CloudMagnet

Both are good cameras so I don't think you would go wrong with either. From reading reviews, the 2600 is the better camera overall but has the bigger price to match. I had the same decision when I moved to a dedicated astrocam, using my Skywatcher 200p means my setup is very similar to yours and I ended up going the a third option, the ZWO 071MC Pro. Never really regretted it as it's a good halfway mark between the other two. Some have reported in the past that the 294 has difficulties with calibrating so leaves artifacts on images and I didn't want the smaller pixel size as you suggested with the 2600. Something to consider -if you are also going down the mono route, then I would also look at the ZWO 1600 Pro, has been used for a good few years now and is fairly popular.

Dithering is still worth doing, not only will it take away any chance of walking noise, but you can also only drizzle effectively with dithered subs as well. Haven't really noticed any difference between bias and no bias, so these are not as important.

The setting circles just need to be aligned with the RA/DEC axis as well. Easily done by using a spirit level. As shown in this video:

Yep, completely normal for a lot of Skywatcher mounts, just the way they are designed. Normally you would polar align first before setting your home position so doesn't make a difference in the grand scheme of things.

Yep, that thread is fantastic, will be making good use of that. APT/Stellerium/EQMOD should be a match made in heaven. Until I press start of course Thats a monster scope as well, good luck- you definetly will need an EQ6 to manage the weight!

Appreciate the offer! Hoping it arrives in around mid July- just in time for darkness to return. My plan is to go down the platesolving route with no hand controller, just laptop and EQDIR cable. Seems to be the best setup for speed

ahh yes all part of the fun, it was good timing for your question. I spent the last few days researching the mount as I have just put in an order for the EQ6-R, one of the issues that kept coming up was the Baud rate so seems to be common. Looking forward to having all these "twitchy" moments myself in a few weeks when it arrives.

No problem, seems to be a coin flip which setting that EQMOD needs, its either 9600 or 115200 -good to know its working for you

Sometimes there is issues with the Baud rate, have you tried setting it to 115200? You need to enter that in EQMOD and also update it to the same in device manager-> port settings.

Same for me as well. In all honesty, i've never used the circles so it's no major issue. More important that the polar scope itself is working ok.

Good to hear! Sometimes the simplest solutions are the best. I had considered a full dew heater setup but the expense and added complexity of a battery/cabling didn't seem worth it compared to if a simple shield would solve the issue. It's nice to have one less thing to worry about when imaging.

As long as the darks are the same exposure and ISO as the lights, DSS shouldn't have any issue adding them into the stacking process-the amount of stars in the lights will have no impact on how the darks are stacked. Before you stack there will be a confirmation box that will pop up, this will tell you exactly how many lights and darks will be stacked and will also tell you if there are any issues such as exposure times being different.

The Iris nebula is a tough one, so I think that has turned out really well given the short integration time and also lack of real nightime we see right now. DSS won’t reduce star trailing in your raw images, but when you stack them together the maths that goes on in the background will start to average out your stars and they can look a little more rounded than in a single image. In terms of why DSS has only stacked 9 out of the lot, this is likely down to DSS not finding enough stars to use as reference points in the image. Try turning down the star detection threshold to increase the number that it can find. I aim for at least 30-40 stars detected. I think you will find that using the flattener will help with this as well. I doubt that DSS will find any stars near the edges of the image due to not being round, so a flat field will solve that problem in time.

Should work ok, only worry would be that the cardboard gets so wet that it bends inwards, getting in the way of the image. I would avoid foil on the inside for reflections but shouldn't cause any issues on the outside.

The orientation of the scope shouldn’t matter. What causes the dew to form is that you have the entire night sky visible to the glass at the front of your scope. That means the glass has the whole of the sky to radiate heat to, so this increases the chances of it cooling down enough for dew. The shield "covers up" a large portion of the sky so vastly limits the available area that heat can be radiated away, helping keep the glass from dropping in temperature as much. It is a bit strange at first to get your head around, ill admit. Its not convection of heat that the shield stops, but radiation.

The way I understand it is that dew forms easily on surfaces exposed to the night sky as heat can radiate away to the coldness of space. But if you cover that surface (with the shield) then you stop that mechanic from happening. I'm sceptical, but for the price i'm willing to give it a try. As a side effect, it does also help stop stray light coming in as well. Sky at night has a good article explaining it as well: https://www.skyatnightmagazine.com/advice/skills/how-stop-dew-forming-on-telescope/

For me dew is more frustrating than cloud cover, at least you can see cloud and forecast it with reasonable accuracy. I've got to the point of buying a dew shield for my Newtonian to see if that helps. Always good to try to find a low tech solution first to save on complexity.

Its just a photoshop trick, I've not used Affinity before so I can't say if there as a similar process you can follow or if there are other settings you need to play around with as well.

Meanwhile, in the Atacama desert in Chile....

Quick trick in photoshop is to use the colour range selector (Select-> Colour range) . Use maximum fuzziness and range (200 and 100%) and use the dropper to select a bright star. Then go to Select -> Modify -> Expand and increase this by around 2px. You might need to play around to get the best result with this. Then press Ctrl+H to hide the marching ants. Finally go to Filter -> Other -> Minimum. On the radius, I find anything from 0.3 up to around 6 gives good results. Higher radius will lead to less stars, but at a risk of creating dark halos that dont look very good. Toggle the preview to compare the before and after. Also dont forget to turn on the marching ants again or you will forget you only have the stars selected Before and after (using a radius of 6.5 so fairly extreme):

Dont forget Topaz DeNoise as well, bit expensive on first glance but you can do a free trial as well. Works great to remove "static" noise but I think ensuring you dither in RA and DEC will get rid of any walking noise as well.

haha, well if you got the perfect picture first time with no learning and improving, it wouldn't be as fun. I think ill try the same experiment with some of my data this week, and see if I get a similar effect.

Ill be honest, I cant comment on PixInsight. I just stick to good old DSS. The settings dont look like they would cause any problems at first glance. Could try in DSS and if you get the same we can rule out pre-processing as the cause.

Seem to be having a problem downloading them, think its my computer doesnt like it I dont think it would be user error anyway, what program and settings are you using for stacking?

Ok, just to check what exposure times are you using? It could be down to read noise creating a minimum floor that dithering cannot help with. This would be worse with multiple short exposures (as you are reading more often) Looking at the specs on your camera, there is a step change downward in read noise from using >100 gain. What gain are you using? Very interesting to see that dark flats are making no visible difference. Thanks again for putting this together