jjosefsen

Just stumbled upon this thread while researching small observatories, exactly the design i had in mind. I was wondering if you could give a little update on how it is working now, is this kind of roof design still good?

@Skipper Billy

On 23/11/2019 at 20:59, DKNicholson said:

Have you checked how far past the meridian your system will go before it attacks the pier? If it is more than 20 minutes or so then try setting the meridian flip for as late after the Meridian as is reasonable. There is also a setting in PHD2 to reverse the guide camera after the flip though I have never found the need to tick that as it seems to do it automatically.

I wish you luck as this sort of error can be so frustrating. Yours aye . . . 

This is good advice.. I've had some problems solving images very close to the meridian in another software package with both ASTAP and PS2 solvers. Letting the mount go 10 minutes past the meridian Solved it.

On 25/11/2019 at 11:15, Mr Spock said:

I think remote imaging is the way forward for a lot of people. Conditions here are far too often unusable, what with our dreadful weather and even worse light pollution.

The weather certainly suggests so, but the price seems to be so steep, and the gear hosted is often very high end, making it inaccessible for a lot of people.

Wooof Adam. Images are looking great, that thing really sucks down photons. Can't wait to see your work when you are ready to do full color images.

Very cool pic!

10 minutes ago, Robny said:

So.....

I tried this last night for the first time under live conditions, all I can say is wow!

Everything connected first time, with the hit of a single button, it automatically launched PHD2 and started guiding, seamlessly connected to Stellarium and synced coordinates and the platesolving was amazing, very fast and very accurate, it just worked (ASTAP).

I am a new N.I.N.A fan boy 😂 and will be going straight to N.I.N.A each time!! 👍

Rob

Glad to hear it!

I had one of those good nights last night too.. Aside from bad seeing which really affected my guiding everything just worked.

First clear night for a long time.. I had been sick all weekend and really needed to sleep early, so i setup 3 sequences (rgb for Double bluster, luminance for Pleiades, and a little test run with Ha on Horsehead), hit start and went to bed.

Woke up at 5.40 this morning to go down and see that everything had worked - even the meridian flip, mount was parked and ready for a run of flats and darkflats.

For anyone interrested, Stefan (the creator of NINA) did a presentation and demonstration of NINA on The Astro Imaging Channel the other day..

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6LVduw-Zo8

2 hours ago, emyliano2000 said:

Hi guys. Is it possible to set a certain start and stop time for each target? Last time I used it I couldn't find this option and I went back to sgp. My view is wuite restricted and I wanna stop one target before it goes behind the trees. 

Also, does NINA remember the last focus position for each filter? 

Emil

Hi Emil,

No you can't directly set a start and stop time. But when you set up your sequence NINA will tell you at which time it will finish, so you can plan ahead.

You can also have NINA do several target after each other, automatically, by adding other sequences to the list.

So you could set up a sequence  for target 1 to image for 3 hours and then go to target 2 for 1 hour and then target 3 for 3 hours. If your setup is automated enough, it would do this without your input at all.

You can configure offsets for each filter in NINA so you don't have to autofocus between each filter. It is under Options somewhere (sorry don't have access to a NINA Instance right now for screenshots..)

On 23/10/2019 at 12:34, spillage said:

I gave 1.9 a run last night after sgpro had issues platesolving. Wow this software is quick and really good. A couple things I struggle with though.

I could not figure out how to manually warm the camera at the end of the night.

I also struggled to work out how to set the pixel error when platesolving. In sgpro I just set ps to within 6 pixels. I guess I am just not use to working in arcseconds (what settings are others using?).

Also will the sky atlas only show possible targets from my location and if not can this be set up?

 

I think I may of lost the plot. Can anyone confirm if there is Deb for NINA. I could of sworn I came across one but now cannot find anything relating to a linux install.

 

cheers,

Hi,

NINA is Windows only - everything is built on a windows platform currently. Maybe at a later date someone will look at crossplatform migration..

