geeklee

😀 exactly! Brilliant, thanks for sharing the WIP and full mosaic. Having seen only a handful of Sh2-240 images, I hadn't quite appreciated its location in sky ☺️ Good luck tonight with more subs. Where does a fast, wide field rig stop on the mosaic front... are you occasionally tempted to just keep going and create a monster mosaic in one season?!

Great wide field shot Phil. It must have all come flooding back with a challenging capture and then opening PixInsight again!! Great work on both fronts.

Lovely image Adrian. The black and white, high SNR Ha images are really enjoyable. On a recent image, I finally captured enough noisy, halo ridden OIII to add to existing Ha but it's been tough to work with compared to an enjoyable Ha version.

I had a minor rattle coming from a Baader Red 1.25" filter a while back, and as @Stuart1971 mentioned, there are two tiny divets around the retaining part. I used two cocktails sticks as I couldn't quite get the right fit and carefully turned to tighten. It didn't need much to stop the rattle but not over tighten. Hope this helps, but you sound one step further along than a rattle now as it's completely apart! I can certainly try and a grab a few pics of a fitted 1.25 filter if required.

There's been some really great replies already that definitely echo my own thoughts and frustrations with the UK weather. I last remember 4 nights in April and around the same in September where I could gather various data sets (some still incomplete from September). Alongside the imaging frustration I've enjoyed the continual visual aspect on those mixed nights where you can cloud dodge without it impacting you too much. As also mentioned above, acquiring data from remotely rented equipment does nothing for me. Part of the enjoyment of an image - however lacklustre - comes from knowing how challenging it was to acquire those photons from my own equipment, in my mediocre, British back garden. If I could afford to host my own equipment remotely, that would be interesting though... Without mixing in the visual aspect, I think it would be more frustrating. I find these complement each other as I look at similar targets or areas of the sky with totally different eyes coming from the screen to the eye piece or vice versa. Hang in there, one or two clear nights with hours of capture and it'll be forgotten.... for a few days😁

The joining of the 82 images (1.25s between frames) definitely makes it look much more "bank job snatch and grab" 😁 A little bit of follow up here stating the closing (10cm/sec) and exit speeds (40cm/sec)... although 10cm/sec still seems quite fast for something like this! https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2020/osiris-rex-tags-surface-of-asteroid-bennu/

Awesome video, thanks for the link. From descriptions of the event I wasn't expecting such a lot of dust and small rocks to be distributed during the nitrogen firing. I take it the white dome looking instrument that made the TAG event had the filter collecting the particles?

Agreed, this is how I now have it setup. I have a powered USB3 hub on the mount with a repeater USB3 cable going back to the computer. So far, so good. This has a mix of USB2 and USB3 cables plugged into the hub.

Nice write up Chris! I only had one bolt and (what looked like) a grub screw on my StellaLyra RC 6" so not sure if that's a standard thing.

I have a spare bar, but I think it's just a fraction short so I'll keep an eye out for a kit. I had planned (if not using an OAG) to have one of my guide scopes at the front of the bottom bar (if I didn't have a top one) to help with weight distribution. Good tip on focusing. I'm definitely seeing this as more of a project scope as I expect acceptable+ results to take time out the box (especially without any upgrades!). Thanks for your other info and I'm looking forward to more great results like the Bubble 👍

Adrian - for my own future reference, is this the normal refractor version of the SteelTrack (with associated click-lock)? I was wondering where you got the tube adapter for another rail 😀 The 8" comes with dual rails. Thanks also for the photo showing it attached, it's some extension out the back with camera etc! My 6" RC landed yesterday.

Lovely image @Hughsie

Great image Rob. Really excellent colour and detail there too.

I think most programs (certainly Apt and Voyager) cool the camera down at a sensible rate (with varying parameters of your choice to help speed up or slow down). For heating, they have "warm up" type functions that, as far as I can see, just reduce the cooling power slowly so it comes up to temperature over 5 minutes or so. You can tell the difference Vs turning the cooler off immediately - it heats back up quick! Depends on timing for how you set up to when you kick the process off. It can obviously just sit there at -10 (or whatever) for a good time before you start shooting (if required). Meant to say, one of my cameras is the ASI533! It's been through plenty of cycles and being cooled for 8-9 hours at a time (for example) and had a few accidental quick warm ups when I've had a software failure. Hope this helps.

