ZiHao

Excellent image! Always looking forward to your widefield images.

Stunning!

Which type of grease do you guys use on your equatorial mount? I have one WD-40 multipurpose but it seems to be corrosive as far as I know. Superlube seems like a popular choice but are there any other choices? I found that WD-40 have a lot of options, one says it contains PTFE and another one is called WD-40 Specialist High Perfomance White Lithium Grease. Any good?

I found this:

https://www.lazada.com.my/products/lucas-white-lithium-grease-8oz-i774798801-s1763476022.html?spm=a2o4k.searchlist.list.3.2bc412b98hEUbu&search=1

I wanted to do this long time ago but just don't have the skills required. Due to the recent failures and problems of my mount tracking such as long delay after pressing one of the slew buttons, weird noises when beginning to slew, very bad sidereal tracking and more. I know most of this happened because the payload of this mount is already exceeded, but I wonder whether applying new grease and dismantling it will improve the situation. Do you guys think it is worth the effort doing all this? Or if any of you have experience with stripping down a EQ3 Pro mount or similar designs? I found this http://www.astro-baby.com/heq5-rebuild/heq5-m1.htm

Thanks in advance and stay safe.

This is the third day of Malaysia's lockdown after the restricted movement order that has been announced few days ago. I decided to reprocess my very recent and only data set in the file during this extended school holiday. Found it to be 35% better than the original version as it has a wider view and is much less yellowish. Do tell me regarding the galaxy's colour on your screen as it looks a bit purple on my computer and white on my phone. This was stacked on APP and processed on PS. Advice or comments on the noisy data would be very welcome!

Equipment: Skywatcher 150/750, D5300, EQ3 Pro

Total integration time: 450x20s --> 2.5 hours

Stay safe everyone.

This 2.5 hours of data was collected on two separate sessions - 22/2 and 23/2. Each sub is just 20s but stars were not perfectly round still. But I was quite pleased with the final result due to the limitations of the equipment used. This image was heavily cropped because of the gradients or some weird cloudy bands on the left side of the galaxy. Subs were stacked on APP and processed on PS. Taken with D5300, SW150/750 under Bortle 8 skies.

Same camera and mount here! Gr8 image 👍

Acquired 90 minutes of data before 2019 ends. This target was also taken around the same time last year but with 40 minutes integration time only, giving me a hard time to bring out the fainter nebulosity. This time, with twice amount of data and good sky condition, I hope I didn't push the image too hard.

SW150/750, EQ3 Pro, D5300

30 seconds exposure

Processed in DSS, APP, PS

Great image. Especially the tidal tail, really is an interesting feature to see.

Sun taken from 60280 guidescope, ASI120MC. Background with D5300 at 18mm, panorama merged on PS.

Can sunspots be so faint that my camera couldn't even capture?🤣 Captured with ASI120MC, 60280 guidescope with seymour solar film, pretty sure the focus was decent.

14 hours ago, davew said:

Wow. That looks really good. I presume you used a static tripod ?

Lovely result from only 15 second frames with your kit lens. They work quite well I see

Dave.

Yep it is static tripod. Thanks!

D5300 with 18-55mm

13 × 15 seconds, ISO1600

APP, PS

It was actually the rainy season here in West Malaysia but nonetheless I participated in an astronomy camp with my high school friends. Fortunate enough, the sky clears at around 3am and we saw a few bright meteors from Leonids as well. Great session.

Rework to the original image. Slightly amplified the saturation of the moon to bring up the hidden colors. BTW this image is also one of the submissions to a Malaysia astrophotography contest so if you are interested to vote and look at other images, search up Astronomical Society of Penang on Facebook

16 hours ago, wimvb said:

@vlaiv is right on the money. You used flats that didn't properly calibrate the lights. This causes weird vignetting and leaves dust bunnies. You also have walking noise, the noisy streaks in the background. These can be reduced by using cosmetic correction and playing with the kappa rejection settings. The only sure way to remove this pattern is by dithering; move the mount in a random direction some 12 - 15 pixels between exposures.

The bortle 8 sky doesn't help either; it causes gradients and a lot of noise. Once you remove the light pollution by adjusting the background, you're left with the light pollution noise. If you image from a site with light pollution, you need to increase the total integration time. For each hour of integration time from a magnitude 20 site, you need 2.5 hrs from a mag 19 site, 6.25 hrs from a mag 18 site, etc.

