discardedastro

Hi, Am after a Nexus DSC (ideally Pro version) and/or encoders suitable for same and mounting on a Dobsonian mount.

Hi all, So I'm now the proud (and sore - it's heavy!) owner of an OOUK VX16 400mm Dobsonian, and am now learning how to use it and figuring out all the things I need to add on to make it really usable in my environment - but would appreciate some advice from other Dob owners! I managed to get a first light tonight - lots of cloud about so it was a bit hit and miss but I managed to collimate fairly well and look at some bright stars. Defocused, tube currents were very, very obvious - I'd kept it outside in a shed for half the day but it was still clearly a bit warm (the back of the mi

It really is I came in at the start of the Pentium era, though had a fair bit of time on Amstrad and friends prior, but no coding. i386 was my first chip - we've come a long way! If shipping all the image data around wasn't so prohibitive for most people I think there'd be a huge case for a render-farm style service for PixInsight and others; it's bursty, not something all users do all at once, so quite well suited to workload sharing. I did toy with the idea of using an AWS virtual desktop instance for PI (pay by the hour when you need it), but since I did my last PC upgrade I've not n

True. The latest PI release with the quick subframe previewing has helped a lot in my workflow for that sort of thing, particularly noise reduction - but things like TGVDenoise, MureDenoise, and Deconvolution are still very processor intensive with poor previewability (and in the case of deconv particularly a lot of trial and error required on most images).

It's actually not quite as good - the platform doesn't extend far enough to fully support the base! It's a 3-in-one so you can lie it down and use it as a platform, and it has some other weird configurations I've not played with yet. 16" is quite a lot to lug around as one person, especially in a very non-flat garden, but I managed to set up a base for it with some spare paving stones and park it in the shed without dropping anything - I think a Telegizmos 365 cover is in this scope's future so it can sit out most of the time. That's an absolute beauty. Congratulations - that im

Yep - I normally just have KStars sat on the graph view so I can keep an eye on things. Once I've finished writing this Rust INDI lib I'm hacking away at (or give up and fix some of the pure-Python ones) I do want to hook up a watchdog program that can alert me if imaging or the mount stops - I've had one too many kstars crashes on overnight imaging sessions!

FWIW, I'd consider myself PixInsight competent/familiar and WBPP confused the hell out of me - it relies on a lot of stuff in filenames etc which is pretty unobvious and the documentation isn't great! I'd strongly recommend starting out with the Inside PixInsight book and/or doing manual processing to get started. It'll be slower and less straightforward but it's a much easier way to learn the software than running straight into WBPP, in my view.

Quite likely, yep. For what it's worth I use KStars on a Pi remotely via VNC and it's plenty quick enough in my experience (I actually run VNC'd into a Pi4 sat in the house which is running KStars, with INDI running on another Pi4 which is strapped to the back of the telescope). This is with everything wired through a good 1Gbps network, though!

Yeah, excellent point - full frame I would argue demands a pretty high-end PC, realistically. Technically so long as you've got a reasonable amount of RAM you can get away with a lot, but practically it's really painful. I've got some images off a Nikon Z6 which is 6048x4024 natively and I think if I were doing an awful lot of that, I'd be looking at something Threadripper based with 64G or more RAM, especially for mosaics! The ASI183MM I'm using today is reasonably high resolution but since it's monochrome the resulting files aren't huge, and once you've got an LRGB master set the processing

You should be able to set this up on the imaging sequence by selecting upload to remote only and inputting the path there or in the camera settings under the Options tab, at least on recent-ish KStars. If you've got a reasonably fast (wired) network then you'll likely find it doesn't win you that much performance - I think KStars will still pull the image down from the remote end in order to show it and do any analysis (e.g. HFR for automatic focus triggers), so saving it locally isn't a big overhead.

The bats are decorative (we've got pipistrelles living in the outside of the house, so thematically accurate) and the BBC Club sign was rescued from Television Centre before it closed for good Definitely looking forward to first light - which looks like it might be this evening, if I'm lucky!

Alright, so the postman didn't bring this, I had to go get it myself - but still worth a post I think! OOUK VX16 from @Commanderfish now being checked over, tweaked, and roughly collimated after a 2h drive up. Bit of play in the focuser to sort and the mirror cell wants a fan fitting, but otherwise good to go and a superb "little" scope I'm looking forward to trying out!

