david_taurus83

Theres a little arrow penciled onto the edge of the filters showing which way to point them. I have the same set by the way. Very close to parfocal. Only issue I've found is the halos on bright stars with the OIII. Regarding the L or C, I believe the L has UV and IR cut where the C is just that, a Clear filter that passes all wavelengths. Personally I shoot with the L and my LPS is permanently mounted in front of the flattener. Even for narrowband. To remove it means taking the image train apart. So i just shoot longer subs lol

These are clearly the results of Skynet's early experimentation with its Quantum Field Generator.

I setup my laptop about 6m from my scope in the hallway one night and loaded a blank black screen on Autocad. I generated a hatched area with small dots to replicate stars. I twiddled and tweaked all night trying to get a perfect flat field. Looking at the actual field test results I got on the second page below, I wish I'd left the bloody thing alone after that compared to what I'm currently getting in the corners!!! Its a road to madness! I'd rather image the Squid Nebula! https://stargazerslounge.com/topic/325405-field-flatness-of-refractor/

Did you install the latest drivers for the ZWO camera prior to connecting it to your PC?

What did the old laptop have?

Take your flat dark frames, integrate them into a master flat dark. Exactly the same as your longer dark frames. Then in image calibration of the flat frames, in the master dark tab, select your master flat dark and apply to your flats. The same as you select a master dark and apply to your lights. Once the flats have had the master flat dark subtracted, you stack the new calibrated flats into a master flat for use on your lights.

I think you've got some really nice data there considering its just over an hours worth. You are probably pushing the limits of the flattener with your 6D but apart from the corners and edges the stars look nice and round. I stacked in DSS with the standard settings and I got something similar to your stack with just the light frames. I set the star detection slider to 89% and ticked the box to reduce noise. This gave me a figure of around 250 stars. It might sound silly but you didn't accidentally mix your flat frames into the light frames tab? I don't know whats happened your stack above with calibration frames! I done a quick process in Pixinsight. The difficulty with this object is its within a dense starfield so it kind of washes out the nebulosity. We are used to seeing beautiful narrowband images of this but Ha and OIII filters really make the supernova material stand out. I've never been good at processing OSC images but I've managed to reduce the stars a bit. I reckon if you were to add another 3 or 4 hours worth you'd have a brilliant image with a bit of careful processing! Autosave.tif

Well just when I thought I had everything nailed down, issues and drama. I had trouble with the ASI1600. If i interrupted the imaging plan for whatever reason, Kstars would freeze and hang. I was running off the laptop and connected to the RPi via my home network. Also a couple of occasions where the image download froze. I switched to VNC and worked off the RPi itself but again, issues with image downloads and Kstars would shut its down on the Pi. See a couple of test images. Its like 2 images in 1. Clouds ruined anything i could capture anyway so hence the reason for no detail. Meridian flip also failed. I had set it to 0.2 hours past the flip. It initiated after an image was captured but the mount didnt move. The image plan then restarted but again Kstars froze and I had to shut everything down and restart. Running the latest version 3.3.3 on both Linux laptop and RPi.

Is it the older type 120MM? They can have issues with Windows 10 and/or USB3 PC's. Mine worked great on a Win7 USB2 laptop but it wouldnt work correctly on a newer laptop so I had to upgrade.

That single sub looks really good. Is it unstretched? Your data looks good so something is going wrong with your DSS settings. I use the standard settings in DSS but I do adjust the slider to detect just over 100 stars. You could post a link to your data on here and see if anyone else gets the same result in DSS.

Are there any more reviews/opinions of these new 4.5nm OIII filters? They seem very well priced. Heres a single (stretched) 15 minute sub with the standard 8.5nm OIII. The halo is bad enough so can imagine what 20 x stacked will look like.

I bet you could get a 12v cable and Sharpcap subscription for less than £25! I dont own either but I've read the right hand side amp glow, even though it looks extreme, calibrates out just fine. Not seen many example images of the Altair. What is the benefit of 4gb of buffer?

Bookmarking this page so I can watch this evening, thanks!

Are they on a dark frame of the same length?

If you set the pulse guiding rate to 0 then it wont guide at all? It will just track at sidereal. Try setting it to 0.5.

I was going to suggest a nice wide field shot of Antares region but prob a bit too low in the sky here.

Thanks, your correct. I've just re-read the first page: There are no longer non-electric pitches available (last year only one was booked so this year everything is electric).

I'm trying to book for the Saturday but cant see the option for electric hook up? Are they all sold out?

Where are you on holiday and what gear are you using?

Ok. I'd only press Sync once in CdC. By pressing it in APT as well you may have added a second alignment point to EQMod on the same position which might confuse things. I plate solve and sync in APT but if I was aligning on stars, planets or the moon I'd sync in CdC. It shouldnt matter which one you use as both just give an alignment point to EQMod and that's what points the scope. But I wouldnt sync twice on the same target.

Do you have Sharpcap Pro? It has a Samrt Histogram routine where it will take images of your sky conditions and recommend some exposure times, gain and offset settings based on your cameras read noise. It's very good. I have used it to determine that around 90s at a gain close to or around unity is good for LRGB where I am and around 10 minutes for narrowband. It tends to recommend a low offset for the ASI1600. I ignore this and set offset to 60 and gain at unity 139. Saves doing loads of different darks. Before you use it you need to run a routine to measure your cameras read noise. Tenner for the year and takes the guesswork out of things. And you get the best polar alignment method available that works in a couple of minutes! Set yourself an hour aside and have a watch of Robin's talk at the Practical Astronomy Show earlier this year.

Are you talking about Carte du Ciel? How many alignment points did you do? Edit: Just reread your comment. Did you align and press Sync in Cdc and APT for the same target?

I have the Pixinsight book and I can tell you the pre processing tutorial in that is virtually the same as the LVA website. The only thing I skip now is the LocalNormalisation and Drizzle steps as they take soooooo long. I have a set of pre process icons saved now so just load them up and pre process. All the settings are saved. Speeds things up.

I find my phone screen gives a better representation of my processed images. Sometimes I'll put the jpeg on my phone and go back to processing if I think I can improve. Nice Eagle btw 👍

Theres just so much more signal in Ha so your really swamping the noise. Not so much with Oiii and Sii so it looks more grainy. I've taken 15 minute subs with the ASI1600 at -20 and the stacked Ha literally needs no noise reduction. But 15 minute Oiii is still noisy.