TerryMcK

Some ZWO cameras have an anti reflection coating applied to the sensor window but I don’t believe they have a UV filter.

Yes it looks like a hair on the sensor to me too. I had one appear on my 400D and had to set the camera to hold up the mirror then opened the shutter. Then I saw it clearly in view. I blow with a can of compressed air dislodged it.

Yes it is a great combination. I use it on a WO ZS103. I think it may be good up to 1000mm focal length of main scope. Maybe beyond.

I like all of them. The SHO ones really pop though. The trunk is showing up really well.

A core I3 is going to be really slow when processing. Also the disk is very small. You may be better with something like a coreI5 or I7 and plenty of RAM.

Great framing. It should end up a fine picture with plenty of detail.

Yes. All my refractors have metal dew shields and the dew straps work great on all of them. I put them in the vicinity of the lens cell for best results.

I was on a live Pixinsight course for Newbies last night being run by the MastersOfPixinsight website guys (Warren Keller, Dr. Ron Brecher and Pete Proulx). It used Gotomeeting and was a good experience. A bit like Zoom. I learnt quite a bit I didn't know - the course being extremely informative. So I decided to reprocess some old data from June of the Bubble Nebula. Pixinsight used for everything apart from the watermark which was by Photoshop CC 2020. Telescope: William Optics ZenithStar 103 with x0.8 field flattener/reducer Camera: ZWO ASI183MCPro OSC Filter: Altair Astro Triband Mount: Skywatcher HEQ5 Pro Rowan belt mod. 97 x 240 seconds guided subs - total time 6.46 hours total I think it looks a bit pink and the background extract needs a bit more work. But not bad for a first attempt using solely PI.

I think I have both of my lakesides set at 100 in EKOS for initial movement. I found it can't go further than 999 ticks in one go though - if you set it to move 1000 it disconnects - I reported this on the INDI forum a while back. My backlash is also set at around 70 and I fixed the motor/gearbox to the coarse side of the focuser on both scopes.

Yes no and yes. It will work ok on firecapture.

Thanks all - I like the colour combination too as it is something different. I think it needs some more work to smooth out the background and will post any updates into this thread. I use Photoshop for post processing and APP for pre-processing but PI needs some serious looking at to get the most out of it. However I have a Pixinsight online course tonight 22/09/2020 with MastersOfPixInsight at 7PM. I find I have only scratched the surface of what can be done with PI. @Adreneline Adrian I can really recommend Topaz DenoiseAI as it produces great results as long as you don't over do it. Experiment with automode and also play around with manual settings as sometimes it can create unexpected artifacts in auto mode.

The weather overnight 21/09/2020 to 22/09/2020 was not supposed to be good with reference to the local weather forecast. Well Owain was wrong (if you live in north west England you will know who he is) and I managed to get 6 full hours of Ha, SII and OIII data on the area known as Fleming's Triangle also known as Pickering's Triangle. I didn't lose one sub. I have initially processed it using AstroPixelProcessor, Pixinsight, Topaz Denoise and Photoshop. Ha mapped Red, SII mapped green and OIII mapped blue. Telescope: William Optics Zenithstar 103 with x0.8 reducer/flattener Camera: ZWO ASI 183MM Pro - Gain 111 Offset 8 Mount: Skywatcher HEQ5 Pro with Rowan Belt Mod. Ha 40 x 180 seconds, SII 40 x 180 Seconds, OIII 40 x 180 Seconds. Total exposure time 6 hours

You need long exposures for any nebula as they are very faint. 3.2 seconds is not very long. You would need to mount the camera on a polar aligned tracking mount to prevent the stars from blurring and take longer exposures.

I've just watched Dylan's latest video called "Take A Photo Of A Planet in the Day". In it he mentions confusing his sarcasm with instruction when viewing the sun at position 1:25. I think he may be reading this thread or alternatively has had feedback on his other social media platforms.

Yes it does indeed Mark. I'm hoping to get the triangle soon, which is just a bit lower down in the image, but will probably have to input the coordinates manually into EKOS as it doesn't appear to have its own catalog number. I believe from messing around with Sequence Generator Pro you can enter coordinates. I'm hoping it is possible with EKOS and it follows through to ASTAP plate solving.

