Malpi12

Bingo! or eureka

My offending trees are now clearly visible and, by making the landscape partly transparent, I can see obscured things that will become visible if I walk a few hundred yards down my lane where I can gain a clear south horizon .

Is there a way to partially illuminate a landscape in Stellarium ?
ie. to give it some ambient light, to make it more prominent when there is no moon or twilight.

-------------------Edit --------------------

Some googling later :-

I have found
minimal_brightness=
used in landscape.ini

and
flag_minimal_brightness=
(&another)  minimal_brightness=
used in config.ini

all I have to do now is to sort out true/false and value directions !

On 24/08/2021 at 12:44, vlaiv said:

and I wound 

🤣 Excellent typo ! That would certainly happen if one were to use the wrong-handed scissors mistakenly.   

1 hour ago, teoria_del_big_bang said:

that this can be a Gray area but that would only complicate things 🙂 

Especially if the photons are collected by a Newt,
they should then be expressed as Reflected Binary Code
(aka Gray Code) 
?  !
 

There are some double and triple satellite close formations, Ive not viewed them myself, but could they swap places as they come in and out of view, perhaps glinting/flashing differently ?

NOSS is one set to google but there are several others. (eg. the Chinese Yogan/JianBing)

Sadly awol this night (11-12Aug) due to cloud&rain.
So I amused myself with a search of  my recent archives and, oh so close, I was in the region chasing asteroids and have this "pre" from 20June2021
where (with a bit of a stretch and imagination) in the noise lurks RS at about 10.5-10.8 ish ! [mags from Stellarium,]

Stack of 100x1sec iso6400, fixed tripod, vastly pixel cropped out of a 50mm f2.8 canon aps frame

Not a vastly significant obs in the grand scheme of things, but it amused me to find it

Y Oph is also a variable, so perhaps not the best ref !
bit of a sporadic history on AAVSO, currently estimated visual between 5.8 and ~6.4, most clustering near 6.4

Well, that was fun, thank you Jeremy, , , and for his next trick he is going to magic-up a supernova for us   

Yes I agree with @Muc 👍 🙂
I couldnt decide between it, zeta Ser, and mu Oph by my aged eyes. So I had a look at my pics with an unmod Canon, stack of 9x 2sec @6400iso (ancient fslr50mm f2.5 lens)
and got this via DSS, Gimp>grey-scaled (yes, it is very yellow/orange)  & Fiji
mags are  from Stellarium.

21:50utc Aug2021.  My Fiji peak values are 204.9, 235.9, 231.4, 234.4 if anyone is good at log mag scales

Thank you once again @JeremyS for the heads-up. Clouds briefly parted for me 11pmBST last night and I was able to get a few 2" exposures of it for my diary

I may be mis-remembering but I think it was made a legal requirement in the UK that when selling goods to the public ( I forget the terminology, ie excluding business sales) that VAT must be included in the advertised/listed price ?? Did a quick google but not found a ref. yet
 

Great work ! Superb, thank you.

A small thing : am I being old fashioned when I think of RA in hours and minutes, more than degrees ?
 

On 25/07/2021 at 17:15, JeremyS said:

Continues to brighten gradually:

Thanks @JeremyS for the updates,
It does indeed continue! I had not been paying attention,,  AAVSO now has it in the region of mag 10.5, 
which should be just about in range of my fixed camera+lens stacks.

AAVSO Viz & V

3 hours ago, Ags said:

 you're right, the Bresser is practically unobtainable!

! 

 I am also thinking "need psu, will travel", so I noted your post pop up into my awareness
Went to uk sites , oh ! 
then to your eu  link , oh dear oh !

It does annoy me that I google on things and continually waste time with, for example Amazon, " we dont know when .." blah blah, so take the stupid page down, dont waste my time if they have nothing to sell !
end hissy fit

Hence my signal to you, just in case
 

Later ! :-
The clouds parted again so I was able to play with my dslr with 50mm lens

the crop , arrow = n Cas, comparisons are marked with lines, see below

 crop seleted comparison stars and import to ImageJ , do  profile

yep, mag 7 or a bit less  [magnitudes quoted from Stellarium]

Just in from a brief cloud-terminated viewing, my first for quite a while,  of nova Cas and I think I have missed its latest outburst because I have it similar to HIP 115198 (HD 220057)  mag6.9(-Stellarium)

?  
 

1 hour ago, Ags said:

 Tending towards the Bresser as it is cheaper, has more capacity and has a mains outlet to keep my laptop running.

But

Delivery acc. to manufacturer: 15.01.2022 (171 days)
Anlieferung laut Hersteller: 15.01.2022 (171 Tage)

5 hours ago, Budgie1 said:

I use Darks not Bias with my ASI294MC. 

That is interesting thanks, a note to be memorized for when my thoughts will in the future turn to proper astro cams, "watch out for reports of amp glow."
I think I would need a cooled one that can have a library of darks, It would grieve me to spend our few nights of stars doing ambient darks
 

5 hours ago, alacant said:

Perfect. So, like us you worked out for yourself what was best. You didn't get bogged down in theory.