Warm camera can be enabled under Options -> Imaging:

Platesolving error:

Can be set under Options -> Platesolving:

Yes this is in arcminutes, but you can use decimals - i believe i use 0.5 arcmin at 520mm, I guess you could work out the error in pixels if you wanted.. Alternatively when it does an automatic platesolve it shows the error in pixels for both RA and DEC.

Sky atlas:

It shows you how high an object is on the sky from your point of view, and i do believe you can filter them by how high they are in the sky.

1 hour ago, Robny said:

Is there a way to load an image into NINA for platesolving testing purposes?

I tried NINA a year or so back and never gave it much time, ended up going back to APT.  However...I downloaded 1.9 last night to give it another go and I must say, j was very impressed.  Everything connected up, seemed very easy to do and everything seemed to work as it should, it spoke to Stellarium and some to PHD2 without any faffing about.

The one thing I was not able to test is the platesolving as I couldn't find a way to load in an image manually....can this be done?

I think I will be giving this a go for my next imaging run

Hi,

There is a camera simulator that you can use, that either generates some random noise, or where you can load an existing image.

You should be able to use that for testing platesolving by loading an existing image.

remember to setup your platesolvers in the settings menu.

Not only is it pollution, it is also tacky.. 😔

Nice scope and the initial results look promising!

I look forward to seeing your images with this little bad boy.

1 minute ago, bottletopburly said:

Out of interest can N.I.N.A  be run from a pi4 and controlled from  my laptop.

No. Windows only at this time.

Modded 600d before I went mono. It was pretty cheap to buy premodded and I still dig it out from time to time for comets, etc.

Whatever you go for, I will say that modding it will be a massive improvement.

19 minutes ago, DKNicholson said:

jjosefsen - many thanks for your response. I'm about to get a new camera so that may well be the time to try NINA. I'm getting the SX Trius-SX694, don't suppose you would know if that is supported? I also have an SX Filterwheel, and Lodestar x2 which should be OK.  My focuser is the RIGEL Stepper Motor, USB nStep Focus Control which is quite old now, so that's a consideration.

Do hope you don't mind me putting all this to you.

Yours aye - DKNicholson

Well all peripherals such as wheels, focusers, etc. Are controlled by ASCOM so they should work. But Starlight Express is in fact not natively supported. It's hard to implement something like that without a test camera, and no developer had one, and SX didn't want to lend a developer one. 🙁

But it will work with ASCOM..

1 hour ago, DKNicholson said:

I've been using SGPro for over a year now and it work well for me, BUT I'm always willing to try something else if there are some benefits. In your opinion are there any benefits of NINA over SGPro (apart from price obviously!)?  For me the main bug bear is that SGPro is not exactly intuitive, but once you've worked out what needs to be done it certainly works.  I don't really want to try it just for the sake of trying it because there is always quite a learning curve, but if NINA is genuinely 'better' it would be worth it.

Hmm I don't know too much about SGP if I'm honest, having only tried it on one imaging session.

But setting it up was quite a journey, and I'm an IT guy..

So I would say these from the top of my head:

• User Interface - In my opinion it is so much better and cleaner than both SGP and APT.
• Speed - It is quite fast and many things are done in parallel.
• I'm not 100% certain here, but here goes anyway - I think NINA has native support for more cameras than any other software out there.
• And as you already mentioned, it is free..

Very interesting (and confusing thread) 🙂

How would you go about resampling (is that the correct term) to a certain resolution in PixInsight?

Example:

Let's say I have an image shot at 1"/px and I want to target 1.8"/px because I feel like that is what my skies allow. How would I do that?

Hope it's ok to ask in this discussion..

Hi Emil,

I use a combination of TGVDenoise and MMT in PixInsight on the individual masters while they are linear, and before combining to RGB. Works quite well!

Extensive masking is used - so TGVDenoise primarily targets high signal areas (bright) and MMT targets low signal areas (dark). Don't go too crazy while linear, the final noise reduction will be done after the image has been stretched, and I also use TGVDenoise there.

33 minutes ago, CrashEd said:

I tried the parabolic fit the other night but it was before I had it all dialled in, so I'll give it a go next time I'm out.

