AstroRookie

On 13/12/2020 at 16:54, Budgie1 said:

I use the same setup with the SV106 and ASI120MM Mini attached.

The camera has the longer spacer attached, which you can just see in the photos below. Hopefully this will give you an idea of where the backfocus is for yours.  

Budgie1,

you're my hero! I removed the extension (I needed for the previous guidescope), "copied" the settings as shown in your picture and bingo! Stars all over place! A great thanks, from

AstroRookie

Thanks for the help,  I'll have a look - next weekend probably, they announce dry weather during the day.

AstroRookie

Hello,

I'm getting desperate over this hobby (but I refuse to give up); with every change new problems set in. I purchased a SVBONY SV106 (60mm - 240mm) guide scope to replace a 80mm - 400mm scope, I was using as a guide scope which was installed on the Orion 8 tube rings. I replaced the finder scope with the guide scope.

First issue balancing but that one I sorted out. Then I tried to focus the ASI120MM with the new guide scope. For the old  one (80x400) , I needed 2 extensions (in fact the extensions are low cost barlows from which I removed the plastic lens) to get focus. To align the new guide scope, I used a 17mm eyepiece and that went ok while pointing at some far away trees. But I could not get the ASI120MM focused on the same trees, not with PHD2 nor with Firecapture; I turned the gain way down, but with or without extensions, no focus. As bad weather is (again) setting in and the scope is permanently outside I had to stop trying.

So I take on this break to get some assistance.  Anybody any advice on this, for

AstroRookie

Hello,

finally some nice weather over the weekend. As the scope is permanently outside (under a cover) it has to be nice weather to do the check ups suggested here. I checked the following:

• spider vanes: they ware orthogonal
• spider vanes are bleck
• spider vanes were not tilted
• secondary mirror back and side is black
• re-did the collimation as outlined by astro baby
  • mirror was not 100% centered, so adjusted that with the spider vanes
  • the laser beam for the secondary mirror collimation was slightly outside the donut: adjusted that (but I admit I did consider throwing it all in the ditch, and purchase a refractor ...)
  • primary mirror was way off; adjusted that
• checked the focuser position - it was still fixed at the position that I took the here included shots with; it intrudes, but is more or less even with the baffles(?) inside the tube

Unfortunately no clear skies over night, so could not take any test picture. That wil have to wait.

I was wondering though, when I took the included picture, it was full moon and heavy dew; so could it be that it is moonlight reflected by dew on the spider vanes?

Thank you all for your advice.

AstroRookie

33 minutes ago, alacant said:

Hi

Sorry, only got a 'phone ATM but will reply anyway in case you gave a clear night ahead...

The stars are trailed bottom left to top right. That may explain the unusual diffraction spikes. Did you try guiding the mount?

The stars are distorted toward the right hand side. Is the camera square to to focuser? Do you have a good coma corrector?

Cheers

 

 

1. Did you try guiding the mount: the mount - EQ6R Pro - was tracking, but my guiding scope - ZWO ASI120MM - did not show any star in PHD2, as it was a 99% full moon, I thought this was the cause and as it were just "test-shots", I did not bother. But could this have caused this?
2. Is the camera square to to focuser: I did pay attention when fixing it in the focuser, but I only noticed these spikes after my imaging session; so it could be possible that it shifted.
3. Do you have a good coma corrector: to be honest I would not have a clue how the check that; this is what I bought last september: Baader 2" Newtonian Coma Corrector MPCC Mark III - from f/3.5

Thanks,

AstroRookie

Hello,

• here's the link to the .cr2 file: M_52_Light_002.cr2
• jpg version attached

Many thanks for your help,

AstroRookie

13 hours ago, alacant said:

Hi

Could you possibly post a clearer shot? A .jpg covering the whole frame and a -link to- the .cr2 would help us diagnose.

Cheers

 

 

Will take care of that this evening, thanks in advance

Hello,

despite the full moon and the humid weather I could not resist to take some exposures yesterday, merely to test a couple of things, not with the intention to get something decent. I had all sorts of problems, like my ZWO ASI 120MM (mini) not being able to display any stars in PHD2, so I decided to go without guiding, and honestly, as my polar alignment was very good, I was happy with the results of my 1 minute shots.

