MikeWilson

Will this work with a Celestron Nexstar SE handset?

Fantastic news!

I've had something similar, too and resolved it with a D-Link powered USB 2.0 hub. (It had to be 2.0 as 3.0 played silly buggers with EQMOD).

Hello all, Does anyone have a Skywatcher Star Adventurer kit (and Ball Head Adapter, Wedge, Polarscope and Counterweight) for sale? WHY? Thanks! Mike

From these pictures, it seems your mount is doing rather well but it's hard to say... We'd need to see some 100% crops (at near pixel-resolution) and a PHD guiding graph to say.

I get random sparkly bits on my images too. I better check for tinsel and string!

I've decided that I really like PI. The tutorials are great and it's able to align some fairly distorted frames quite well using the 2-D splines alignment algorithm. PI is well worth it, although there's a lot of crossover between the various tools; Maxim, PI, AstroArt, etc. I suppose it all depends on what you're doing and how you work. I'm still using Nebulosity 3 for image acquisition as I really like the easy interface, especially for focusing. What I don't like about Nebulosity 3 is that it's got no interface (and the scripting is a bit hit & miss) for image capture sequencing. I'd quite like to see something like Sequence Generator Pro in there, but for the time being I'm rolling up a sequence in Notepad each time I want to image something. And I forgot to take darks in 2x2 bin, so there are no darks for the RGB portion of this image. Now to figure out how to add the Ha data into the LRGB's red channel to bring out the nebulosity in the galaxy! Thanks for your feedback on the show More to come!

Do give PI a go; I recommend before you trial it (since the trial is very restrictive - i.e. if you install and don't get around to trialling it you don't get another go beyond the first 45 days) that you have at least one tutorial that you like the look of ready to go with your image data. I pretty much followed the LRGB processing tutorial steps/workflow to make this image. I'm glad that you're enjoying the show. There's more episodes to come!

Thanks, the second process is so much better. I used PixInsight which feels to me like a collection of Photoshop Actions on steroids. Even with my non-existent PixInsight skills I was able to produce an image that is better than I could with Photoshop. Although I had to use NoiseNinja afterwards as I don't understand the noise reduction techniques in PixInsight yet. The 2020 Astro podcast is back Episode 17 was out last weekend which is on image processing. Mike

Updated process using PixInsight. I'm still learning, it's a monster of a tool.

Thanks Mr Sulaco, sir. Glad to be of help Pete: Did you find a solution? Was it simply a focus issue? Mine is like each channel is slightly >distorted< - it hasn't been a problem with narrowband but with RGB I'm a bit skewed. I'm wondering if it's focus-related somehow but it probably won't matter for a binned RGB layer if it's blurred a bit. The higher resolution luminance gets the correct amount of each colour so it's worth it in the end. I'm just getting to grips with PixInsight, so I'll post another version up later when I've managed to figure out a slight problem I've got with the LRGB recombination. Cheers, Mike

Welcome back, Andy!

Thanks Pete, Those halos; it's my alignment. I just can't get a decent alignment of the RGB channels. It's been a problem for me of the last two years - so I'm going to see if PixInsight can do a better job aligning the RGB channels so that there's not a bit of each colour sticking out at various places. A gaussian blur would probably help here too.

All good images; it's a lovely M33

Oh yeah, I even left the 2" IDAS LPF on the end of the imaging train - in front of all of the filters. I guess I can probably remove it now and wished I'd remembered to do that before I took this image!