david_taurus83

APT can control multiple cameras on the same PC. Hence my reason for switching back from Ekos to wired connection as going down the dual rig route. Great shot though. I replied to a an ad on ABS about buying a 460 but he never responded. Oh well!

11 minutes ago, FLO said:

PS: It isn’t only ZWO products, we can offer discount for pretty-much any product ordered for collection at the SGL Star Party. If you email us your requirements we will replay with a discount code 🙂

Sweet!

1 hour ago, FLO said:

Grant will have his at the SGL Star Party so feel free to have a look there 🙂

Regarding whether to buy one at the SGL SP or at IAS, we will be at both (at IAS we will be with Ian King on the Ikarus Imaging stall) and will be offering the usual 10% event discount off ZWO products. 

It is good to hear you will be there 😎

Steve 

If one was to avail of this 10% discount, would we have to place the order on the website and add a note to collect or do we buy at the event, SGL SP in my case.

1 hour ago, happy-kat said:

Bats are amazing as are hedgehogs.

Your body and head let off heat that rises and attracts night fliers like little knatts so the bats are swooping and feeding.

A bat literally flew into my head the once. Was walking along a dark road when I was 16 when I heard this flapping for a split second before it flew into my hair! Never ran as fast since then!

+1 for doing things manually. Have you tried to run things through DSS? It gives you a pretty good idea of what's in your data before you go through the intensive PI pre process.

Well, that escalated quickly!

I paired up the Starwave 102 side by side with the WO GT71 last night for some testing. Despite having a couple of hundred quid worth of mounting bar the 2 most definitely did not line up after centering Vega in the FOV of the ASI1600/ED102. I had to use tin foil shims on the side of the GT71 dovetail to nudge it over and a Dunlop Tortex 0.88mm guitar pick under the dovetail to tip the nose down. A 5 pence piece was too thick, I found! Obviously a temporary solution for now. Managed to get the FOV close enough for what I needed. Trained the GT71/ASI178MC at the Pacman last night and ran a plan of 60 x 60s subs at gain 200 and set the ASI1600 to capture 60 x 60s Lum subs, all controlled and dithered by APT. No guiding, obviously. The result below isn't perfect, theres lots wrong with it. The ASI178MC uncooled is definitely not a DSO camera, not without a cooler anyway. Theres lots of amp glow that doesn't calibrate out even though I captured darks at the same temp. So it's still a bit noisy. Not saying I'd stick with this camera for OSC but the idea shows promise I think. Just an hours worth of short exposures and I managed to get a full colour image. With mono only I wouldnt settle for anything less than an hour on each LRGB filter. That would take about 5/6 hours in a single night when you factor in focusing, flipping, dithering, guiding woes etc. We just haven't got the weather and skies here. It's so frustrating having only a couple of hours Lum or Ha on a target and then you have to wait weeks for a clear moonless night to try and add a different filter to it. Might be on the lookout for another OSC camera soon. Need to decide on a modded DSLR or do I get a dedicated astro camera? First thing I need to do is figure out a way to align both scopes a bit more accurately. Not keen on leaving the tin foil in place...

Is there a program of events with times? Talks, exhibitions, food etc. It would appear that the Saturday I have booked also clashes with my an event my mother in law has booked with my other half. We've come to a compromise where I can still come, regardless of weather, but I probably wont get to Lucksall until after 4pm.🤔

On 18/10/2019 at 11:39, emyliano2000 said:

Wow, this looks so good. 

I tried soooo many times the star removal but I never got a good result. 

I have no clue how you guys are doing it. 😢

I have the pixinsight starnet plugin, I have the standalone version too, Annie's action pack in Ps, Straton. Tried them all and I just can't get a good result. 

Would you mind sharing how you are doing it please, do you do it on a stretched or unstretched photo? At what point in the process do you do it? 

And lately I get an error when trying the pix plugin, Check point not found or something like that. 

Emil

Hi Emil. It will only work on a non linear image. So after your main stretch. It wont work on a project you have already started. What I mean is, save the stretched image you want to work on.  Save your project and close Pixinsight. Restart Pixinsight and load the Starnet process first. Now load up the saved image and drag the Starnet instance onto the image. It works well on Ha images as the stars tend to be small. On other images with big stars, bloated stars, halos etc, it will leave artifacts behind.

I'd say yes. I took this with a 600D in August last year. You can just split the red channel after stacking but for this is I split the red channel prior to stacking.

Loads of threads on this already but looking for recommendations. What's good, what's not..

Having a bit of a think about my setup. Currently using a side by side, scope and guidescope. My guiding RMS is typically 0.6 to 0.8 but there can be quite a large peak to peak error. At 336mm the WO 71 is fairly forgiving but at 564mm the AA 102, not so much. Noticing centre stars having funny shapes in the same direction. Also, I'm having this eerie voice in my head telling me to mount 2 scopes with ASI1600 mono on the 102 and a colour camera on the 71. Currently have a 178MC for a guide cam. Could I pair this with the GT71 to collect colour? It has a Sony sensor with small pixels and low read noise. It's the uncooled version. The resolution would be a close match to the 1600/102 combo. Or could get a modded DSLR for the bigger sensor but extra cost and weight.

Anyway, I understand there are a few hurdles to overcome first with an OAG, focus, prism position etc

What's everyone's thoughts? Is there a noticeable improvement with guiding after switching from a guidescope?

17 minutes ago, jimjam11 said:

No, normalised real and scientific notation. They are then directly comparable with the noise evaluation output...