But having taken a closer look at the subs, I noticed strange diffraction spikes of the bright stars (see attached example).; I'm using a Orion 8 Astrograph and a Canon 500D.

One of the things I modified, I attached a cooling system to the DSLR, bringing it's weight from 480g to 1080g, could that be the problem; I don't remember where, but I seem to have read somewhere that the Orion8 focuser could take up to 1300g. I know I'm close, but still.

Or is it my collimation that is not ok; I admit, I did not check it, as I collimated last week during the day and the whole setup has not been moved. It stays outside under a car cover.

Anybody any idea what's going on here?

Thanks in advance,

AstroRookie

22 hours ago, andrew s said:

There is a thread here on this 

Regards Andrew

Sorry Andrew, I did do a search before posting this, but I searched for "Astro Biscuit" not "astrobiscuit" - but that's what one can expect from an

AstroRookie

Hello,

I really enjoyed Astro Biscuit's latest youtube vid: The Next Big Breakthrough in our Understanding of the Universe.

It's not the usual astrophotography on a budget video, but a brief explanation of the latest findings on how to explain the universe. It's really of professional quality!

A must see!

AstroRookie

On 18/11/2020 at 16:40, bobrosset said:

@AstroRookie, I just received a Terryza StickPC, 8Gb of RAM, 120Gb + 256 Card. I'll test it this weekend and let you know my results as well. I think I can clamp it to the tripod and leave it mounted. I may need to 3D Print a cover though. I'm excited about this! Wooohoooo!

Hello Bob,

looks indeed very cool; I wonder if you could install linux on it (I'm not a windows fan as you will have guessed)? For the rest over here, nothing but bad weather, wind and rain for weeks now. And according to clearoutside.com next Thursday clear between 02:00AM and 06:00AM, but that combined with an almost full moon

Kind regards,

AstroRookie

Hello,

I have 2 Canon's Eos 500D. One that I bought new 10(?) years ago, and one that I bought second hand in april of this year, to use as my dedicated "astro-camera". The latter, I have removed the IR filter. My question, while my "astro-modded" camer is taking the light frames, can I take the dark frames with my non-astro-modded camera (same shutter speed and iso of course)? Can the dark frames of this non-astro-modded camera be used in the calibration process? After all, its the same processor, and if the death pixels are not the same, these are handled by the bias frames, no?

Thanks for clarifying.

AstroRookie

On 06/11/2020 at 22:41, jm_rim said:

That's it; I'm throwing in the towel..!

After countless of attempt - I have not once succeeded in a decent frame... Unfortunately, my evening hasn't been long, the last couple of years. With small children that have to get to bed, I have had max 2-3 hours before going to bed myself, which have consisted of setting up all the equipment and cables, trying to polar align (but never really successfully), and lately to many software bugs/errors - all ending in nothing and me having to take everything down again.

Mostly I find out what the problem is and try to avoid/fix it next time, then something new goes wrong, or the same reappears ageing...

I would love to add some equipment to my setup which I believe could enable a more straightforward setup, go to upgrade, guide camera, etc., but there will probably go a couple of years before the budget allows for that.

Hopefully, one day, I will try again, but for now, I done... 