I thought I'd come back to this thread as my pair of the Helios 2x40 wide field binos arrived last week and I got a chance to spend an hour or so last night with them. Fundamentally these do what I expected and provide the obvious wide field view of the sky, showing a slighter fainter magnitude of star and bringing everything out a little clearer from my light polluted night sky. I found the FoV to match the claims when you're right up close to the eyecups - just about squeezing in the "big dipper" of Ursa Major. I found similar challenges to the ones already mentioned - there seemed to be a brighter halo around the outer part of the view and setting up the focus meant that they don't fit in the soft case afterwards so a reset is needed each time (minor). I occasionally couldn't get the image to coalesce and saw double - a quick blink or two and it was usually fine though. I got a bit of a shock (which I shouldn't have) when I pulled out my simple Olympus 8x40s (I really like these) and the sky burst into a rich, coloured star field. Of course this would be case but it hit home that I wasn't getting that much extra from the 2x40s over naked eye. Again, repeating some comments above, I guess dark skies would benefit from these more than a light polluted back garden, so I'll keep these in the "toolbox" for another day. As an added bonus, they get a laugh from the family when you're holding them up to your eyes in the house and they look towards you into the objectives 😄

There definitely seems to be a comedy inverse relationship (for the UK anyway!) where more and more cloudy nights means more time in front of a computer potentially buying kit for the clear nights (that never arrive) and for the clear nights... just out there using your existing equipment and not thinking about new stuff!

Beautiful image and just as detailed browsing @ 1:1 What an instrument that Epsilon is for capture (plus your post processing skills of course! 😁) When I saw the brilliant Ha stack in another thread (I think), I was looking forward to more.

@ollypenrice just to clarify, as Atik's site says minimum is 1/1000s, I have this at 0.001s. Can we go shorter? Thanks for the other advice in that post

I have only had a (second hand) 460EX since spring this year so am also just starting out with it. I'm now dithering between each shot as I've only used 300s / 600s so far. I've used the camera with Apt and Voyager without any troubles. I've used Apt to create Dark libraries and Bias frames. As above, Atik states minimum shutter speed of 1/1000 (0.001) seconds, so I used that for Bias. I also use -10 on the cooling due to the mentioned conservative delta and the listed low dark current at -10 (from Atik's tech specs). With the very limited imaging I've done with it, I plan to experiment with the darks / no darks etc. For what it's worth, here's a recent 600s Ha sub @250mm (just STF stretch in PI, 50% resample)

Great image and the video was an added bonus, thanks for posting that too. Really enjoyed the asteroid piece at the end.

I definitely struggle with the same thing. I have to keep a careful eye on the pixel values as "a bit too light" always looks great on my monitor whereas the perceived "just right" for some images looks too dark (but is fine on other screens!)

Great image Dave, to echo Mark's comment on the colours - big range to look at, the more you study it. Lots to like about the 1:1 view too.

Lovely image Mark. Looks like some careful work maintaining the faint stuff in the top left quadrant - great job!

I really like this @david_taurus83 A staggering view of the starfield that I don't always see for this target, either due to star reduction or FoV. Brilliant.

Good write up @wimvb I recently moved from having the PDF only to ordering the printed versions too (prompted by @groberts, thanks). I was finding it a little frustrating working with PDF versions while in the middle of a PI workflow myself. Some interesting comments around InsidePixinsight, especially above from @Ouroboros. I enjoyed this book and used it for reference for a good while, but I found as it got deeper through it, Keller seemed to run out steam as he realised the task ahead of trying to continue to show "inside Pixinsight" and what that actually entailed if he explained most of the processes in detail with examples... so it gets a bit... high level. Mastering PIxInsight, so far, provides that additional information (in both it's PDFs/volumes) I was looking for.