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Forunke

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  1. Managed to acquire about 12h of narrowband data on this target over 2 moonless nights. Shot with the ZWO Asi183 Mono through the Skywatcher 150/750 PDS. 60 subs each of 500s Ha, OIII & SII, added a layer of Ha at 50% as luminance, processed with AstroPixel Processor, Photoshop and TopazDeNoise. Felt like I made a big leap in image quality and in my opinion the best picture I've taken so far. Got a lot of helpful information from fellow photographers which helped a lot.
  2. I imagine you're using something like this? Wall plug to cigarette lighter plug? Or do you use one of those power packs? I wouldn't go to high with the amps on the fuse, the cables might not be suitable for to much amps. Those fuses are usually sold at gas stations or hardware stores (at least here in germany) maybe try that and buy a few 2 amps and 3 amps, to have a spare one until the proper power supply arrives.
  3. Basically anything that says 12V and 3A+ output should work just fine. You could check a few hardware stores if Amazon won't be fast enough. But be sure to check the polarity of the plug! The ZWO needs positive on the inside, negative on the outside as indicated below the power plug. There are power supplies that allow you to switch the plug.
  4. Got some new gear and enough time to image a few nights in a row. This is data from 2 nights, ~60 subs of each Ha, OIII and SII, 300s exposures. Captured with a ZWO Asi183 Mono through the Skywatcher N 150/750 PDS. Stacked and processed in AstroPixelProcessor and Photoshop.
  5. Don't go for less than the gear says it needs, it should theoretically work but only at 1/3 of it's power. You can safely use more Amps. Voltage is supplied, Amps are drawn... Think about it this way: The wall plug has a set Voltage but you can use a phone charger drawing 500mA without frying it or a heater drawing multiple Amps. I use a 12V 5A Power supply on the passthrough of my CEM60 to both feed the 294MC and my focuser. And the mount dosen't really need that much power. It's just 2 motors at a really high gear reduction which gives them the power they need.
  6. Yeah no need for high fps when guiding but the problem was that even at 1.5s exposures it would skip 2 or 3 frames till the next came in. On top of that PHD would frequently loose the star. That lead to some big guide pulses which ruined some frames. But it worked out when using the cam with the webcam settings.
  7. Hi, I bought the Meade LPI-G as a replacement for my previous guidecam. I connected everything during the day and did some testshots through the guidescope with Sharpcap. Up to that point everything seemed fine. But when I setup my rig at night and tried to do polar alignement in sharpcap I noticed the framerate of the camera was about 1fps with an exposure of 250ms. Fiddling with the settings I could sometimes reach 4 fps but stil way to low. I tried binning by 2x2, lowering resolution, 8bit / 12bit, Raw / RGB , no real improvements. I connected via the Ascom drivers I downloaded from meade, aswell as the Meadecam drivers. Both options delivered similar results. At that pooint it was getting dark and I started to guide with the camera. Same problem here. PHD2 would often skip frames because the camera did not manage to take another frame within 1.5s. At this point I thought my USB connection was maybe to slow, but when I fired up SkyCapture, which came with the camera, I get framerates that sound plausible. SkyCapture manages 4fps, Sharpcap only does 0.5fps Any idea what could cause such behavior? Edit: I think I found a workaround: You can connect the camera through the "Windows WDM-style webcam camera" option in PHD2 and choose the "MeadeCam" option. This way PHD2 does not connect through Ascom but through the meade driver itself. Will report back tonight if it improved the framerate. Edit: Setting the camera as webcam did the job. It required some more settings in PHD2 but I managed to get it to work consistently.
  8. Coming back to post some results from playing around with some settings. I managed to stop the image flipping by using Subframes (PHD2, settings, camera, use subframes), which makes me think there's a bottleneck somewhere down my USB3 line. Will have to try the suggested firmware update to see if it helps but ultimately I'll probably switch to ethernet for data transfer. Thanks for all suggestions!
  9. As iwols said, try focussing during daytime then refine the focus on a star. Easiest way would probably be using Sharpcap. Turn down exposure and gain till the image looks like it's not overexposed (basically not white or black), then start with the focus at 0 and see if you can get a somewhat sharp image. Maybe you need to use spacers / adapters if you can't find the focal point.
  10. Well I was thinking about getting a new guidescope... maybe I should just go for a bundle then and use the ASI120 for planetary
  11. So how did you go about guiding then? Another cam? Different software?
  12. Ok, so this is a really annoying bug / problem that I have with my setup: From time to time, in non regular intervals the image my guiding cam (ZWO ASI120) send seems to get flipped / mirrored or looks like it's from a completely different patch of sky. When I'm paying attention to the guide images I can clearly see that the image seems to be flipped in some way. It only happens for 1 frame PHD send a warning ( No star found / Star lost Mass changed) and after that everything is fine again. My gear is all connected to a single USB3 Hub which then runs via powered USB3 cable to my Pc. I'm not binning and have the noise reduction off (though PHD might got hickups while processing) but it still happens. Sometimes there are minutes between two events sometimes it happens 5 times in a row. It also seems like it's only happening during guiding, I haven't seen it happen during calibration yet... I'm completely clueless what's happening or how to get rid of it, any help / idea is greatly appreciated.
  13. No Idea how to scale down the video... hope it's ok Decided to play with one DSLR while the other was shooting... Scope_Timelapse_h264-420_720p_MQ.mp4 ~1h timelapse of my Nikon D5200 imaging through the Omegon Pro RC 203/1624 with a ZWO 120MC on a 50mm guidescope mounted on top of a Skywatcher HEQ5 Pro. Already replaced the D5200 with a ZWO ASI 294MC Pro Color and a stronger mount should arrive in a few weeks.
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