Dustspeakers

Oh man! Great tip - I hadn't noticed this one. It will save a LOT of time

Great detail Geoff

I've had a Celestron CGX over 2 years now. The CGX was not keeping time/date at all so I decided to change the RTC battery in the CGX. When I opened up the panel, which has never been removed before - by me anyway, I was horrified. Flapping around on the pcb was a 1 inch shard of metal shaving The twisted wires from the inside of the CGX to the pcb connectors had had their insulation cut/scraped away and with high chance of possible shorting. The standard of soldering on the pcb was pretty average too. How can these kinds of sloppiness possibly get through QC?

Ditto. TV claims I'm using commercially which I'm not. Deleted TV from all devices and using Anydesk - works fine.

Thanks Mark, you are right. Weirdly I can only just make this out on my original now you've pointed it out. Also there's a reddish background tint which is also not (as) apparent on the original. Uploaded again without the blue band, hopefully

14, 20, 21 Sept 2020 – The Wizard Nebula, NGC 7380 The Wizard Nebula (a.k.a. SH2-142) is located just 8000 light years away in the constellation of Cepheus. The nebulosity surrounds the open star cluster NGC 7380 and the active star forming region is about 100 light years across. From my UK bortle 5 back garden – CGX, C925 0x7 reducer, EFW, ASI1600MM, ASI120MM guider. · Ha – 22 x 300s at 139 gain bin 2x2 · OIII – 25 x 300s at 139 gain bin 2x2 · SII – 30 x 300s at 139 gain bin 2x2 Total integration time ~6.5 hrs Processed in DSS, StarTools

With 20/20 hindsight I store mine horizontally too now

I've only just seen this thread. I had almost exactly the same kind of staining on my C925 which I put down to condensation inside the tube and storing the OTA with corrector plate down, i.e. on the scope cap, so that the condensed water ended up resting on the inside of the corrector plate. Unfortunately, due the the looooong intervals between imaging sessions in UK, I didn't notice the this for a while and was horrified to see a stain on the inside of the glass. So I was also faced with the dilemma of what to do, and after watching the Internet videos I decided to clean it myself. There

Superb!

Ahhh. Great explanation - I understand that now. At the moment I'm going through the my whole setup to try and eliminate anything really inane that I may be doing, and increase my understanding of the whole calibration process so I'm doing some more testing and I'll post based on the results. Thanks for the assistance. Steve

Hi Vlaiv, I'm also having issues with calibration frames (flats in my case) but I was interested in your comment above in trying to understand the whole calibration process. I have an ASI1600MM-Pro and I do see that raising the offset does shift the histogram from the LHS towards the RHS. For example on Bias, for Gain 200/Offset 10, I get a 'bell curve' of ADUs values between 0.78 - 12; for Gain 200/Offset 20, values between 6 - 18; for Gain 200/Offset 40, values between 19 and 29. So if I've understood you, if I shoot Darks (and Lights) with the latter value this is the correct way to pr

I endorse all Frank says about the quality of these OTAs. I've had my Redcat for about 6 months and when I've been able to use it from UK I've been pleased with the results. Here's my version of the same area of Orion with Redcat/Canon 550d (unmodded) 90 x 60 sec on 6th Jan 2020

Beautiful detail

19 Oct 2019 - Before the clouds came in Canon 550d 156 x 15sec 1600ISO, f/3.5 18-55mm stock lens at 20mm

I’m fairly new to narrowband and trying different processing software for what is best for me. I’ve spent the last 2 weeks with Pixinsight (free trial) and various Youtube tutorials trying to process test data sets. The results from PI are still not as good as a 4 hour first attempt with StarTools. Still evaluating but it’s a for StarTools from me.