If you're on Uist then some friends up the north end of things have good internet - up on Berneray. BT did FTTC to the islands as part of their government-funded builds (though failed to actually connect it up till a few competitors started pointing out they hadn't actually delivered anything to people), but there's also a lot of fixed wireless stuff back to the mainland which is pretty quick! http://sealview.com/gettinghere.html Last time I was up there I wasn't really doing astro stuff, but knowing how populous it is (my friend had to go to Lewis to do their driving test because it

Do they work well in darkness without IR? I've got a fair few Reolinks and they're practically useless with their IR switched off, even if the manual exposure is maxed out.

Try this: sudo systemctl disable gpsd.sock To explain a little more - both gpsd.service and gpsd.sock are things provided by gpsd to systemd, which will ensure that all the dependencies for the service/socket are met. That includes, if you just disable the service, bringing it back to ensure the socket is available. If it's still booting up then try systemctl list-dependencies --reverse gpsd.service - this will tell you what is dependent on it and bringing it up.

Ah, around the focuser? I did consider that I had some light leakage from a nearby light and packed the gap between tube and focuser base (as mine had some gaps) with Sugru, and the opposing side of the tube is flocked, so maybe that's helping minimise ingress.

Seeing your image there I'm now realising that I'm probably actually seeing the same thing in my imaging. I'd noticed in some geometries - generally lower altitudes - I was picking up a bar across the image. Nowhere near as severe as that, though - it was only when I stacked things I picked it up, and I was able to generally correct it with some careful background correction, but the same basic artifact. I've only had it rarely and it wasn't the end of the world so I hadn't dug into it properly. I am using an IR cut filter (mostly just to have a parfocal filter with my RGB) as my L, so al

Edit: Interesting, I can't post to this with some content... I don't suppose the LX200 will be returning GPS data in a format that gpsd can take advantage of anyway, so I'd disable it. If you want a GPS, then USB GPS devices that work with Linux can be had for <£20 on eBay or even Amazon et al. gpsd can be forced to look at a specific serial port and not autodetect with a startup parameter, normally configured in etc default gpsd. Otherwise systemctl disable gpsd would do the trick, so long as you've got an internet connection for time. For good time sync, gpsd can do basic c

Yes: https://astronomy.tools/calculators/magnification However in practice sensible maximums are going to depend a lot on what you're observing!

Going second-hand for PC parts can work well but you do need to be very careful - there is an incredible amount of fakes, misrepresentation, and scams on PC parts on eBay. I'd definitely avoid hard disks (SSDs probably fine) on eBay as many will have had a rough life. Even things like RAM are somewhat reliant on people having proper ESD control etc to avoid damage. The scam/fakes side of things is much worse if you're buying relatively new bits, too. GPUs in particular are incredibly sought-after on the second hand market at the moment because of lack of supply (most retailers have waiting lis

Very impressive for Bortle 5/6! You've got a bit of background which could get cancelled out with some processing, and colours look a bit blueish - suspect this is a side effect of processing to remove sodium glow? You might want to have a play with masks to protect the brighter light sources. But very nicely done. Focus is spot on! Hope you don't mind but I had a little play in PI to try and bring out some colour - results attached. The data's really good - I did one which I just did a background subtraction, solved the image, corrected colour balance with PhotometricColorCorrection

I'll leave the Canon discussion to the experts, but if you're thinking about imaging deep space objects then do consider a dedicated astro camera. Secondhand cooled CMOS/CCD cameras can be had for £500 or less sometimes depending on how old a sensor you can tolerate, and will have a much lower noise floor than any DSLR for long exposures. But obviously they're not any use in daytime, so not necessarily the best bang for buck depending on what you want to do! They do also have the advantage of an unfiltered sensor window and easier software control/integration with common software. If you

Yep, udev rules should fix this. You will want to make sure that autodetection is turned off and you explicitly select the port, or you can still get collisions if drivers end up connecting or trying to connect to the wrong thing at start time.

For me, PI was night and day compared to a lot of the other tools out there. You will need "Inside PixInsight" as the missing user manual, but it does exist and a wide range of excellent tutorial content is available online also. It has a steep learning curve but is definitely best in class for the low-level bits (from calibration up to integration) and I would argue is best in class for a lot of the "post" processing like colour calibration, deconvolution, etc. It's definitely the tool to use if you want to make every little bit of your data work its hardest! Photoshop, Affinity etc are

Focal length, i.e. the mm number on your lenses.