AstroMuni

Nice shot. And an excellent one for a first attempt The areas to improve over and above what has been said by others is the bottom half of your image has oblong stars, while top half is quite round. So thats one to get to the bottom of. Good luck

will try this as well. thanks

First and foremost select a guide star as suggested by @alacant, increase cal step to 2000 as per @michael8554. Give it a shot and then post logs here. Good luck

Hi, Here is a suggestion: Process only the lights without darks, flats etc. and compare the results. Also upload a single lights image here (unprocessed) preferably in fits/tiff format so we can all see how bad or good it is. What tool are you using to stretch the image?

In this there are 3 lenses in play - the large one at the far end of the scope (objective), the eyepiece near your eyes and the lens in your eye itself So together the focus needs to be at a point where your eyes see a clear image. Remember that the eye is capable of adjusting the focal length of its lens. You will hear the term called eye relief as well and thats to do with how close you need to bring your eyes to the eyepiece to get focus.

Are there no linux experts in this forum

They are all at default settings

Thats great progress indeed.... I find that the hard part is learning how to use the various software tools to bring out the best from your images and that takes time. I would suggest you try processing your older image and see if you can achieve better results with what you have learnt so far.

If you see even the hubble images its not very colourful. Its filled with these dark areas and your image captures those well. 👍 You may wish to crop the image so you can bring out the salient features better.

In a nutshell the lens or mirror is bringing the light gathered through the various portions of the lens/mirror into a small circle. This is what you see depicted in the various science papers. So think of it as a collector of light, hence the larger the lens the more the light gathering power. Here is the basic science as explained in BBC bitesize https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/zt7srwx/revision/1 If this is too basic then let me know To make it more complex, various wavelengths of light bend at different angles so they will not end up in the same point in the small circle. And this is where comes the need to use multiple lenses to correct for the various errors you hear about (coma, chromatic aberration etc.)

bump

In a nutshell......If you are using a driver such as EQMOD you dont need the Synscan in between, as it has all the functionality built into it. So folk (like me) who have switched to using the laptop to control the mount via RPi dont use the Synscan at all

Check out this video, which might answer some of your questions ......

Need help. The kstars crashed on my MacOS and I had to reinstall. Now for some strange reason the star sizes when using alignment tool (in simulator mode) are so tiny that its hard to spot them. Is there a setting for this?

As others have already said Astroberry (free) is the easiest way to start off on RPi. There is also StellarMate OS which sells for around $50 which also does the same. Stellamate is run by the developers of INDI, Kstars, but the software is also available for free. I use Astroberry on the RPi. Ekos has a scheduler that allows you to automate the tasks of startup, align, track, focus (if you have autofocuser), guide, capture and shutdown once the object of interest is out of view. It can then restart the following day to continue where it left off. There is plenty of documentation available online. And ofcourse there are plenty of users here who can help too.

I am struggling to install TensorFlow that is pre-requisite for getting Starnet++ to run on my old Dell N5040 with 3GB RAM and running Linux Mint Una. The laptop does not have NVIDIA hence tried to install the GPU version with no success. My CPU does not support AVX instructions hence proving to be a challenge. I am not a Linux expert so will need detailed step by step instructions. Any help is appreciated.

On the days platesolving hasnt worked for me its generally due to very high level clouds that reduce the number of stars its able to recognise. They are hard to spot but when comparing images from a previous night, its obvious. In my case I use the ASI224mc as my main camera on a 130/650 scope. The guidecam is ASI120mm on the Astro essentials 32mm guidescope. I prefer using the internal Ekos Stellarsolver to external ones. I run Ekos from my Linux based laptop and the RPi just runs the INDI server & drivers. As your problems seem to have started after a software install, I am guessing some config has changed in that process. What would help us is if you post the solver settings esp the Options profiles that you have chosen eg: 4-ParallelSmallScale. And I am guessing you have downloaded all the recommended Index files for your FOV onto your RPi.

Next time try doing platesolving with main scope as well to see if it has the same problem.

Are you platesolving with guidescope? What is your main scope? Per se there is nothing wrong in doing it this way IF both guide and main have been aligned to same point. Using guidescope for PA should work even if its not aligned with main, but when it comes to actual imaging, it could lead to the main object not being correctly positioned in FOV.

Sound advice. @Martyn A E My laptop is Linux based and I use Kstars & Siril. The MacOS is after all Linux under the hood so most software that work on Linux are likely to have a Mac edition.

I use ZWO cameras as well and primarily capture DSOs. My laptop is an old i3 with 3GB RAM and 256GB HDD running Linux Mint. I also use an RPi as it gives me the luxury of being able to sit inside my house on laptop without having to run wires to scope etc. The RPi runs the INDI server and drivers and comes with 2 USB3 ports + 2 USB2 ports. I changed to Linux when my laptop was struggling to run windows 7, 8 and I couldnt be bothered to buy a new laptop. Ref long exposure times most of the hardwork is being done by the camera and it only calls upon computer resources when it saves the files. I tend to use a combination of 30s and 120s exposures as my camera is just a good old uncooled ASI224mc and I figured out that light pollution in my area anyway contributes a lot, so I can get away with short 30s exposures. See the video by Robin Glover on optimum exposure.

Have you considered the filter from ZWO? I use that with my ASI224mc

Awesome picture. So many galaxies in one shot

You are correct, but its a bit deeper than that. So its referring to the location of INDI server which then looks for local or remote device drivers. So you could potentially have the INDI server running on the RPi but the devices connected to another machine, in which case you would specify the location of the drivers in the Remote text box in Profile editor. @Ian McCallum if you hover over the the Local or Remote buttons you should see a popup with help.

Beautiful sights 👍