Grant Fribbens

I think what you really need to do is take a look at making a call with C# .Net to ASCOM, https://ascom-standards.org/Downloads/DevSamples.htm or INDI or INDIGO https://sourceforge.net/projects/indisharp/ so that you can get the information from EQMOD. That is what I would do.

I am looking into doing a mosaic with APT but just do not seem to be there the yet. I am looking at using SkyChart/Cartes du Ciel and then importing the plan into APT but am not sure that I have my starting rotation correct. Hopefully when the skies clear I will get to try out the Flat61R an see how that goes. 

Hi Raf,

Guiding with PHD 2 using EQDIR will mean that your stars in your images will be even clearer than if your were to just rely on the tracking of the HEQ5 Synscan tracking. There is going to be periodic error in the movement of the HEQ5 and the guiding in PHD2 will counter act this error. This link explains it well Mount Periodic Error

HTH

Grant

I currently have the WO 61 with the FLAT61A and the ASI183MC Pro on the EQ6-R mount (overkill!) but have also just purchased the FLAT61R as M31 is still too big for my fov. The ASI183MC Pro does have a lot of glow but I have managed to get rid of this using Astro Pixel Processor with the use of darks and dark flats although have not done flats yet which I have just got a LED tracing board for. This was my first attempt of M31 back in July and I can see loads of red artefacts coming from the area of glow from the ASI183MC which you will not get from the ASI533.

And this is my second attempt this month with much clearer skies and where I tried out dithering for the first time.

If I had not got the ASI183MC Pro before the ASI533 came out I would have gone for that but I am pleased with what I have achieved having only started doing this in December 2019. I am much happier with the last image but still needs tweaking in photoshop but am still trying to learn those techniques!

The Askar is 2.56kg on its own. Depending on the extras you may be adding such as reducer, guide scope, camera adapter to focuser you will get to the 5kg limit of the Star Adventurer pro quite quickly and many say that you should only go to half the amount of the max payload when imaging. I actually started out with the Star Adventurer pro myself and that is also why I went down the Red/Space cat vs ZS61 route, but soon found the lure of a Goto mount so bought an EQ-5 second hand and was then hooked especially when I made my own EQMOD cable and got into the world of computer control. I have now upgraded from the EQ5 to the EQ6-R Pro but do think that the HEQ5 is a bit lighter and manageable if you have to keep taking the whole rig up and down but availability is an issue at the moment.

For stacking and processing you want to get a machine with the fastest processor with a highest number of cores and most amount of RAM that you can afford but would go no less than 8gb of RAM. I would also stay away from Atom or Celeron based machines as the Intel i3,i5 and i7 are much better processors or even the AMD Ryzen series all which have a faster bus to the ram.

I had the same decisions that you are going through but I went with the William Optics Zenithstar 61 over the Red/Space cat. After spending extra on the Flat61A and now the Flat61R I could have gone with the Red/Space cat as it does not need the extra field flattener. With the extra glass I would expect the colours to be better than I am getting with the ZS61 but I am pleased with what I went for and the ZS61 has a larger aperture than the Red/Space cat.

If I were in the same position starting again I would be tempted by the ASKAR FRA400 with the FRA72RD as this has a really decent aperture of 72mm and would give you the option of 281mm with the reducer or 400mm without.

I have found the with my ZS61 I have had to get the reducer as I need a wider focal length to fit the targets in. This is also due to the 1" sensor on the ASI183MC that I am using but I have looked at other cameras and the pixel size means under sampling when used with low focal length telescopes.

I use FLO Astronomy Tools CCD Suitability to check this.

Although I am still confused when I see people using 3.76micron sensors and getting really great images. I am still learning all the time.

I started back in mid 2019 the same as many others by first taking pictures with a Star Adventurer Pro of the Milky Way but really wanted to get images of other nebula and galaxies that are out there. I was frustrated with getting the star tracker aligned to my target and ended up in damaging my usb socket of my Sony A6300 when I added a guide scope which crushed the right angled USB cable and now I can no longer remote control the camera, which compared to the control of a Canon or Nikon was severely lacking anyway!