Hello jm_rim,

I know exactly how you feel, but letting aside the fact that you have to combine this hobby with small children, I'd say, don't give up. I started somewhere in march with this hobby after having neglected my Celestron C8 for more than a decade in the garden shed (also due to a combination of work, kids, some extreme sports interests ...). I started buying a  new mount for the C8 and finding out on different fora that my C8 was not the most suited telescope for DSO astrophotography with a DSLR (Canon 500D, which is also known to be quite "noisy"). I think that I've needed at least 5 consecutive sessions to understand what backfocus is all about and that with a Canon 500D there are not that many stars one can see using the liveview functionality. In the meantime I (literally) dropped my C8 , rendering it useless. Though I'm also on a budget, I did not want to give up at that point, knowing that I made already a little bit of progress, so I bought an Orion 8. Which brought new frustrations, collimation, rather cumbersome to move out and back in. So now I leave every thing outside under a decent car cover (which costed me 82€ , where as a telegizmo would have cost 4 times more). I know it will wear out quicker then when I keep it inside, but I'm sure I'll use it more. Does this mean there are no more frustrations, not at all: there's the fact that in the last 8 weeks, there was only 1 opportunity, for the rest bad weather all of the time, and on that one opportunity, ekos (I'm using astroberry) crashed all of the time and  I only realised after 10 lights that I had left on the bahtinov mask. But you know what, though it's a constant battle, if I found myself doing yet an other stupid thing, I laugh with it, after all it's just a hobby and I'm just

AstroRookie

Hello Kmaslin,

why would you leave windows for Ekos? There's plenty of excellent free software on windows for astrophotography. Even Dylan O'Donnell, who is a die hard mac user admits that the best astrophotography software runs on windows.

If you really want to give it a try, then I would advise you to setup a linux VM on your windows computer and install Ubuntu on it, then install indi, kstars and ekos. I'm a mac user, but as I don't want my macbook to be outside in humid conditions, I switched to Raspberry Pi with astroberry.

Kind regards,

AstroRookie

11 hours ago, JamesF said:

I feel so behind the curve now for actually having to go out and open/close chicken house doors every morning and evening.

Do you also have a little conveyor belt to deliver the eggs to your kitchen?

James

Hello JamesF,

if you want I can take some pictures, the code (it's python, and the web app part is python using the flask framework with nginx) is open source, though I did not publish it on github - I would have to make an installer package, document the installation process. In fact it supports 2 kind of motors (direct motor, for the up/down solution and stepper for the sideways solution). About the egg conveyor belt, don't let this chicken coop project make you think I'm a "hand dandy", here back home they call me "handy Harry", my wife never asks me to fix something (but I do have a handy son and a handy friend, who even proposed to help me build a small observatory) and furthermore since I got into astrophotography, all my limited skills and free time go into that. 😉

AstroRookie

9 minutes ago, JamesF said:

I'm intrigued.  What does your RPi control in your chicken coop?

James

Hello James,

we have foxes in the area, and though I found foxes fascinating animals, I don't want them to eat my chickens. So the pi is controlling the door of the coop via a stepper motor from an abandoned printer. I used a stepper motor because the coop is not high enough to have a door that goes down and up, so the door moves from right to left, to close and from left to right to open. I used a stepper motor because I did not want to make it too complicated with sensors and so. There's a small web interface to setup the number of steps, and the time before or after sunrise the door has to open or close and some log info when the door opened/closed.  The pi is also configured as a hotspot, so I have wifi when am lying in my hammock in the summer (but it's not very performant).

Kind regards,

AstroRookie

Ok, here's what I did today:

• Stopped and disabled a bunch of unnecessary services, alsa (sound), nginx (web server - I don't use astroberry web interface), bluetooth, avahi (some multi-cast dns service), triggerhappy (no keyboard directly connected needed,  either go via vnc or ssh)
• Increased swap to 2GB
• Started kstars+ekos
• Deleted the existing ekos profile and created a new one
• Started a capture sequence of 60s x 60
• Monitored memory usage during capture

Conclusion: at the end there was some 35MB free memory, which is too little, so ordered the new Raspberry Pi 4 with 8GB memory; the one I use now will serve as backup for the one that controls my chicken coop, or I could make a fault tolerant solution for my chicken coop (not that it is needed, that pi is running since 2016 without any problem, I think it only has been rebooted 2 or 3 times since then), plenty of time with the bad weather that's coming up 😉

AstroRookie

Well, I've increased the swap, now I want to take a test dark, and now it's stuck in the download of the capture (I tried saving on an external ssd as well as on the SD). As for the SD card I always take Samsung Evo ... ones. I have noise reduction turned off.

