Adam1234

It's my 30th birthday today and as such my fiance had this astronomy themed cake made for me!

Nice one! Glad your settling in with the new gear!  I look forward to seeing your final image

Nice images of the rosette!

I've probably made a mistake going for the rosette in RGB with this moon so it will be a challenge to process! 

This happened again last night while imaging - I disconnected the mount and reconnected and it seemed to work fine after that. 

I have a theory after speaking to a work colleague who is also a computer scientist - I recently had an update to my laptop (Windows 10), so could it be likely that I need to install the latest ASCOM drivers?  

32 minutes ago, geeklee said:

Thanks for the link 👍  From that angle it definitely looks like it's doing a decent job of blocking the street lights.

Ha! Funnily enough I have a sketch and a list of parts to do the exact same thing - I think I might keep that on the shelf for now as I'm not the most handy  

No problem! Yeah its definitely doing a decent job. Considering I've got 4 street lights on the right side of the garden it's a wonder I was able to get any half decent images before, so I glad I bought this! 

If your design and list of parts is anything like mine was, I wouldn't bother! 🤣🤣 The tarpaulin, despite it's colour actually let through quite a bit of light so I tripled it over, but then I just got tangled in it,  was heavy and make a hell of a racket. PVC pipes also didn't appear to have been the best choice, unless you can build something like a cage that is more stable 

The street lights!

The more subs the merrier, I try to get at least 5 hours per filter, I'm not exactly sure the point of finishing returns is bit I think it is way above 16 subs. 

This video may be of some help to 

There is also a thread on cloudy nights regarding optimum subs length, if you Google asi1600 exposure times

30 minutes ago, geeklee said:

Cool Adam.   Is that a home made light shield to the right of the scope?

Thanks Lee! 

It's not a home made one, it's one of these Collapsible Terrace Side Awning Grey 300x200 cm - (manomano.co.uk), screwed onto some wood with a bag of bricks to stop it falling over. It's not perfect, it sways in the wind and can't use if it's windy despite the bricks, and it lets through a small amount of light but it blocks out the direct light from 4 streetlamps.

I did try and make one - out of PVC piping and tarpaulin - that was a right faff and a complete failure and it went to the tip!

Thanks Michael, 

I checked the debug log, but I don't believe it was an issue with PHD2, rather more of a symptom - the error message in PHD2 it seems was a result of ASCOM disconnecting, hence why the tracking in APT disabled, as to why ascom disconnected no idea but at least I got it working again within minutes.  

23:43:12.358 00.003 5700 ASCOM Scope: DisPHD2_DebugLog_2021-02-27_184619.txtconnecting

PHD2_GuideLog_2021-02-27_184619.txt

PHD2_DebugLog_2021-02-27_184619.txt

I decided to have a bit of fun and make a time lapse last night whilst imaging the rosette nebula on my telescope. 

The time lapse is composed of 317 x 4s exposures (2 exposures per minute over about 2 and half hours) at f3.5, ISO800, taken with the Canon 2000D with stock lens at 18mm. Video made at about 25fps.

Image of the rosette to hopefully follow soon - depending on how images from the last couple nights turn out as the moon has been out. Just need to get images through the blue filter tonight.

Adam

Wonderful!

Can anybody shed any light on what happened here?  Was imaging happily, was working fine all evening, guiding going well, half hour left on imaging plan before the rosette got too low, then all of a sudden I had this message pop up in PHD2 and guiding stopped:

I closed PHD2, tried to start guiding again and I noticed that the stars on the guide scope were trailing, so I thought that was weird. 

Went into APT and noticed tracking had stopped.

I tried turning tracking back on but then kept getting this message:

No idea what caused this, but I disconnected the mount from APT and tracking then worked all seems OK now, but just curious as to what may have happened. 

Any ideas?

I thought it could have been the celestron power tank running low, but that's not it as I've just checked and it's still half full

Nice one!  How much integration time?

I'm imaging the rosette at the moment, got Ha on Thurs and Red last night, going for green tonight and blue tomorrow! 

13 hours ago, Clarkey said:

But more seriously, we have all done daft things before.

That's how you learn by doing daft things - like just last night I learnt to unplug the cables before taking my OTA off the mount...

And last year I learnt to put on the counter weight before the OTA and releasing the clutch...

What issues were you having?

Nice. I agree it does look much more like an angler fish!

2 hours ago, Rustang said:

That's been really helpful, thank you, I think I can use that stretch process to look at stars with the Bahtinov mask to aid focusing. I looked at some shots from last night in APT, stretched them and I could then see all the diffraction spikes of the stars to show I was in focus so that's really handy, and will help with the darker NB filters, thnaks! 👍

I've also found using the 1:1 view ( I think that's the one- the non default one!) with the bahtinov aid helps focusing. And after stretching I've found it helps to press the arrows on the histogram to darken it slightly, especially if the star is too bright

Incredible!!!

Amazing!

55 minutes ago, Mr Thingy said:

That's also my plan for tomorrow. 

Have a good session.

Thanks! Good luck for tomorrow

First good string of clear nights for me since September! 😀😀 so imaging to spite the moon! Yes, to spite the moon 🤣 Ha on the rosette tonight

Here's another attempt in a sort of modified HOO with 50/50 Ha and Sii in the red channel, with a bit of Ha also in the green and blue channel

Thanks for the data! Here's my attempt in SHO, processed in Pixinsight.

Approximate workflow:

• Combine to SHO
• DBE
• Background neutralisation
• Linear noise reduction
• Unsharp mask
• Histogram stretch
• Starnet++ to remove stars
• Histogram adjustments and curves to increase contrast
• SCNR and colour manipulation
• Added Ha as luminance 
• HDMRT & local histogram equalisation 
• Stars added back in
• Star reduction (morphological transformation)
• MMT sharpening
• Dark Structure Enhancement

Adam

Nice

This has been my first image in a fair few months due to lack of clear skies, taken towards the end of January. NGC2403 is about 8 million light years away in the constellation Camelopardalis, with an apparent size of 19.9 x 10.1 arcmin.  If you look closely you can spot a number of smaller galaxies across the image.

I hadn't originally planned on imaging this, bit since the moon was up that night I decided to stay as far away from the moon as possible and chose this. 

Integration: 1 hour each of R, G, & B (in 60s subs).

Scope: SkyWatcher ED80 DS-Pro, 0.85x reducer

Mount: EQ6-R

Image Capture: ZWO ASI1600mm pro, ZWO filter wheel, Astrophotography Tool

Guiding: ZWO ASI120mm mini, Evoguide50, PHD2

Processed in Pixinsight, with darks and flat calibration - although the flats didn't actually work so well due to an alignment issue with the filter wheel which was causing the dust on the filters to appear like moon craters. Luckily, I managed to save the image by removing the stars, then using the clone stamp to remove the artefacts, then added the stars back in. 

Thanks for looking

Adam

Well some good news for a rainy day - I don't think I ruined my luminance filter! No obvious artefacts at least anyway.

Flats for all other filters seem ok I think, and only 1 spec of dust missed on the Sii filter, but I'm not going to worry about that one, unless the filter wheel alignment issue persists. Not sure what the streaky bit is on the Sii flat, but as long as it corrects my images I'll be happy. Just need to take proper flats at some point as these were only 20 test flats of each filter, with no camera cooling or dark frame subtraction. 

Now the real test will be to actually shoot some images of the cosmos...no idea when that will be....🌧️

In the meantime, here's the stacked 'test' flats in the order of L > R > G > B > Sii > Ha >Oiii