Image captured 21/09/2020 Telescope: William Optics ZS103 with x0.8 field flattener Camera: ZWO ASI 183MM Pro Filters: Ha, SII and SIII Mount Skywatcher HEQ5 Rowan Processed with: AstroPixelProcessor, Pixinsight and Photoshop CC 2020 36 x Ha 180 seconds, 40 x OIII 180 seconds, 40 x SII 180 seconds all at gain 111 and offset 8 - Total imaging time 5.8 hours

I enjoyed the talk but look forward to the recording to watch again as there was much to take in and I'm very much a novice with Pixinsight. Thanks to Gary for a great presentation.

Some of Dylan’s content is questionable but overall I think he’s ok and if you take his channel for being just entertainment its fine IMHO.

Glad you have sorted it out. When I set priorities 1,2,3,4 etc it does it in the order I specify regardless of score. Maybe yours is different.

It depends how bad your light pollution is. But now the IR filter is removed you will get good data from both of your targets. In general unless you have perfect skies get a city light filter such as the IDAS D2.

Change its priority to 1 and that will sort it

I have had a few failures recently with some of the data captures specifically with my OIII filter in conjunction with my ZWO ASI 5 position EFW filter wheel. It helps if the manual on EKOS is read for time to time rather than blindly just diving in with both feet as I did! It turns out that I was missing out setting the filters autofocus in the EFW settings. Clicking that little box above opens up this below What I hadn't done is click the auto focus box against each filter. I have done that now as seen from the screen capture. Previously my sequence settings were something like this: Capture target 1 in Ha. Make sure focus box is ticked. Capture target 1 in Sii. Make sure focus box is ticked. Capture target 1 in Oiii. Make sure focus box is ticked. etc. I expected it to change to the filter in the job when focusing. What it was actually doing on every job was setting the initial filter for auto focusing to whatever was set in the focus module. In my case Ha. Once focused it would then switch the filter to Oiii etc as determined by the respective sequence job and acquire the images. However my Oiii filter is not parfocal with the Ha and Sii filters which are very close. Hence I got a couple of runs of Oiii out of focus! So now I have read the manual I now know that when the filter is changed it will automatically switch to the focusing module, perform an auto focus, when complete it will switch back to the sequencer and carry on with image acquisition, Once I have worked out what the actual filter offsets are (I don't know them for sure yet) I can then enter them into the Offset column. This means I can choose one filter to always perform the autofocus - Select Lock Filter to make sure this is always used. Uncheck all the other filters autofocus boxes. Then when a different filter is selected the focuser will move the relative number of ticks and (hopefully) that filter will then be in focus (assuming backlash is compensated for in the focuser). Now my scheduled jobs still look the same but I only set the focusing job on the initial job in the list The next job and all subsequent ones look like this Notice the focus box is unchecked. It will automatically focus using the filter selected in the job instead from now on. There are many ways to set schedule sequences up and I have chose this way as it seems to work ok. BTW the naming convention I use for sequences is Filter-Gain-Time-Number of captures. So OIIIG111T180C40 means OIII filter Gain 111 (that's the default on the 183MM) Time in seconds 180 No of Captures 40 I always set offset to 8 so don't record that in the name of the sequence. So the moral of the story is sometimes you should read the manual. Hope this helps anybody diving in to the Astroberry Kstars/Ekos or Stellarmate/Ekos systems.

I managed to get some Ha on NGC6888 this time with the same orientation as the OIII and SII last night 18/09/2020 and processed the results in SHO Hubble Pallet. Processed with AstroPixelProcessor, Pixinsight and Photoshop CC 2020. I believe there is a way of integrating the other (rotated) Ha data using AstroPixelProcessor to create a more detailed image but I need to experiment with that.

Hope it doesn’t rain!

I have the 650D but don't use it for astro. I bought this dummy battery and power supply https://www.amazon.co.uk/ACK-E8-Adapter-Replacement-Supply-Cameras/dp/B01HJLT4YU It works fine and is 7.2 volts. I got mine for £9.99 but it seems to have gone up in price since I bought it. My 400D uses a similar dummy battery/power supply and there is zero amp glow.