Which 1.10 nightly version are oyu finding the mose stable?

I haven't had a session in weeks, but I ran 16 without a hitch.

I think the latest is fine too, they found the memory leak that was causing issues in the QHY native driver, and now you have to enable loading of those drivers in the options so it doesn't affect every non QHY user.

For clarity - QHY are comming with a new driver really soon where it is fixed.

5 hours ago, CrashEd said:

Had another great night using NINA last night. Think I've finally cracked the autofocus, although it's taken a bit of setting up. I'm still not getting a classic 'V' profile but it's close enough. It's hitting the focal point better now in any a case.

The only real issue now is that I'm still getting the odd camera error (ASI1600mm Pro). I'll try and post a log on their Discord channel. This time it was during the autofocus routine and luckily not during imaging.

Great bit of software though!

I don't have a v-curve either, more like a U, and with the new parabolic / hyperbolic fitting algorithms in the nightly releases it hits focus very well.

Does this lensing effect happen due to something on the sensor or is it the front glas?

I found that Starnet makes some pretty good starmasks, something i've always struggled with in PI. :)

39 minutes ago, dazza1639 said:

It would be good if you could use it with an indi server. I have all my gear connected to a RPi, and connect to the remote indi server running on there with KStars on my windows machine. It would be nice to do somthing similar with NINA, as it looks great and a bit slicker than KStars.

Yeah that would be good, but it is a massive project to undertake I think.

I do believe the next big thing comming is a rework of the sequencing funktionality and with it things like dome control and such.

19 minutes ago, CrashEd said:

Took NINA out for a spin last night (that sounds wrong! 😆) and I have to say, I was very impressed.

I found it more intuitive to use that SGP and the download speed with my ASI1600mm Pro is incredible in comparison! It will seriously same some time over SGP. Plate solving with ASTAP was also much faster than Platesolve2. 

I managed to get through a whole imaging session with only a few hiccups:

1. Autofocus was slightly out (50 steps) compared to what I could achieve manually, although I did realise (too late) that I didn't have the binning set to 2x2 as I would normally in SGP. This meant that there weren't enough stars for analysis. I think you can change the sensitivity of the star detection, so I'll try that as well. This leads on to the autostretch issue in # 2 below... 
2. I found the main image display to be pretty awful in terms of the stretch that was performed. It was pretty hard to distinguish the target, other than by some brighter stars. In fact the image history images were better. Not sure if this is a bug (I was using last night's nightly download). I tried messing with the black clipping setting and the stretch value, but to no avail. This could be why the autofocus struggled too? I through a few images into SGP to compare and the stretch was much better.
3. I got a couple of camera download errors, which meant a few dropped frames throughout the session. I'm using the native driver for the ASI1600mm Pro, so I might revert to the ASCOM driver next time.

So, some tweaking required here and there, but otherwise I'm converted!! 😀     

Glad to hear you had a good time.

I don't know what version you are using? But the later versions (1.9 and onward) are running the same autostretch routine as PixInsight, and in general that is the best implementation I have seen.

In the 1.10 Nigtlies there has been a lot of work on the autofocus code, with a brandnew detection function (contrast based) and new parabolic and hyperbolic curvefitting functions as opposed to the classical v-curve functions.

This is a great improvement to autofocus!

BUT the 1.10 nightlies are a little volatile at the moment as there is a lot of new code being put in, so probably best to be on 1.9 or ask around which 1.10 nightly has been stable lately.

My last imaging session was on 1.10.16 and that was stable enough for a fully automated night.

4 hours ago, blinky said:

OK, will have a look over there - for now though, how do I set it up to use the local ANSVR plate solver? When I look in the settings in SGPro it uses the localhost address but NINA seems to want a directory and do I need to install another version of PlateSolve 2?

No you can just point it to the install directory of PS2 / ASTAP / ASPS / Etc..

Personally I use ASTAP for nearfield solving (it is the fastests solver I have tried) and ASPS for the rare blind solve.