Loki1978

Right, from what I can see. OIII is an obvious blue. With HA and SII I'm getting one filter which is a bright red when I look at a white surface. The second filter is a dark wine red. I'm guessing the HA is bright and the SII dark. I checked again and the filters are purple on one side so I think they are ZWO 2nd gen. The OIII has a silver coating. The other two are bronze on what I think is the SII and gold coating on what I believe is the HA.

Louis, Thanks, I will give this a try and see if I can tell which is which.

Hi all, I have a question about filters. I recently bought a second hand ASI1600 and filter wheel. It's my first time using a mono with filters. The filter wheel has already been populated by the previous owner. They appear to be ZWO branded, and the old style as they don't have the purple coating on one side. The problem I have is identifying the filters. I have four screw ins which are easy as it's written on the side. These are luminance then rgb. But the HA, SII and OIII are not the screw in type. Just filters. Is there a way I can tell which is which? Or do ppl usually install them in some logical order?

I used to do a lot of refurbishing which involved removing paper stickers people had stuck on painted steel. The best way I found of removing labels etc was heat. If you don't mind applying a bit of heat to the tube and the foam is still mostly intact it will just peel right off. Chemical dissolvers etc have their place but my 1st choice was always heat. I don't mean hair drier heat either. I mean paint stripper heat. You have to be sensible with it though.

Ah, good to hear. I will have a look. As most of the coursera courses seem to be between 25 and 45 hours to complete I might just start running through them. Better than being sat in front of the tv of an evening. I did spend 2.5 hours watching 'Dont look up' yesterday though 🙄

Thanks very much. I did notice the centre for excellence one. I may give that a go. Not really doing it for the certification just general interest really. Might be nice to have something to hang on the wall once its all done. They are doing the course for £58.50 at the moment. I will see if the discount code still works. I did come across a site called coursera which has a handfull of free astronomy courses from various institutions around the world. I might give some of those a look too. They seem to range from beginner to intermediate.

Hi All, Hope you are all having a good festive break. I was just wondering if any of you can recommend a good Astronomy diploma course. Or any to avoid. I've been looking for a while and there are a few around but the details on the content is always a bit limited

Also I was a bit confused what sort of debayer I should set in DSS

Hi All, Thanks for the replies. I had another play with DSS tonight and I think those coloured dots were my fault mixing up the terms for my darks, lights flats etc. Below is the result of a second try in DSS with a couple of quick stretches. I still have the light corners and I think I was out of focus (got to 3d print myself a bahtinov mask) I was wondering if some problems could be the security cameras I have in the back garden beaming IR light? What sort of starting exposure times should I aim for unguided on an equatorial. This was 42 subs at 90 seconds.

Adreneline, Thanks for the jpg tip. I've got the post edited to show the image now. I was cooled to -10. When I recently cooled to -20 I was getting ice starting on the sensor chip. I've replaced the desiccant since then. I'm using deep sky stacker with appropriate lights, darks, dark flats and biases. Save as a tiff then straight into gimp.

Hi all, I just had a couple of questions about my images I'm taking. I keep getting red blue and green dots in the image. Also whats causing the light corners top right bottom left? My setup is a Williams Optics zenithstar 80, Atik 414 on an skywatcher AZ-eq6 This image just has a couple of stretches in gimp.

lol, I didn't even notice that, how did this thread get resurrected. Jez is probably on his third or fourth setup by now.

Just thought I would give my experience as I've just started in imaging in the last few months and I had this exact question. I understand the benefits of Mono, and this is a direction I really want to go in. 'But' I decided to go with colour at the moment while starting out. I found on a typical night I'm trying to get all my equipment set up. Get aligned, get guiding working, find my target. The learning curve is quite steep and while I'm sure this process will become quicker each time I do it I feel I would have got frustrated with running out of time and the extra complication using a mono camera. I didn't want an 'all the gear and no idea' type of scenario. As I say though I do want to head over to mono when I have everything else set up and running correctly. The equipment is always upgradable. If I had a permanent setup I would possibly go mono straight away.

Jeff, Cool sounds like a plan. I can't wait to get a mount for my refractor. I haven't imaged in widefield yet. I've always had too much magnification with the cpc 800.

Geoff, I recently got back into astronomy and I kinda went out and bought something familiar to me, I then started going down the imaging route and soon realised the equipment I have is not really suited. I do have a williams optics zenithstar sitting on the shelf here but no mount. I'm aiming to buy an eq5 or 6 at some point. I think when I do I will take the wedge off of my cpc and use it for visual. Then buy a c8 ota for the equatorial if I really want that much focal length. I would love a RASA but £££ Actually I did notice you can buy a hyperstar conversion kit. Has anyone tried one?