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Beautiful. Are those very faint red rings on some of the brighter stars deconvolution artefacts? I have been trying to understand what that is and what it does, thus far I have only managed to get modern art out of that feature in pixinsight. There are some useful looking articles online but I dont have the brain capacity to read them at the moment!

Looks like you have it mastered with that though. congratulations

Ed.

That's awful! sounds like you were lucky that wind didn't come with lashing rain though. Its been blowing up a gale down here and I keep checking on my cameras that the scope cover is still on. 

Best of luck with getting all that up and running again. 

Hello everyone. Weather has been awful and  my motivation has been a bit off with other projects, sadly mainly work but I have managed to scrape enough photons from the clouds to process this NCG2174, the Monkey head nebula

Narrowband HA/O3/S2 25 minutes each, 10x150s subs, guided, capture with NINA, Sky Watcher ED80 on a pier mount NEQ6.

Mainly processed in PixInsight, some learnings on this one, Narrowband subs needed pedestals to get them to process via Weighted Batch Pre-Processor (although this final image i did by hand). Lots of stuff to recall from last season because I had forgotten how to make Pixinsight do much other than beep at me in irritation!

Got to confess as well, eldest daughter worked on the stars at the end in Photoshop. I think she dropped a B/W layer on then painted the nebula back in. Not sure how I feel about that! Seems to be a bit cheaty if you ask me!

Anyhow, its a nice enough image. until you look at all the others

All the best to everyone with pier mounted gear but no dome tonight. Its blowing an absolute gale out there.

Ed.

ah sorry yes its a Skywatcher NEQ5 and the motherboard has SYNSCAN EQ6 Motor Controller Rev C printed on the other side.

I have just scraped that chip with my fingernail and the deposits have come off! it looks pretty clean so, not looking like that chip has exploded or been damaged. 

It also appears that the mount is now working again! Maybe just sitting inside for a while has sorted something out!!

Anyhow thanks all for your posts. Just got to reassemble and wait another few months for a clear night!

Ed.

Bit of a disappointment, first clear night in ages and I was shooting the iris nebula with NINA. The RCD switch in our house tripped and everything shuts down. After some investigations I think I narrowed it down to an outside double socket that runs power to my mount on it's pier. One of the sockets seems to have gotten damaged over the summer and by switching that socket off I could get the house up and running again.

Now I fired up the rig again and my Pegasus Astro power box is telling me that there's a short on output 1. This is the mount power. So I swapped the mount to be on output 4 which is spare and the power box promptly reports a short on that too.

So, I have now dismantled the rig completely to get everything inside, set up just the mount and mini-pc and it appears that the right ascension axis has failed. Just using EQASCOM to send some slew inputs the DEC axis will spin but the RA is dead.

I have pulled the motherboard to have a look and there appears to be some damage to one of the chips in what I am assuming is the RA circuitry, it has the letters RA printed next to it so I think its a fairly safe assumption.

This is what I am seeing, it looks to me like there is damage to that U8 chip but I know nothing about electronics whatsoever.

Is there a test I can do to check whether its the motor or the controller that has failed? I do not (currently) have a multi-meter or any electrics testing tools but Screwfix sells them and is open. I would however need someone to explain what to do with one and I do so love a trip to Screwfix on a Sunday.

Morning everyone. 

Just thought I would post a quick update to let you know the plastic bag and desiccant plan has worked an absolute treat, the lens assembly is crystal clear again and I have reassembled the scope.

Thanks so much to this wonderful community for all the suggestions (and warnings! because I was tempted to crack that optical assembly open!)

Ed

Turns out there is a small bag of desiccant in each and every covid test strip we have (and we have a couple of boxes full!) 

Seems like I left my UVC lamp in my other jeans, but the ziploc and desiccant is working a treat, I can see the fogging clearing up nicely and in time I might be able to forget about the fingerprint 

Cheers all. I have the cell isolated now, but I have not taken the cell itself apart so the lens elements are all as they were. I have the dew band on and it does appear to be working, I am less than pleased to note however that the massive fingerprint is on the inside of the lens cell and is not one of mine!

Anyone know where you can buy desiccant, or even what a domestic desiccant might be?

Hey all.

Over the weekend I had to travel up North and whilst I was away my scope cover broke free of its restraints in high winds and left my rig exposed to the elements for a couple of days.

Electronically its fine, I have dried everything out and reassembled it inside and N.I.N.A can see and connect to everything, the mini-pc is fine and all the cameras seem to be OK.

The concern I have is with the scope itself, obviously when it came inside I got a significant amount of condensation developing on the lens unit, I have wiped this down and left it to dry out overnight. 

The scope is a Skywatcher Esprit 80ED Pro and now I have removed the focusing module and the hood so I can see just the lens element it seems to be very "foggy". I have never stripped it down before so I have not seen this component in its "pre-incident" state so I don't have anything to compare to. I don't want to do anything to it, for example clean it with some sort of cleaning agent, until I know whether this is as expected, whether this is something to do with the lens coatings.

