Swillis

Hi all, I have been thinking of upgrading from my Canon 600d to a 533 mono astro camera. I wanted to ask what narrowband filters everyone is using with the SY135? I know that band shift would be an issue with this lens. Are you using pre-shifted filters? Or can you get away with a wider band pass filter? I have seen Cuivs video on bandshift and have downloaded the spreadsheet calculator, but haven't had chance to plug the numbers in yet, also real world experience is just as useful as the theory. I am in bottle 5, so light pollution is not a big issue for me. So I'm not after the narrowest of narrowband filters. Thanks in advance Simon

That's great. I didn't realise that. When stacking multiple sessions, you can easily see if one session was better or worse than the others just from looking at the plot. I certainly find the graph a much better way to visualise this than just a list of numbers.

I hope you manage to recover some of your data. That sounds like a bit of a nightmare, but probably better than loosing the rig. The targets are not going anywhere soon (mostly). It's probably not much use with an ASIair, but I use a Synology NAS also, and have it setup to sync with my imaging miniPC, so the files are transferred in the background whilst imaging. I can then pick them up on the other computer when I come to process them. It also means I have the files in one place so its easier to move from one computer to another. @900SL you mention transfer was slow? I originally had it setup with quickconnect but this goes via a server so was painfully slow, but the local connection was very quick for me.

HFR=3.65 in NINA for me right now if that helps. I'm in Bracknell.

Also, have you checked the Sirilic log to see if has any errors? We're all the images registered properly?

Can you take the r_pp_lights from Sirilic and stack them manually in Sirilic and see what you get? Maybe there is an error in the Sirilic script which means they don't get stacked or only one gets stacked.

Have you checked all the intermediate files are created in the directories you expect them to be in? I have not used Sirilic, but do you get a console view like in Sirilic where you can see what has happened in the background? That may help work out where the error is.

Don't think it's a BST thing, as the blip is in October. Must be the latter...🤣

I think using what you have to start with is a great way to get into the hobby. Whatever level we are at there is always more investment we would like to make in upgrades. This is however not a cheap hobby, but you can be budget conscious along the way. Certainly while you work out if it is for you or not As suggested above a barn door can be a cheap alternative and is a good project to keep you busy on those cloudy nights. There is always second hand gear to consider. Once you get to enough posts you get access to the classifieds section. And mostly the stuff sold on here is well looked after.

Hi, @Chuleton08 it might help others answer your question if you could give more info on which software you used for stacking and post processing? Also what steps you took with post processing would be helpful to know. Also if you could share the output file from you stacking software that would also be great. Others will then be more able to identify where any issues are. Thanks Simon

Thanks @WolfieGlos I just thought that was due to my DSLR (and not having enough data) and reaching the limit of where I can stretch before bringing out the noise I'll have to give it another go and try your method. Thanks again

I have just tested Sirilic and you can use a constant bias value. Just click edit and type in =2048. @TiffsAndAstro thanks for the recommendation, I'll probably stick with manual in Siril for most cases just so I know more about what is going on, but I can see this being useful with more than a couple of sessions to stack.

@alacant I'm already using Siril manually and use 2048 as bias (also 600D). It wasn't clear from the suggested video if you could do that in Sirilic.

Didn't expect GFP to pop up on here Thanks for the recommendation I gave this a watch and it looks fairly straightforward now. Will give it a try the next time I have multiple sessions to stack. The only thing I was unsure of was of you can use a constant bias value rather feeding it a set of bias frames. I'll have to look at the docs

I did look at Sirilic a while back but it looked a little complicated, and I just ended up figuring out to use Sirilic manually. Maybe I'll take another look again You've certainly made some very quick progress. Keep posting, I have enjoyed following your threads.

If you were to stack each session individually, then as elp says you can check the quality of each session and identify and issues specific to that night. You could then load in all the preprocessed (pp_) calibrated files as a new sequence then register and stack as one batch. I originally used the scripts for Siril, but I started using it manually and found it to be quicker. I took me a little time to figure it out and I made a few mistakes so had to go back and forth a bit, but I would go back to the scripts now. Overall it was a lot easier than I thought it would be. I like that you can view the graphs showing how good the data is, which can help in deciding what cutoffs to choose for which frames to stack.

Have you got mirror lockup set? I had issues when trying to use this with an intervalometer. Also, you might want to check if exposure bracketing on? Simon

Is there a custom white balance set? If you are looking at the preview on the back of the camera, it will use the white balance which may reduce the pink/red hint. When saving as raw, the white balance is not used (only for preview and jpeg)

A few years ago I put together a barn door tracker as my initial venture into astrophotography. Unfortunately the time it took to reassemble and small children meant it didn't get much use. But @SwiMatt you sound like the kind of person who would enjoy the challenge and possibly get a lot of enjoyment out of the process (I certainly enjoyed putting it together but just lacked the time at that point to get the most out of it)

Sounds like you're having fun and that's the point. I was slightly cautious about scrolling down to see what was in the picture after reading this.

Have just tested this and it doesn't connect. Synscan app or similar appears to be required when using NINA. I guess the ASIair is setup differently. There is no option to set the baud rate in the synscan app. I had a quick Google when setting up GSS and used the suggested baud rate of 9600. GSS looks to be working...

I've had my AZ-GTI a few months now (from a fellow SGLer), with very little opportunity to use it. When I have got out I had lots of trouble with dithering. Initially there were issues with settling after a dither, but then I noticed that PHD2 was coming up with lots of errors about ASCOM connection and not supporting pulse guiding... The dither appeared be happening, and guiding was working ok so I carried on as the subs looked reasonable (just some with issues after a dither when it didn't settle. It has only been PHD2 which has complained about the connection. I'm using NINA, PHD2, synscan pro app on a mini PC, connect to the mount via an eqmod cable. I noticed that when I tried to run the guiding assistant it would, after a short while complain that the 'mount cannot report it's pointing position'. So I have been using this as a way to troubleshoot the issue while it's been cloudy. I have uninstalled ASCOM, synscan driver and app and reinstalled all fresh after a restart, but still had the issue. To check it was not a dodgy eqmod cable, I tried connecting to the mount over WiFi which didn't solve it. I spent most of yesterday evening trying to be methodical over how I started all the software and connected to the mount, and thought I had it sorted. When connecting NINA and PHD2 to synscan I get a choice of 2 IP addressed to choose from, and thought the issue was around this, but sometime I get to choose the IP address and others I don't. So I gave up on the synscan app and installed the eqmod software, but swiftly ran away and tried Green Swamp Server. It looks like this has solved the problem 🤞 Tomorrow night looks like it might be good for some real world testing, before clear outside promises some good clear skies at the end of the week. Now I have said this the connection will drop, and the cloud will be here for another month 🤐 Has anyone else had similar issues with the synscan app?

Probably a lot of variables involved here. More info on camera, scope, target and mount would probably help others answer the question. I would probably go for taking a set of test exposures and see what they look like. I guess depending on the mount/focal length you might hit a limit...

Might be worth a look at YouTube. 'Nebula photos' has done several videos of untracked imaging including this one of the pliedes. Which should give you a good idea of what to expect.

You can edit the script files so it doesn't need the biases. I did a similar thing for processing DSLR data without darks. From what I remember you need to remove the section where it reads in the files your not using and then you also need to remove any reference to using the bias value.