop a little especially with the added weight of the camera, etc. I solved the problem by fitting a Baader Click-Lock - which rates as one the best things I've ever spent money on in this hobby. Apologies if you already have one fitted to your OTA. Clearly spacing is important as well but that shouldn't be an issue with the correct EoS adapter. Adrian

This was my approach also but then I discovered that I didn't always stretch the tee-shirt evenly or consistently and I started to get some rather strange, uneven and inconsistent looking flats. I used an iPad as a light source placed on top of the stretched tee-shirt. I've now moved away from the stretched tee-shirt and instead use a non-stretched tee-shirt - I just lay the material on the end of the scope. My flats now appear more "uniform" / "symmetrical" - not really sure how best to describe them as everyone interprets the adjectives in a different way. Whatever they work for me.

Another iteration on my setup. Decided to utilise my EvoGuide50ED alongside my Samyang 135mm as I have found it really difficult to achieve a good level of focus with my ZWO mini guide scope. This combination/setup works a treat although it is more difficult to handle and place on the mount. The guide graph stayed with +/- 2" - could be better I suppose but that may have been less than ideal seeing. The ASIair continues to perform faultlessly and has transformed an imaging session for me. There are a few things I'd change but the ease of focussing with a BM and the iPad pinch-zoom display is amazing; APP reported every sub with FWHM of ~1.25. Plate solving and mount syncronisation saves so much time and gaurantees repeatability in seconds! Testing meant yet another session on the Heart & Soul - it's the only target I can see now from my garden and even then I only get an hour before it disappears behind the roof. Adrian

I like this a lot - especially the star colours. Hope you don't mind but I took the liberty of plate-solving in Astrometry.net - you bagged yourself a serious number of targets in one image! Excellent! Adrian

I guess you've tried this maybe? I also use DPP that comes with the Canon. Adrian

That's a bit of a blow. Sorry I can't help.

That's strange. I installed CS6 on my laptop (Win10), installed the updates and Camera Raw 9.1.1 was installed which opens Canon raw files. Same on my iMac/MBP. I didn't do anything other than install CS6 updates. This is running on the MBP Adrian

In a nutshell I do calibration, registration and integration in APP. I then move the individual masters into PI and register them again before cropping edge effects and applying either dynamic or automatic background extraction. I then use PI to complete the post processing and finally tweak the colours in Photoshop - or not as the case may be. HTH Adrian

+1 for this approach - it's a winner for me too. I still occasionally use DSS if I just want a quick look at a stack of subs though. Totally agree - transformed my MBP, iMac and Lenovo PC laptop. My NUC has an M2 type drive which is also amazingly quick on read/write access. Astro Pixel Processor

Thanks very much for the clarification. It is interesting to see and understand the approach used by ST. I'll give it a go and see what difference it makes. I am sure the rest of your post will have been of interest to ST users. Thanks again for your help. Adrian

Thank you! I’m assuming you used the .fit files I posted to achieve the image in your post. Is your image a straight HOO or is it a luminance augmented HOO? - sorry I’m a little confused. How did you create the synthetic luminance image? Thanks again for your help and sorry if I’m missing something obvious. Adrian

I don't rotate my camera, in fact I never change the alignment of the camera - it is always aligned with the sockets on the back parallel to the vixen bar. All I can say is taking flats at the outset of an arrangement hasn't been a problem for me. As long as I don't open up the imaging train I've never noticed any new dust bunnies appearing in my images. Maybe I've just been lucky!

It's what I do but I use a refractor and have no experience of using a reflector. I don't have a permanent obsy or even a permanent pier. I pick up the mount and tripod and position it on little reference marks on the patio and then I attach the scope, filter wheel, camera and focusser complete. I connect two cables between the mount/scope and power supply, plug into the mains and I'm good to start. Some advocate only using the Luminance flat for all filters. I use Baader 1.25" filters (broad & narrow, in an eight position wheel) and when I examine the flats in PI for each individual filter there are noticable differences. Because it is sealed I make the assumption nothing will get in, or out, and I stick with the same flats until I make a fundamental change. I always use the same gain, same offset, same temperature and a small range of exposures, generally 120s or 180s. I used to be always making changes but I found I was spending more time messing around that imaging! Good luck. Adrian

Indeed! I do this on a regular basis although having said that I always register the images in PI before doing anything else - I don't rely on any registration that may have taken place in APP. Following registration I use DynamicCrop to get rid of any edge effects and then use ABE/DBE, etc. I have noticed that PI can be a bit fussy about using calibration files produced in APP. If I calibrate and stack in APP and then decide to repeat the process in PI, PI will complain about the master calibration files produced by APP, especially it seems the master flat; it will just give a warning say something along the lines of no compatible files found. I did raise this on the PI forum but got into a lot of trouble for mentioning APP. HTH P.S. Just seen @Laurin Dave's response - +1

Haha. Um? Could this be a generation thing? I'm verging on neolithic - where are you My son's despair of me - my grand-daughter is too young to despair of me - but the time will come. Thanks for educating me - just goes to show you're never too old to learn.