Prolifics

I would presume they were geese. Did you get any close in shots of them?

Its a beautiful image though I really like it. Stunning! have you tried higher gains with narrowband like 200 to 300?

Well done looks great. I love clusters especially when done in 3's. So I will award you 3 out of 3 Keep them coming!

I have been playing with numbers and will be doing 60 x 2 Min of Lum and 15 x 4 mim of RGB just about fit that in the darkness of August month. What formulae do you use for Narrow band? I guess the exposure time is double of RGB but what about the Lum? Another question my scope has a focal length of 700mm and i put this in APT so platesolving will work etc. When I get my x0.79 Flattener/Reducer do I put into my programs the new focal Length for example 700mm x 0.79 = 553mm ? This is the link to small spacers to get my backfoucs perfect I just need 1mm + or - https://www.365astronomy.com/baader-t-2-delrin-setting-rings-adjustment-spacer-rings-15-pieces.html Kindest regards David

Haha -30 to keep everything constant -1 and im already dead! Do your cables freeze up rigid in -30 + that must be a problem. Maybe a small wooden hand made shed with sliding roof would stop that add +15c to the temp I would make sure its all greased up well so really then you don't really need a cooler only to keep it constant. Bit like why you need a freezer up there in winter not to keep it cool but to stop everything from freezing. I guess in midwinter you can image for 17 hours of the day? Thanks for the link I will check that now. I am away Tuesday for a week so catch up with you then hopefully. Cheers David

Thanks for explaining the exposure times for each filter. I was doing it half right. I always do double the Luminance amount but didn't relise about the RGB impact in light gathering. Now it all makes sense. Regarding Backfocu I will have 56mm I need 57mm so I bought some 1mm 1.5mm 0.75mm etc Baader adjustment rings so I can play with that. What is the best way to test your Flatterner? Guessing I would say take a 3 minute exposure of Luminance? Check for elongated stars at the edges and adjust back focus from there? My garden is a Bortle 5 site magnitude is around 20.27 for me. So not terrible. I guess where you are is great because you get less daylight than anyone else Plus the cooler conditions means less noise and I guess the northern lights or Aurora may hinder you at time? I also have a friend who lives up there in the north of Sweden. Kindest regards David

Hi Andy I got one of these last month. I got fed up going out all the time to refocus for my filters. Comes with many springy metal adapters to fit your scope took me about 30 minutes to install it. Smooth as silk and can get better fine focus than by hand. Works flawlessly with APT. Make sure you downlaod the driver from their ZWO website and alter the ascom driver settings not on APT or SGP as driver overides it for me. You do not get a PSU with it! Any positive centre 12v power supply will do with 1.5A rating or above. If you want to go the extra mile go and fill in the backlash boxes you can determine backlash by movng the focuser until you see movement of your focus knobs one way then lower the amount from 10 to 1 and move the other way and record the Focus number just before it moves. This is your backlash. Mine is set to 8 units. My HWFM and HDR values are just around 1.3 wasn't acheivable before by hand. Looks great on my scope (white). Would look great on black scope too, but not sure about bright red on blue or orange (Old Celestron). A worthy addition to my setup that now I can not live without. Go for it! I left you some pictures... Kindest regards David

Can post at cost!

Thanks Wim for that. You can see its like day and night compared to the one without darks. You have even got some of the black nebulae out from it even with only 2.2 hours of data. Not sure what to try next. I think its expreminent with gain next. Raising the from 1 Min to 3 Min exsposures will help bring a sharper and more detailed image as my tracking is good. Plus my Focul reducer/Flatterner will improve things. I also took 3 minute dark frames today while I did the 60 second ones Not sure what the white foggy stuff is? Did you set the black levels and grey and white levels? I know its zoomed in alot so will show a lot more noise and imperfections. Looking forward to any tips you may have. Thanks David

I just finally spent out and bought https://www.365astronomy.com/ts-optics-photoline-2-0.79x-4-element-reducer-and-field-flattener-corrector-for-astrophotography.html Cheaper than Pixinsight I did speak to my friend Zoltan there and he said I may be getting Vigneting because of the backspace 2 inch going to a 1.25 cone and into back of my scope. Thats the adapters that came with my filter wheel and camera. So not only will this fix that but is a matched flattener for my scope and 0.79 reducer. So the Flattener should stop the elongated stars at the far left and right of my shots. Also the Reducer will lose 20% of my size because of the reduction of focal length but will gain x1.6 exposure time. Turning my F6.5 to a F5.13 I am away all of next week so I will keep you updated somewhere on this forum with the results Would be nice to compare the new data with the old if you get 10 minutes. Have a good weekend. Regards David

Hi Wim, I managed to do the darks same temperature gain offset and exposure time as my lights. I may have found something else I was doing wrong. I was using the same master flat frame for each colour. This time I done them all seperate. I have replaced the files and re-uploaded them. All with 30 frames of lights and 60 darks. I also saved them in 32 bit Tiff format as to not lose any data. Hopefully you will have time to look at these and see if its the darks not being added has caused this problem or something else I need to work on. https://www.dropbox.com/sh/skqoxrbe5huosg4/AAAdQ_UEP0XsX0S0b6oBPiiKa?dl=0 Kindest regards David

Thank you for that. My flats are taken with APT with an ADU of 25000. Using a lit flat panel and a white T-shirt. I am not using a flattener yet. Any suggestions? I will take some darks tomorrow remake all the LRGB files again in Deepskystacker and see how that does. Then I will know for sure. Regards David

Thats basically what I do when I stack. I don't use bias frames as apparently my Cmos camera dosn't need them. I have been doing 1 min exposures. I think it may be better aiming for 3 minute ones to bring in more stars. I still need to work with the gain and see whats best on certain objects.

Wish I could afford that program My stars are not sharp and numerous like other pictures. I think it's more exposure time and gain settings that you were saying. Any good pointers would be appreciated but first I need to know if its my data or my post processing. I think its both Cheers for looking at it for me! Oh by the way there are no dark frames yet only flats. I still havent took them Kindest regards David

Hi Wim, I think I am a little out of focus but here is a link to my stacked LRGB files it would be nice to see what you can get from it, to see if my data is any good. https://www.dropbox.com/sh/skqoxrbe5huosg4/AAAdQ_UEP0XsX0S0b6oBPiiKa?dl=0 Regards David