Thanks. I didn't convert the decimal correctly the first time. My results:

1x1 stack, SNR 6.01, FWHM 2.644px: 3.67"

2x2 stack, SNR 10.05, FWHM 1.561px: 4.33"

1x1 stack binned, SNR 9.437, FWHM 1.497px: 4.16"

1x1 subs binned before stacking, SNR 9.439, FWHM 1.495px: 4.15"

So very marginal improvement between binning the subs prior to integration versus binning the integration. It does appear to improve stars and mask the tracking errors. The pixels on the 1600 are small anyway so you only notice the binning if you pixel peep.

10 hours ago, jimjam11 said:

I used this link:

https://pixinsight.com/forum/index.php?topic=7388.0

 

Basically a combination of the Statistics process and Noise Evaluation script...

Thanks. I did try that but I must have been using the wrong figures. Do you set to 16 bit mode in Statistics?

I have taken some images the other night to compare no binning, binning on camera and binning in Pixinsight. The results are just as you've described @vlaiv  I took 40 x 90s L subs of the Crescent Nebula at 59 gain and 60 offset. I took 2 sets, the first at 1x1 and the next at 2x2 on camera.

The on camera binning makes a right pig's ear of things! The stars are horrible and blocky! Wont be doing that again! I also used IntegerResample to down sample the 1x1 stack and I also down sampled the 1x1 subs and then stacked those. Thanks @jimjam11  for that tip about the image container! Made it much easier to batch down sample.

There is clearly an improvement on star size and shape. Running SubframeSelector on the 4 images also shows this with an improvemnt in FWHM and eccentricity. How do you calculate your signal to noise ratios?

That diagram means absolutely nothing in my experience. I get better results if I interpret it the other way..

1 hour ago, Gina said:

Posts in reverse time order may be fine if you're continually reading but otherwise it makes more sense to me to read in the order they were posted.  Sorry but that's the way I think.

I feel the same. Gmail for example infuriates the hell out of me!

1 hour ago, jimjam11 said:

My understanding is that this is not optimal. There is limited benefit to binning cmos at capture time because there is no read noise gain. If you had excellent seeing but captured binned then you are effectively throwing away resolution (especially up at 2.8" pp). You also get more control of the binning by doing it post-capture.

 

(You do of course gain in data volume by software binning but hard disks are cheap)

I dont understand how an increase of x2 SNR is not beneficial?

Unless theres another practical method that Pixinsight doesn't possess, that's a hell of a lot of subs to manually open up and bin. I collected 1200 x 30s subs on a target this year!

Has anyone captured binned data and compared that to the same data, captured at the same time at full resolution but binned in software?

I appreciate the maths might not stack up but isn't the whole idea of the hobby about creating pleasing images to the eye?! What I mean is how does one image look compared to the other?

16 minutes ago, scitmon said:

Will it still have the micro lens diffraction pattern problem for bright objects?

 

It's the Panasonic sensor itself that suffers from the microlensing so yes.

Based on what vlaiv has explained above and what I've read elsewhere, the SNR on a CMOS is increased x 2 so I might just give "on camera" binning a go with my 102mm. I'll still have 2.78" pp resolution.

1 minute ago, wornish said:

I have used Sharpcap for nearly two years now and it is so easy and quick I agree. I thought I would give the Ekos polar align tool a go and see how it does.

What did you end up using ?

Sharpcap lol

Both times I tried the ekos version the final alignment star went off the screen so I gave in and brought my laptop out for Sharpcap with my guide scope. It takes me a few minutes to PA that way. That said, the Ekos version does use the main camera and scope. So might prove very useful if you were guiding via OAG and dont have a separate guide scope. Or if you dont have a laptop to bring to the mount.

*double post*

I use VNCViewer on my phone to control everything. I've had a go at the Ekos PA but found it a bit fiddly compared to Sharpcap.

Thanks. I will have a look at IntegerResample. Would this be best applied to subs prior to stacking? I dont suppose it offers a batch method..

Thanks vlaiv. I kind of get the first bit. CMOS binning does increase signal but it also increases noise by the same amount. Youd still need the same number of subs to overcome the read noise. So no real benifit apart from smaller files.

In your example, the software binned image is on the left and the simple resample (50% down sample?) is on the right, yes? What process did you use to software bin? I resampled an image last night by 50% as the data wasnt good but I was mistaken by thinking this is what you refer to as software binning.

Hoping someone can explain this in a bit more detail without my humble brain crashing. I've seen it mentioned a few times that the ASI1600 CMOS sensor doesn't bin in the same sense as a "traditional" CCD chip where the CCD gives the added increase of SNR. I've always assumed that when I select 2x2 with the ASI1600 that the capture software was "binning" the downloaded image. To my eye, the sub does look brighter and appears to have more detail. But I assume that the noise is also increased so all I've achieved is to make the image smaller with no real increase in SNR. I've seen @vlaiv mention on a few occasions that the subs could be processed as normal at full resolution and then could be resampled later in processing. Are there any steps on how to do this? Any comparison pictures out there? I've seen plenty of chatter about software binning but does anyone regularly use this approach?

Currently, my image scale is 2.33"pp at 336mm and 1.39"pp at 564mm with my 2 refractors so no need to bin there. But I've been thinking about a longer focal length for small targets, galaxies etc. Something along the lines of a 6" RC at 1370mm but with an image scale of 0.57"pp. My guiding would surely be tested at that plus it would be massively over sampling with my rubbish skies. Hence the question at hand.

7 minutes ago, assouptro said:

I can't see anything in there to denote orientation though?

It would appear not