I downloaded your master file, and to me it seems underexposed. I would expect to see more stars in the unstretched image. What was your single sub exposure time? Did you use a light pollution filter?

I first did a polar alignment on PHD2 using my guiding rig and everytime after polar alignment, I wouldn't even try guiding on an EQ3 pro and instead went for the 30seconds maximum exposure sidereal rate tracking. Next time I'll try the settings on DSS to eliminate the walking noise and of course don't be lazy to take flats...

Single sub exposure time is 30 seconds only and no light pollution filter was used. Gonna save up for HEQ5 and that will probably help a lot compared to my bare minium setup right now. Thanks for your help.

Stacked in DSS, processed in APP and PS. 3 hours of integration time under bright skies and calibrated with 100 bias, 15 bad flats. Didn't really expect that simple equipment could yield decent (for me) image using 30 seconds exposure, quite satisified with the result. Hope you enjoy.

On 03/09/2019 at 04:19, vlaiv said:

I have to say that this is beyond me ... I have no clue what might be causing this - it is possible that flats are to blame.

You said that you used old flats? If you remove camera from the scope or change focus or anything - old flats are not going to work. Also need to do proper calibration - which includes darks or at least bias.

I tried fixing things, and there is simply no way to fix the above. Concentric rings look like some sort of issue with vignetting - possibly due to use of old flats and wrong calibration.

Interestingly enough green channel does not have this issue - only red (I did not check the blue one).

Thanks for helping anyway! It is calibrated with 100bias and 15 flats, old flats which might be the problem here. I have 4 hours of dumbbell nebula with me now so I will try to stack them with and without flats.

12 minutes ago, Rush said:

Can u upload a stacked image right out of APP or DSS. Not touchiing the saturation silder ?

CS

https://www.dropbox.com/s/zv6m8a9vvmon0xo/done.TIF?dl=0

5 hours ago, bottletopburly said:

Is your setup permanent? Otherwise new session new flats , did you take darks  too , 

Nope, I guess I will take a new set of data some day. I am using a non-cooled DSLR, so I guess darks wouldn't help much as the temperature doesn't match?

3 hours ago, vlaiv said:

Not sure if the issue is with flats.

Inspect your subs - you might have couple of them with high altitude clouds creating uneven background.

Removed 70 subs with a red tint on the corner, and it helps a bit. Now the final image is surrounded by a circular red ring. Need more data next time. Attached is the final image, darkened the image to conceal the red colour in the background.

Tried my best to pull out what I have from 2.5hours of data but it still looks very bad! Stacked in APP and edited on PS. As I neutralize the background with PS using black point dropper, all the noise popped out, and further edits with the image doesn't really help. Maybe because the flats taken are not effective enough (I was reusing the flats taken last time), I will try to take new flats to remove the new bust bunnies if possible. 

It's New Moon! Will have 2 clear nights here according to Clear Outside and hoping to shoot two or more objects in a Bortle 8. I have M31, M27, NGC7331 in my list. I think this will work pretty well with my D5300 as I am intending to shoot around 5 hours on each of the two DSOs, 30 seconds for each exposure. What are your recommended targets?

4 hours ago, smr said:

As John said that's very impressive considering.

Which camera is it ? Scope? Light pollution filter used?

 

SW150/750, EQ3 pro and D5300, no light pollution filter was used.

About 2 hours of data with 20 bias and flat frames. Stacked in APP and processed in PS. Photographing nebulas in a Bortle 8 area with an unmodified DSLR and heavy setup on a light mount can be really challenging...

Thanks for the compliment! BTW, am I reaching the limit of the image quality for my setup for planetary imaging? As the seeing yesterday was pretty good, and the procedure of processing the planets are very similar every time as well I guess and the only way to bring out better images is higher magnification and bigger scopes, of course, and during opposition. Does stacking more frames help for planets? On Autostakkert, stacking 10% of the frames seems to be better than stacking 75%. Any advice for getting more details? Considering that the focus and collimation of the setup is decent.

Attached are Jupiter and Europa, Saturn, Copernicus Crater. All taken with ASI120MC, SW150/750 and 2x Barlow.