AstroMuni

Hence I wanted to make a start using an online service rather than build my own station. A couple of friends have reported decent predictions from this source.

Awesome. What software do you use to control your mount?

I wish to use INDI weather watcher driver with Ekos. I have Ekos running on Linux Mint. I would like it to connect to a service such as weathermap.org. My programming skills are near zero but having coded over 20years ago (in now ancient languages), can read some code 🙂 Has anyone else done this? If so need tips on achieving this please. @wimvb I recall seeing your post in the INDI forum about something similar. Did you get it working?

Try finding a spot using this site https://www.lightpollutionmap.info/ Then you can decide which one to get to and related logistics.

I would second this. Having a good mount is essential in this journey to AP. (A go-to mount is not essential but gives you additional abilities in terms of control via laptop.) I would say Guiding is the next step and investment.

The same app. I have an android phone as well. I find that wifi signal can be poor in the garden so I switch off wifi on phone and onto 4G data.

Hi and welcome. You are absolutely right in saying that you would need camera (modded would be better), lens and a good tripod (preferably one with tracking ability for longer exposures) to start with. Without tracking you will be limited to taking pictures of the moon and star clusters. For milkyway you would need longer exposures from bortle 8 skies. You would need decent filters to reduce light pollution. I havent seen many adverts for just the mount head and not the tripod, so you might be better off investing in a good mount to start with. Plenty of 2nd hand ones should be available. Aim for something like the EQ5 ones atleast as they are quite stable and support decent payloads for AP. You could start small without a go-to mount and then add RA & DEC motors at a later point in time. hope this gets you thinking on options and ideas to proceed.

I use Team viewer which connects my phone to my laptop to get around that. So I can stand beside my scope with my phone remotely watching the laptop screen and the effects of my focussing.

I do my focussing manually. I achieve a manual focus with the aid of the Focus simulator before I start imaging. But once the scheduler has taken charge, if I need the scheduler to do a refocus, there doesnt seem to be a way for the scheduler to pause automatically and alert me to do a manual focus. It treats as if I have an automated focuser and goes into a loop. Is there a way around this?

Thanks for the clear explanation 👍 As most of us image from our backyards in less than ideal bortle skies, I am not sure how much more detail we would get by adding the extra bits

My reckoning is that if your original image was captured in 16bit then any further processing can be done in 16bit. Its not like we are adding more info at that stage. But I am also not that close to understanding this.

It should take the same amount of space as when doing via Siril directly. After all it creates a script which then executes in Siril. You can configure it to do processing in 16bit as that would help.

I use a remote connection and in your case the most reliable way sounds like the following: - Take an extension power cord outside to within reach of your scope. You can use this to power mount, usb hub and any other devices you may wish to attach at a later point in time. - Attach a powered USB hub and use that to connect to mount and camera. - Take a long USB cable from your laptop to control both mount and camera and attach that to usb hub. I use a slightly different approach and that makes use of RPi as I use Kstars/Ekos to control mount and camera. I run a long ethernet cable from my laptop to RPi

I can see a bit and I am sure there is more in there somewhere but hard to see 😞 Just love the way you can capture such an expanse of sky. My image with ASI224mc was this, hence was keen to see what was in yours as yours is a much better kit.

Nice shot. There is quite a lot of detail in there, so would be great to see the intricacy of NGC6888 in closer detail (if possible) 👍

Awesome shot. Love it. I agree that SIRIL is a great tool.

Never say never until you find out what your scope is capable of You dont need too many additional pennies once you have invested in a decent OTA and solid mount (thats more critical). You will need a camera, laptop and cable to connect the two. Most folk own a DSLR and a laptop, so job is half done already. I was told my OTA is rubbish but I am surprised at the images I have managed to get out of it (see my signature for link). Good luck!

If your 600d is effectively at zero cost then your plan above gets you best of both worlds. 👍 With the asi224 a few of the larger DSOs wont fit in (m31, veil, pelican etc) but on the plus side it lets through IR so images are more detailed than an unmodded DSLR. I have setup the fov for the asi on Kstars, so can easily see if my potential target will fit in. You can always do mosaics but that will be next stage for me 🙂 . PS: Like I mentioned before you can see some of the images I captured with asi here

In order to get an airy disk you will need a high magnification and the image will be quite small due to reduced FOV. There are other posts on this forum by @vlaiv that explain in clear detail (as usual )

Looks great. As you say the amount of detail is fantastic. You can even see NGC206 to the right end as a star cluster quite clearly

Thats the approach I took and it turned out that the ASI224mc was less expensive than DSLR, so thats where I began to learn (and still learning) My journey is in the link on my signature. BTW, I can get around 60s unguided, so havent purchased guider etc. and managing with short subs of 30-60secs

There are several needs to be done activities that are seen on forums (collimate, guiding, parabolic mirror etc). I have had my scope since 2012 and although I had done some preliminary checks after reading up about the need for collimation, I stayed put as the quality of my images whilst viewing was good enough for me. Even when I got into imaging this year, it seemed fine. But now with a few months of imaging under my belt, I started noticing that my stars were not as sharp as I would like it to be. So I guess at the end of the day its what you are happy about

I would have thought that to preserve colour balance we should combine and then stretch. If each colour was stretched separately then you coud end up with an unauthentic colour as each channel may have been stretched differently. Is my understanding correct?

Everytime you platesolve, the frame is rotated on screen to reflect the correct orientation. So after you rotate the camera just do a platesolve to get an updated display. Does that answer your question? If not I can elaborate. If you know the orientation beforehand you can also set the rotation in the configuration so the sensor shows the approximate framing of your object without a platesolve.

+1 I use only SIRIL and Gimp to do any touch up work post processing. This is a great place to learn the basics. I follow this workflow and this gives great results. @StuartT also take a look at the Sirilic tool which has a GUI interface for generating and running scripts.