I'll give it an other try tomorrow after having removed all unnecessary processes. But apart from conky, I don't see what else I could stop.

But if stash_old can do it with a RPI3b, I can't see why it would not work on RPI4.

But for now, I'll call it a day ...

AstroRookie

8 minutes ago, JamesF said:

I think you're going to struggle with that little.  You could add more swap as a file on the SD card, but it won't be good for performance.

James

Exactly what I'm doing now

3 minutes ago, JamesF said:

That's not good.  How much memory does your RPi have?

James

Hello James,

astroberry@astroberry:~ $ free -m
              total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:            804         176         359          18         268         551
Swap:            99          99           0

memTotal:         823476 kB
MemFree:          360836 kB
MemAvailable:     563952 kB

34 minutes ago, alacant said:

 

Hello Alacant,

KStars crashed again in the midst of the capture session (after 101). This is what I've found in /var/log/kern.log:

Nov  6 22:41:00 astroberry kernel: [20391.858425] Out of memory: Killed process 31870 (kstars) total-vm:948012kB, anon-rss:302620kB, file-rss:3340kB, shmem-rss:27576kB, UID:1001 pgtables:1328kB oom_score_adj:0

I'll try to take some darks, some flats tomorrow morning, but for now it's enough. I'll update the system tomorrow, and try again tomorrow evening.

Thanks for your help!

AstroRookie

24 minutes ago, CedricTheBrave said:

Have you updated to the latest version of the build?

these issues are similar to my early builds of Astroberry but it has been stable for a while now.

run from the terminal sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade && sudo apt dist-upgrade

hope that helps

Hello Cedric,

thanks for the hint; I'll do that tomorrow; after 6 weeks of wind, clouds and rain, I'll finish this session first, it's at 64 captures of 120 now and seems to do alright. I'll also create a new profile, where I'll setup the indi canon driver, maybe that will be more stable.

Kind regards,

AstroRookie

2 hours ago, alacant said:

If you have any issues in future and you're in a hurry, you can get an -almost- instant fix/solution by posting a one liner along with the log here. The log removes any guesswork.

Cheers and well done for sticking at it.

 

Hello Alacant,

thanks for encouraging but I have still some very strange behavior with Ekos:

• I have setup for a "test" session this evening, and the software as well as my Canon 500D are behaving very strange
• Yesterday, the display of the camera was not lit, which I found pretty cool, no extra disturbing light, but today it's lit ??
• When taking my test 2s exposures to focus, the directory not found error occurred again, then having switched to FITS and back to native, when previewing it always needed 2 attempts, the first attempt failed and the second attempt popped up the preview ... very weired
• Started PHD2 (I know you suggested internal guiding, put I didn't want to push it as I already used PHD2 on my macbook before, next time I'll try the internal guiding)
• Finally I managed to start a 120x1min session, but after 6 captures it crashed (it, being the indi server I presume)
• When I restarted, the KStars preview, constantly popped up, so iI killed every thing and restarted the whole session; now it's at capture 22 and seems to behave normally

Can you point me to the indi server logs, then I'll post them on the forum you mentioned.

Thanks for your help, really appreciated!

Kind regards,

AstroRookie

18 hours ago, alacant said:

It's an indi setting. You can choose to force BULB and have indi time the exposures or have the internal camera time them. 

A few other bits which may help you find it...

Are you saving as CR2 or fits?

Is the camera set to M?

Is the camera set to B?

Have you tried another cable?

Are you certain that the camera is not mounted by the computer?

HTH

Hello Alacant,

force bulb enabled did it, thank you very much. I have to admit as a beginner the settings in Ekos are a bit overwhelming.

Kind regards,

AstroRookie

5 minutes ago, alacant said:

?

The fixes don't mention anything about pixel size.

Go through the fixes they suggest.

Cheers

I'll check the communication mode as well; though I'd be surpirsed if that is the problem, as this was working a couple of weeks ago. As for the timed shooting, don't really know what that means, I'm just doing a Preview shot, and that fails with the aforementioned error.

Kind regards,

AstroRookie