scitmon

On 15/03/2022 at 10:42, Carbon Brush said:

Adding an adapter means more connections to play up.

How right this turned out to be!  Bought an adaptor from Amazon to connect the Sesto to the Pegasus.  Tried to move the focuser and it fails with a high pitch noise associated.  I feared the worst and thought I'd bricked it.  Went back to the supplied cigarette style power lead and it worked fine!

I suppose it could also be the Pegasus but I seriously doubt it.  

Looks like I'm going to buy a dedicated cable after all.

Thanks for that, I like to keep my mount powered separately anyway just to lighten the load on the rest of my equipment.  Interesting take on the adaptor, perhaps I'll purchase a dedicated lynx 2.1 to 2.5 mm cable on my next order with FLO, but for now I'll see how the adapter goes.

I recently took delivery of a Pegasus Powerbox Advance, and last night was trying it out.  When it came to try and connect my Sesto Senso Focuser, I discovered that the Sesto 12v socket would not take any of my 12v power cables apart from the one supplied with it (cigarette style one which I'm trying to move away from).  

So my question is, will purchasing an adapter work and what size do I need if so? 

The only indication I have found about what size the Sesto takes is a thread on CloudyNights that says it is a 2.5mm size, but that was unconfirmed.  How will I know the polarity will match?

EDIT: further research indicates that the sesto is 2.5mm centre positive.  So I'm going to go ahead and get a 2.1mm to 2.5mm adapter as I believe the polarity also matches.

It does sound like it warrants a separate thread.  Might be useful to survey as many people as possible about camera/light source/settings used to find what works best.  I myself am using a tracing light board with layers of paper, I doubt its ideal but I don't have the time to experiment different methods.

my new darks appear to be working much better:

i'll redo my flats/dark flats for good measure.

Thank you, yes I am using flat darks, no bias.  I try to get my Flats between 3-5 seconds if I remember correctly.  

OK, I think (hope) I might have a possible explanation.  It was curious to see a small partial outline of a circle in the centre of my masterdark (see above), which suggests there was some light leakage when taking my darks.  I'm going to retake them with the camera off the scope and the cap on and in the dark.  Hopefully that fixes the problem.  Fingers crossed!

I've repeated the above process for one of my RGB frames, the only setting difference being the exposure (60s) and it looks fine.  Does dark subtraction require a difference process for Dual Band Filters?

Ok, putting the flats aside for now because they are clearly not the issue in calibration.  There seems to be an issue with my darks but I can't work out what.  I've cabilrated a single frame with my master dark and it looks horrible:

top left: after calibration, top right: before calibration, bottom is my masterdark.

The image statistics for both the light frame and the master dark give a mean K value of around 0.03, beyond that I don't know what to do?

Can anyone help?

EDIT: attached my masterdark and a light frame

masterdark.xisf 2022-03-05_20-09-54_2_-14.80_300.00s_0002.fits

I've just debayered and stretched one of the flats I took at gain 120, it looks a lot different to the flat I saw in the thread you linked:

8 hours ago, Budgie1 said:

What gain & offset settings are yo using?

Some using the ASI294MC Pro (me included) have had issues with the flat calibration frames causing the red & green gradients in the combined image in your second post, this only seems to happen when a duel band filter, like the L-eXtreme, is used.

To make the flats calibrate correctly with this filter, the answer seems to be setting the gain at 200 and the offset at 30, see the thread below:

I've now used these gain & offset settings over four sessions and haven't had any issues and the flats have calibrated correctly, including the Flaming Star, which I did this weekend.

I used the standard 120 gain 30 offset.  I wished I'd seen the attached thread before, but at least I know that I have the issue too.  I will give 200 gain a try next time.  May I ask length of subs you use with 200 gain?

Okay, clearly there is an issue with my calibration process somewhere which I'll have to investiage further.  Here is the result of stacking uncalibrated frames:

a slight difference!

Last night I took my Optolong L-Extreme filter out for a spin for the first time, with a ZWO ASI 294MC-Pro.  I managed to get 26 x 5 mins of the Flaming Star Nebula and I've just finished calibrating and stacking (and applied a quick ABE). 

My first impressions where being a bit disapointed at the amount of noise, and also suprised at the amount of green in the image.  Once I split the master light channels I get:

I'd like to ask other L-Extreme users... Does this look about right?  

masterlight.xisf

Doesn't the telescope you are using them on come into the equation too?  As I understand it, with long focal length telescopes such as my Skymax 180, spending extra £'s on higher quality EPs is not really worth it?

I would try taking the flats anyway, by getting the focus position as close as you can to what the lights were taken on.  If there are no dust bunnies then it might work better than not having any.

I presume you know that flats remove vignetting, but are looking for an alternative because you ran out of time to take them?

Wow looks much better

On 14/01/2022 at 20:54, PadrePeace said:

I first stacked Ha and OIII separately in APP

Does this mean you went through every sub and split the RGB channels individually?

On the face of it that sounds time consuming but with Narrowband I suppose the number of subs isn't as much as broadband sub numbers.

The ZWO mini filter wheel that I'm using can be reversed.

I guess I don't have to wait for clear skies to take some flats, I'll see if I can do some this weekend.

Well this concerns me, I just bought a L-eXtreme and minifilter wheel for my 294MC pro, but haven't had chance to use it yet.

14 hours ago, Peter Reader said:

Out of curiosity, did you play around with ISO and exposure length at all with the Canon 1000D? 

 

No, I read that 800 is pretty much the best setting from research and stuck with that.

On 05/01/2022 at 23:28, Peter Reader said:

Thanks for all the replies guys, tonight I had a better session after collimation, new LPS from Scitmon and SW 0.9x coma corrector.

Scott, I don't have the option to save in CR2 in NINA for some reason... FITS seems to be workin - is there any reason to try and make CR2 work?

As has been said, if the FITS files have the metadata needed then it should be fine.  I wasn't aware that NINA saved Canon images as FITS.  Looks like your process is working pretty well now.

Fantastic results IMO, especially with the noise reduction, i'd love to know how you managed to get a clean image like that as I always struggled with it.  

Are you are using the Canon DSLR you bought off me?  Images should be saved as CR2 files if so... not tiffs or fits. 

CR2 files are also compatible with DSS.  Each image will require a stretch to see all but the brightest stars, and will also need debayering to see colour, but you need not worry about doing this with individual subs.  A DSS stack should debayer them for you.