speckofdust

Come to think of it, unlike a refractor, the need to clean the primary mirror at least once in a while and the process of remounting it will also introduce errors in alignment.

I am sure there is a good reason, but why is it not possible to make a reflector that has all the relevant optical elements firmly fixed in place so that collimation is not needed from time to time? Curiosity....thanks in advance.

signed

let's wait to hear from Moonshed.....😀

I have just googled the picture of smarties and a picture of 1 litre milk bottle ( only used to either 1 pint or 6 pint bottle, thats why) and my guess is about 1200.

Ah....looks like there was a misunderstanding, but anyway, considering the premise that people have seen the jar and the size of the candies before making the prediction, then intuition (!!!) tells me that this phenomenon is no longer an incredible one . I guess it is intuition derived from life experience after all, like estimating someone's height, speed of a car, muscle memory when lifting an object etc that leads to a ball park figure. The more people you throw in to make the guess, the extremely wrong responses are drowned out by the closer to normal ones, ie resulting in the normal distribution. Obviously this response does not contain any sound scientific evidence and invokes the nebulous concept of intuition, which nevertheless seems to be a good approximation.........

I think prior knowledge, however inaccurate it might be, plays a role. The participants would have to have seen the size of the jar and the size of the smarties to come up with a value that is actually close to the truth. If asked to guess the wealth of a random person, most people will say "tens of thousands", but the moment you say that the random person is a banker, the answer will change to millions. The rest is just Gaussian distribution.

Was mesmerised by the appearance of the sum this morning on the way to work through the "freezing fog" and just took a picture of it with the smart phone with no filters. Never expected to capture the sun spots, really pleased with this lucky !! imaging.

Hello all, on the recent processing I did for veil nebula, I could not see any effect from using the dark frames on Deep Sky Stacker. Not sure why. I have tried all the various options such as remove hot pixels, dark optimisation, kappa sigma, median kappa sigma etc, but to no avail. I have attached a selection of the image from a processed light frame and master dark frame ( generated by DSS). which show the same hot pixels. any help would be appreciated.

Thats brilliant, I feel this solution will work, will give it a go and feedback here. Thanks

Thank you, I will give this a go!

I am using zwo asi 1600 mm camera for imaging and zwo asi 120 mini for guiding, but what I have found is that these cameras have to be attached to the same specific usb ports on the laptop. If the cables are swapped around to usb ports, then the capture software (ASI Cap that comes with the camera) does not work and always chooses the guide camera and at the same time PHd2 would stop working. Does anyone know why this is so? Is it an issue with the software? Thanks in advance

absolutely stunning images

Wow, simply wow!! you can almost feel the fusion explosions fuelling the proms. well done and thanks for sharing!

Or we could try to match supply and demand. The vast amount of imaging data collected from the clear sky areas elsewhere could be outsourced over to be processed by people like me living under the endless cloudy nights in the uk. just thinking about the market forces....