AstroMuni

Good to see you back in action Steve.

Welcome to this group. Join a local astro club and someone should be able to guide you. But a simple advice is try your scope during daytime and see if you can view distant objects.

Taking more images will definitely help. Most of the lovely images you see out there are several hours worth of imaging. AND learning what I call the dark art of post processing helps a lot! Folk split out the object, stars and background into different layers and then enhance each one seperately - A skill in itself which I havent mastered very well. My images have grainy backgrounds too (see link in my signature). One simple way to get rid of the graininess is increase the black point, but that may get rid of the wispy bits of galaxy too.

I agree it can be confusing. But galaxies (and globular clusters) show up as fuzzy objects so cant be missed. Its indeed tricky to get one into your field of view. As others have mentioned your finder needs to be a decent one and needs to be aligned to your scope. But I am guessing you have done that if you managed to see Jupiter. I would suggest using an app on your phone to help you guide the scope to right position. Several apps are available depending on if you use Android or Apple. I use Android and prefer Skeye. You can attach the phone to your scope and Skeye will help guide you towards the object you are looking for - PUSH TO functionality is what its called. There are other apps like Stellarium too.

Thats where I think I got that notion from - since we have darks to match the lights, therefore in my simple mind the biases would be equivalent to flat darks

The graining that is left behind is generally noise and using darks, flats should help reduce this. Gradients left behind by light pollution are handled by the background extraction. Taking more images should help increase the signal to noise ratio too.

I thought the flats and the biases need to be taken with same exposure levels. Time for me to go back to reading up on this

Lovely picture. How come your biases exposure timing is way different to all the others?

Good point. @Ed the Fox If you are driving the mount through your computer then you maybe able to save the Mount configuration and reload it the next time. For example I use Kstars/Ekos and it has ability to save mount alignment model.

Just saves you the hassle of downloading and configuring a whole set of astro products on top of Linux. 🙂 Downside is you might get a whole bunch of products that you dont use/ need.

Just incase you havent read it already, this tutorial helps a lot in suggesting a sequence of steps https://siril.org/tutorials/tuto-scripts/#tuto-3 If the background light pollution is excessive, you may benefit from applying background extraction using a 1st degree polynomial function to all the images before stacking. Siril has a function to do that and its mentioned in one of the tutorials. https://siril.org/tutorials/tuto-manual/#background-extraction

Sound advice. I went through a similar experience. I still have the 130EQ OTA and it works beautifully for imaging (see link in my signature for examples). In my experience the mount is one of the weak points and needs to be stabilised for easier viewing. And like everyone has said already, the stock lenses are not of much value.

Are you saying its consistently off by a similar amount? Can you explain a bit more about high to left please? I am trying to visualise where is the star and where is the mount. Is the star in the field of view and just not centered in the eyepiece or is it way off. Even a simple drawing on paper would help

If Skeye can get it right, it will be a strong contender for the Celestron StarSense 👍🏽

Welcome to the forum. John has identified your issue so I am sure you will be able to get that resolved quickly. I have the same scope so I maybe able to assist with your journey into using the scope 🙂 I am assuming you are using the 10mm and 20mm erecting eyepieces that came with the scope? This site will help you understand how large you can expect to see Jupiter and Saturn using your equipment. https://astronomy.tools/calculators/field_of_view/ Just to set your expectations, both Jupiter and Saturn will appear quite tiny with the 20mm. Be patient -as the more you watch the more the detail you will see. The 10mm will give a better view but it will be harder to keep it in the view. If you have the motor to track then that will help. Good luck!

I like Skyeye and its my app of choice on my phone. Will be good to see how plate solving works with it, although I probably will have no need for that feature as I control my scope using Kstars/Ekos.

Definitely interested

Looks lovely. This image looks a little out of focus to me, but that may just be what has happened when the image was converted to web version. There is a bit of star trail so guessing you dont use a guide scope. You maybe able to get better images if you used shorter exposures.

Thats sounds like the issue

Thats good news. You should be able to view a lot more stars mentioned in the list above. Good luck with your hunt!

Good link John. @Richard N install a software like Stellarium or Night Sky app on Apple devices and look around for these.

What scope do you have, Richard? And whereabouts do you live - as in a light polluted city or relatively dark skies are visible?

Heads up - The camera on its own would not give you an image, just a blur. It needs a lens to focus an image onto its sensor. Some models come with a wide angle lens (like your ASI120). Not sure if you can repurpose that and put it into the 533? I think that the 533 does NOT come with its own lens.

What are you pointing at? It looks like you have dust/ smear marks on the lens or sensor.

Nice image. The more the number of images stacked, the better your signal to noise ratio should be. So give it a shot ! You could try cropping the image to cut off the brighter sky and then work on stretching it. The other option would be to use layers in Gimp to split the bottom half of the image into a seperate layer and stretching each layer individually.