kryptonite

Yeah, that corner is pretty bad and pain to get rid of. Guess i just need to brush up on my PI game...

I'm not experienced with LRGB imaging, so thought i'd give it a go on M81. However, when i combine the 4 individually processed integrations i end up with horrible colour hues across the image - they're all aligned and wotnot. Am i running into the issues of light pollution (inside the M25), which i can only remove with aggressive DBE application?  Individual files attached.

38 minutes ago, Alien 13 said:

The results from your machine beat my Alienware laptop into the ground so expect to pay big money if you want an improvement i.e. north of 4K.

Alan

That's interesting. I just assumed the age of my machine would put it well out of date 

I've got a 5 year old desktop, which i think performs decently and does my Pixinsight processing pretty well. However, i want to change to a laptop for the form-factor, but i don't want to compromise on performance.

This is my rig: https://www.userbenchmark.com/UserRun/27054387

What machine do you use and how does it perform with Pixinsight? Any folk familiar with computer hardware able to provide steer on whether i'm due an upgrade?

Looking to understand how others do their processing.

On 10/05/2020 at 20:59, TerryMcK said:

The 183 is well matched to a scope of size of 72ED. It does suffer from amp noise but of course it can be calibrated out really easily. It is really sensitive though and produces excellent results., 

I’ve no experience of the 533 but that is marketed as having no amp noise. Also never used the Atik camera you mentioned.

Unrelated to the post, but noticed your signature.  Dedicated my CPU cycles to Folding@Home 👍  

I've also been researching the ASI533. I'm currently using Atik 383L+, but i'm being tempted by ease of OSC and the 533 looks tasty

Nice job. Feels great once you manage to guide for longer subs

7 hours ago, AntHart said:

I’ve been looking in to this and while it is possible to ‘get’ windows on a pi it’s certainly a struggle and some say not worth the hassle. I’ve even read that it’s locked to 1gb of ram! 
Anyone who knows more I’d be happy to hear it 👍🏼 Definitely open to options.

I would 110% go for a pi if APT or NINA worked on it but these are windows only and I want to go this route software wise.

I also want to run windows 10 pro so I can have the Remote Desktop embedded software , the way I see it a program that’s built in will run better than any 3rd party app.

...sorry to hijack your conversion 

I found this thread, which I might explore. I have a pi kicking about somewhere. 

On 24/04/2020 at 21:45, freiform said:

I am currently using a Raspberry Pi 4 and have used a RPi3 before that. Both are perfectly adequate to guide, plate solve, image, autofocus and everything else you need for imaging. There are a few drawbacks, though. The internal WiFi can be a bit weak, depending on your infrastructure that might or might not apply. Also when using it with a SD-Card, transfer rates a a bit on the slow side which effectively limits its use for planetary or lucky imaging. But that might be migitated by using a fast storage (i.e. SSD via USB3).

Anyway, even the smallest NUC currently available, which features a dual-core Celeron CPU, outperforms the Raspberry Pi considerably. Your only issue might be how snappy eveything runs, i.e. Windows itself, start times of apps, etc. But as I can just power my device on when getting ready for imaging, I really don't care about that. Why anyone would hang an i7 with 16 GB RAM on the scope is beyond me, but to each his own, I guess.

I just ordered a NUC with Pentium J5005 (~155€) as I want to take a look at what happens on the Windows side of things. I am not particularly fond of ASCOM, but N.I.N.A. looks interesting and develops fast and then there's Voyager's siren call of carefree automatic sessions

TL;DR

They will all work fine for the basic tasks of equipment control and image aquisition. Maybe stay away from Atom Cpus.

 

Great information, thank you!

 

All the best

Sven

I'm interested by your Raspberry Pi comment - what OS is it running? I currently run my imaging from an old laptop, but a Pi sounds cleaner..

There's a couple of really good PHD2 videos on Youtube that are well worth a watch. Found them very helping in setting up my guiding. This is part 1 - he also has a part 2. Takes you through the important settings for good guiding.

I'm on the west side - near Ruislip. 

Everything seems to be working and i'll get another chance tonight to do some imaging.  Must be the Mk1 star - got it in 2013 or '14 or so. Attached is a raw image out of the camera - seems like it might be ok to get going (300s lum - longer subs seemed to saturate).

Sounds like a CMOS set-up wouldn't necessarily result in a faster or easier workflow for the same quality image?

Think i saw your original Keter post Dave, which motivated me to make and covert my own. Not as progressed as you yet though - i have to lift mine off. Will work towards rolling it over the next couple months. 

Five years ago I escalated my astrophotography habit to the point that i had an NEQ6, Skywatcher CF 10” Quattro, Atik 383L+ mono, William Optics Star 71, Lakeside auto focuser, EFW2 with Baader LRGB and 5nm Astrodon narrowband filters. Also got a Sony a7rii. Never really got the hang of the SW scope, so mostly used the star 71. Got some fun shots using narrowband filters - i almost exclusively image from inside M25. I had no fixed imaging set-up and one day about 3-4 years ago i just stopped. I suspect it was to do with the time commitment and the headache of set-up and breakdowns at terrible hours.

I now have a Keter shed i’ve modded to remove the roof and my set-up is now static, so at least i can now sleep while the rig is doing its thing. However, now i’m trying to kick start my habit from scratch i’m not entirely sure why i have the gear that i do.  The only thing i’ve been able to determine is that the Atik and star 71 are undersampling..apparently.. And cmos are all the rage.

Want to make a success of my energy to start this again, but don’t want to make life hard for myself. Any advice from people that have been through the same low energy or are familiar with my equipment on how to maximise the enjoyment return? You now have my gear, what do you do? (change scope, change camera to cmos etc). 

Once had a passion for this, now trying to maintain the spark that has returned.