So I purchased a secondhand EQ-5 goto mount in December 2019 along with a Skywatcher 150PDS (which I have not used as it is quite often windy where I am and I did not take this into account) and also went for a William Optics Zenithstar 61 and FLat61A as I wanted the wide field and this could be used on my Star Adventurer Pro as well as doing bird photography, but due to my Sony camera issue and what I had seen about CMOS cooled cameras I went for a ASI183MC Pro which was appropriate for the focal length of the Zenithstar 61.  The ASI183MC Pro is great in that I can take darks and flats when I wanted as I have full control over the temperature of the sensor.

I have had many frustrated nights where I really could not get the focus right or polar alignment was just not right but I did get some decent images of M31, Soul Nebula and Eastern Veil with the EQ-5 but felt I needed something even better so was looking at an HEQ5 but due to the pandemic it was not available and would not be for quite a while so I sold the EQ-5 and decided to go for the EQ6-R Pro which is much heavier and can take heavier equipment later on. My first image with the EQ6-R Pro was of the Wizard Nebula and it was a delight to see.

When I started imaging I was stacking in DeepSkyStacker (DSS) and then attempted stretching in Photoshop which I just did not seem to be getting right. Then I decided to try the trial of AstroPixelProcessor (APP) and have to say found the UI a bit of a shock at first but once I added my images and saw the whole process from start to end I was really impressed with the final images that I got which were much better than what I had from DSS. Now I am able to have a library of darks and flats that I can just pull in to run a stacking session.

I really like automation and Raspberry PI integrations but have had to give up on my PI 4 Astroberry only because there are some great Windows apps that I want to run as well alongside indi/indigo and they just did not like working that well over networking (wireless or ethernet) so I have gone for a Mini PC XC30Y which runs Windows 10 but I have installed virtualbox which runs RaspiOS for running indigo and sticks onto the EQ6-R nicely with velcro.

So last week clearoutside.com was showing that there were going to be clear skies Friday and or Saturday so I made sure that I was prepared for my first fully automated session. I setup and did polar alignment using SharpCap and then did my focusing using the latest release candidate version of Astrophotography Tool (APT) 3.86.8, I had setup dithering for the first time as I had heard great things about doing this. I setup PHD2 and started guiding and everything looked very good. I did a slew to Vega, too a 15s shot gain 110 and plate solved to get my actual position and then synced that back to the scope and then did another goto and then saw Vega in the centre of the screen after another shot. Then I focused the Zenithstar 61 with the built in bahtinov mask and got it to 0.03 which I was pleased with but hoped that would be good enough for my session as I do not have an auto focuser (yet).  I then did a goto to M31, another plate solve to make sure that I was in the correct area, sync to the mount and goto again and a 30s shot to see that I was now in the correct area. Did a PointCraft show to Stellarium to check the rotation which I needed to make sure that M31 was diagonally across the ASI183MC Pro so as to get as much in as possible, but I have already found that I needed the Flat61R 0.8x reducer flattener which is on its way! Once happy I could finally leave the setup and let the plan run taking 120 x 120s exposures which was estimated to complete around 5am. So it was 1am so decided to go to sleep. Woke up the next morning to see the scope was in a very awkward position still tracking so really need to set limits in indigo as when I asked the scope to park the camera just touched one of the legs and now has a small scar! So now I have learnt how to add commands in an APT plan to make sure that the camera warms up slowly and the mount parks itself at the end.

This week I have been trying to stack the images but found that the result in APP was really bad and I kept on getting a blue spike on the left of the colour chart and the image had blue crosses around most of the stars and I thought that the dithering has meant that the images were now not stacking properly. I tried DSS again and it also complained about the images so knew something was wrong. So I when through everything to see what was wrong and I found a couple of things. First I had installed all the software onto the mini PC but had not told APT that I was using a one shot colour camera. So APP was getting the light images wrong so I did try overriding the RAW/FITS settings but the image was still bad. I almost though that my images were not good enough and that the session was a waste of time until I noticed that I had used a different gain for the lights that I had taken. Luckily I could just create a new set during the day with the cooled CMOS camera. I managed to find some software that could edit the FITS headers and batch fix the light images to make sure they show as 16bit RGGB bayer pattern instead of 16bit grey and then ran APP again and am now very pleased that I stuck at it as the image that I got is, and I hope you will agree reading this, my personal best so far.

I have felt that I have come on a long way since I started and have learnt many things along the way but getting this image has just encouraged me to keep going no matter what and when I see what other people have done or can do this also encourages me and this post is also to help encourage others that may be having issues to keep going and not to give up!

Clear Skies!