Just our €0,02

 

And worth every cent  👍

Being new to the camera - at first I just did lights to find out what all the modes were, find my way round the stars, see what exposure duration/startrail was acceptable, how to drive DSS and a host of other things to learn (like, my old fslr 50mm lens isnt much good ) 
( and like, dont walk away from the camera with the intervalometer in pocket but still attached, if you do, be ready to catch the camera+tripod as they fall over ! Phew, I did, but it was a near thing !!)

Then dutifully I moved on to darks, as the tutes said to do, yep good.
Then, whats this bias stuff all about ,,
that is when the head-scratching started, Thought at first that I wasnt understanding bias and/or DSS.

Thanks for all your thoughts everyone. 
 

1 hour ago, alacant said:

astrometry.net is an app which runs natively on Linux. You do not need an Internet connection. Just install the program locally.

Another alternative is Astap. Again standalone.

HTH

Thanks for the correction, yes, my bad, I should have said nova.astrometry.net ! 

I did mention ASTAP   & that I was having probs with it (in my windows 64bit).  **  It is also available for Mac and RaspPi.

**edit Update. Working now, I didnt have min and max set right,  doh!

1 hour ago, INeedSomeHelp said:

with 1600 ISO some other stars also popped up.

That is good, you should be ok to follow via delta and mu. Others here who have shot the galaxy should be able to advise on the visibility of the core relative to these stars.

Good luck.

On 25/07/2021 at 18:04, INeedSomeHelp said:

do you think that at 100mm, f2.8; 1600 ISO and 3s exposure I can clearly see

PS !

I should have asked : In  the stacked exposure that you showed us, which of the stars could you see in single exposures at the camera lcd, any ! ?

Ie. what is your light pollution and what ISO can you go up to ?

Darks or Bias or both, dslr vs other.

I am a bit puzzled.

A couple of posts recently, (by @Budgie1 and @alacant) suggest not to use darks, instead use bias only with dslr.
I have found this when starting out in dslr (Canon 60D unmod with 50mm and 135mm lenses) I played with stacks in DSS of 20 x 1, 2, or 4sec exposures on fixed tripod: then doing light only, light+dark, light+bias, then L+D+B.
L only was of course poor, L+D and L+B mostly equal, and L+D+B being often the same as L+B sometimes marginally better.

The 'marginal' didnt seem worth the lost imaging time if the sky was still clear.

So I am puzzled on two fronts,
most online tutorials and 'tubes insist on darks.
secondly, dont most dedicated astro cams use the same chips as produced for dslr (more recently for mirrorless) so why not bias only for dedicated (but uncooled) astrocams aswell ?

I originally thought my findings were because I was inexpert, that my ambient temperature allowed great mismatch in exif temperature (not necessarily sensor temperature)  and also using very short exposures. Then I read that proper imagers with longer tracked exposures may also not be using darks !

Anyone got some good links to exposures of the truth
Is it just down to the inability of a dslr to get darks sufficiently close in temperature to the lights ?

23 hours ago, INeedSomeHelp said:

 do you think that at 100mm, f2.8; 1600 ISO and 3s exposure I can clearly see Andromeda after having followed your hopping pattern?

A good question, not sure, I have not yet been able to explore that bit of sky with my camera!
But no I dont think so, not as a smudge of galaxy, however it has a bright core that may appear star-like at around mag4 I think. Certainly you should be able to see mu And., above Mirach and then your target is the same distance the other side of mu.

9 hours ago, INeedSomeHelp said:

 but my internet here is quite bad. 

Plate solving via astrometry.net may not be viable for you then,
so a local platesolve my be better and a lot faster !

One that has helped me find my way pointing my dslr is a neat freeware by 
Giovanni Benintende called All Sky Plate Solver. Here
I think it is only available on Windows though, and as you are using Siril,  not DeepSkyStacker, does this imply you are Linux or Mac ?
It is quite a small download and the index files that also need to be downloaded are quite small for 50mm to 135mm lenses.

Another is ASTAP plate solver which will also run in Linux or so I am told, but I have not got it to sing for me yet !

Good luck with your next outing, I shall be after Andromeda later when it comes into my view.

+1 for Stellarium

In your uncropped pic you can also see delta Andromeda bottom left.
I have set my Stellarium to approximate your field of view and superimposed your pic upon a mozaic of 2 Stellariums which shows that you were nearly there just a frame away !

The stellarium underneath:

If you re-aquire Alpheraz - then star-hop by moving it to top right with delta near the middle you should be able to get Mirach near the bottom left.

Hop again so that Mirach in the the bottom right.
Your target should now be in the top-middle,

I do this at the camera on the LCD with 2 or 4 sec single exposures with ISO 3200 or 6400 in my northern twilight so you should be ok. (mag4 stars show up well) 
Then centre the target, re--adjust to your stacking ISO and fire away