newbie alert

Did i see that it needs the UCAC4 catalogues in the plane wave spec?

Beltingonline had a reprofile service 

I've just had to do my 690, although the temp and duration seemed abit excessive, atik say an hour at 200, so 5 hours at 230 seemed way overkill...( Although the desicant is different) think I did 3 hours at 200...

Why are you using CDC to frame and slew, then nina when you can just frame and slew with Nina?

Don't know what platesolve 3 is, ASTAP is fast and accurate, never had a issue

A bahtinov mask for a 80ed won't work precisely for a lens as the aperture and focal length is different, best to  make one for the equipment used . A friend made a decent one from a cd perspex case and scribed in the pattern with a craft knife.. worked extremely well 

What do you need to clean a DSLR sensor?

2 hours ago, Wonderweb said:

Hi all.

I've tried searching for this topic but couldn't find anything. 

I am torn between getting an off axis guider to use with my orion optics ct8 at 900mm or try a x2 barlow with my 240mm guidescope to hopefully improve guiding  at 480mm. 

I've heard some horror stories of people spending all their time searching for guide stars with an oag and with precious little imaging time with work and clouds, I dont want anything else limiting my exposure time. 

Is there much benefit in fitting a barlow to my guidescope or should I try the oag? 

Thanks

Darren 

I've got a oag on my SCT (1280mm FL)setup and also one with my esprit 80 (400mm FL)/Qsi as it has a internal filterwheel... I've never had to search for a guidestar with either setup... 

Surprised you don't have it all riding on the mesu Adam!

Confidence is everything.. and as you said everything has shot up in price.. if the old mount is around the payload needed, the price that you're looking to pay,then it's got to be in the running..

1 hour ago, Graeme said:

600mm cube. It seems to be the going rate. Your excvation looks massive! Is it finished?

Im just under a cubic meter, it went down 1.3m as I have a 2m length water duct pipe as a pier... Really enjoyed pouring the concrete as it was the first time I'd used a cement mixer

Yeah it's finished, really pleased with it

What size is your dug hole... I'm in Ashford so not a great distance from you... I remember doing my little scope house and I guarantee it's the best thing you can do, already setup and ready to roll

18 hours ago, Philobr said:

I think it's #3

Doing 3 star alignment with the mount then going into NINA.

I'll try your suggestions. 

Thanks so much.

 

Doing a 3 star alignment on the handset is a good idea before you open up your capture program ( in your case Nina) or you can use the capture program to accurately center your stars if you bring up the the reticle and place the stars bang in the center...  Moving forward you can drop this and just plate solve

With regards to the scope slewing to targets it will either be scope on the east or the west side of the meridian, depending on which side the target is, so sometimes it looks like it only has to go a short slew..  but seems to take the long way around, it isn't... 

Regarding PhD, it's fairly straightforward once you've calibrated etc but can be daunting at first... You can setup using the wizard and do your dark Library and bad pixel map beforehand 

Where abouts in the world are you? Someone close maybe able to help..

I'd assume this to be because of the second qe spike in the IR and NIR.. not got a zwo qe chart to hand but the Qhy shows the same sensor, they call it the extended ir range

3 hours ago, Gumminess8083 said:

could it just be the clouds messing up the readings?

 

I double checked my polar alignment both with the polar scope and the three-points polar alignment tool, and it was perfect within 2 seconds at most

Polar scope is regarded a rough polar alignment method.. run the drift tool and it will show you the errors

7 hours ago, Gumminess8083 said:

Thanks for the suggestion!

I actually wanted to try that first, but I didn't want to have to redo all my settings without being sure that it would fix the problem.
Since it did the trick for you, I will try and see if it works

 

edit: no candle. The graph still shows up as empty...

 

 

Actually! As I was writing this message, it started working! Hopefully it isn't just the clouds moving around... I'm doing another run and it still shows a dead graph... This is strange

This shows you're way out of polar alignment, and both axis are on a downward trend

Everyone's system is different, and not everyone lives in the same place regarding light pollution, so if your camera/ and skies allow you to do 30 min subs but your mount can only track for 3 mins then the whole system is reliant on the mount... So its a balancing act of your equipment and sky conditions

In darker skies you can exposure for longer as your subs won't contain signal from as much light pollution, so the main rule of thumb are longer subs in darker skies and shorter ones in more light polluted ones

High dynamic range targets such as m42 and m31 will need 2 different exposure times, for the trapezium in m42 then you will need exposures of only a few secs, and then much longer for the rest( 1-10 mins, depending on filter)

Guiding opens up your whole exposure range

Stopped watching the ones that are making far too much money , and watching the manufacturers/ suppliers launching products at them is embarrassing... meanwhile prices have shot up... 

25 minutes ago, scotty38 said:

Come on  please, there's enough unnecessary jumping on the "let's bash pixinsight" train as it is without admitting it's never been used but it's still rubbish 😀

When did I say it was rubbish?? 

Don't jump on things that wasn't there in the first place

23 minutes ago, geeklee said:

Like , , ,  and  ?  

Why are they "stupid" names?  Aren't they exact descriptions of what the process is doing?  

You can drag the Process to your Workspace and rename it whatever you like.  I believe MT can be used for other things of course.

 

Ok histogram transformation... Levels

Curves transformation... Curves( pull it up or down)

Channel combination.. merge channels

Why do you need a script to do this.. it's just a click

5 minutes ago, ollypenrice said:

I don't think they realize what their language sounds like to most people. It's a progam written by geniuses for geniuses - so that's me out of the frame!

Olly

I must be well down that ladder then

From viewing this thread it seems like a useful tool but since its release plenty of images to prove that people are mis using it to over sharpen, showing artifacts from the Ai technology that aren't really there within the data captured.. sticks out like a sore thumb... 

38 minutes ago, Stuart1971 said:

Anybody that can’t get there head around PI should get another hobby, as the rest is much harder….IMHO…

I've never used it, but I can't get my head around why there's so many stupid names, is it to make it sound technical , to make a simple task sound complicated... 

As a guess as I've never used a RC, is your spacing distance bang on spec, as that will have a impact on both focus and focal length... It happened with my SCT.. 

Also I wouldn't get hung up on getting the FL perfect as I've not come across a bang on the money spec'd scope yet, from SCT to refractors, but they're using too long than too short..

2 hours ago, heller792 said:

That was a great read, thanks for sharing it with me. I do fall short in the categories of clear sky's, where I am is a very cloudy area most of the year, for this reason I am leaning towards OSC

Lots of people do this and end up going mono in the end... Weigh up the options.. .. mono is actually faster,and has been said more than just a few times..

From that article it gives the viewpoint that the duel narrowband filters are on par with the normal narrow band filter... I don't think so .. he says he can't tell the difference.... Really... Mono has and always will produce cleaner images because every pixel is assigned to the colour it's designed to.. not nearest neighbour values

Very nice Adam... Well done