I will add some images in a sec, started writing this on my work laptop and I can only add images from my personal machine!

here we go. this to my untutored eye does not look like a clean and happy component... that said this is looking directly through it at a light bulb with a DSLR flash, so it would never get that much light through in normal usage, I dont know, I think probably it needs to go for a professional clean, 

This is the component, I can break this down a bit more and remove the tube foot section leaving only the lens unit. this would give much better access to the lens and would let me clean it with a DSLR sensor cleaning kit or some other recommended kit.

Quick one - I cannot seem to locate a button or menu that takes me directly to my personal gallery. Is there such a function? I can hit up "gallery" and see all the recent public uploads but not go directly to my personal space without using a saved link.

Also, am I abusing the gallery feature by posting loads of images to it? is that what its' there for?

Ed.

I appear to be blessed with another clear night, 3 in a row, and I am debating whether to gather more veil data or move onto a new target. I am up to 8 hours or thereabouts on narrowband and I have these two images, slightly different processing, not entirely sure which I prefer, to be honest I quite like both.

Anyhow, if I rack up another four or five hours do you think it would be worth the time investment or am I chasing diminishing returns?

Would you add some RGB subs in? more narrowband data or call it a day and move on to a new target?

I am also debating a multi-panel job using telescopius to work out better coordinates and get more of the region, but that's a different question.

Ed.

Are you proposing to mount the scope and the DSLR on the star tracker mount?

Just looking at the weights, the star tracker has a capacity of 5kg, the camera is going to be about 1 - 1.5 kg, the Williams scope is 2.2kg, you don't have a huge amount of headroom for additional kit.

Have you considered a reducer to widen the field of view on the Celestron for DSO's? have a look on astronomy.tools. I have never used one so I dont know what the impact is on exposure lengths.

What is your current setup? do you have the Canon attached to the viewer of the Celestron?

Ed.

On 16/09/2022 at 15:16, Skipper Billy said:

My fanless Intel NUC has been outside for >4 years now without any form of protection - zero issues. The small amount of heat generated keeps the connections etc dry.

With a fan cooled one it would be drawing damp air into the casing - that doesnt sound like a good idea.

 

 

And you call that a "guide scope" do you? 

My vote would be with a mini-pc or "NUC" standing for next unit computing but essentially just a really small PC, that's for a fixed installation, if you are taking out and about yeah maybe a laptop is more what you need.

If you want to capture at a high framerate the key component there is going to be disk write speed, so swap out any spinning platter HDD's for solid state drives straight away.

My little NUC is out there happily, has been for a couple of years with only a telegizmos cover on the scope for protection. no issues at all. I run a pegasus powerbox as well, so I shut down power to everything at the end of my sessions. the NUC runs on its own though.

Hi Duncan,

A guide scope is a finder scope, the thing that makes it a "guide" scope is the software that you plug it into, so, you would take a normal finderscope/guide scope like a skywatcher EvoGuide 50 and you plug a camera into it.

That camera then connects to a piece of software, PHD2 is very commonly used, and the software also connects to the mount. The software monitors small changes in the location of a guide star, and issues a correction to the mount. So in that respect no, its not just for alignment, its for actively guiding the mount and compensating for errors.

Objects that require, or you want to use long exposures on are helped by active guiding. 

Solar system stuff is generally done with video, using a technique called "lucky imaging" in which you shoot many, many frames of video and post processing software picks out the best ones and stacks them together.

I would recommend a dedicated astro camera over a DLSR for a number of reasons, most of which other people have called out but I would also add that a dedicated camera will have ASCOM drivers which in the long run will be easier to integrate into a full system.

Post as many questions as you like! That's what we are here for.  Personally I have just about finished getting my setup how I want it, its pier mounted permanently and all remotely controlled, there are some sizeable learning curves on this journey but it's immensely satisfying!

Ed.

Wow that's amazing. both the object and the skill in capturing it. 20 minute subs are looong

Grab yourself a shutter release cable, that should deal with the wobble. don't bother with a Barlow, all that will do is increase magnification and crop the image. The Orion nebula will fill most of your frame there if you have enough exposure. Focus is only slightly off, to my eyes at least but a bahtinov mask will help you sort that out.

A tracking mount will, ok I am going to be honest based on my experience here, a tracking mount will drive you insane for a good few sessions until you get to grips with it. Once you have nailed down setting it up and aligning it it opens the door to the incredible images you can see on this board.

Orion is a bit of a special case because its so very bright and only needs "short" exposures. If you want to shoot stuff that requires exposures over 30 seconds, which is pretty much everything else in the sky, you will need to be tracking. Once you get over 60 seconds you also want to be looking at guided but don't worry about that for now.

Personally I would skip the mount upgrade path, i.e. adding the tracking motors, and head straight for something like the EQ5 SynScan mount.  

As for stacking, yes its a bit of a mystery to start with. My route through the various options started with Deep Sky Stacker, which is free and perfectly serviceable, then onto Astro Pixel Processor which isn't free for stacking, and PixInsight for post processing which also isn't free to quite an amazing degree. 

During daylight you can shoot a set of calibration files and reprocess your existing image, so if you are at a loose end today you can try that.  I cannot stress enough how important the calibration files are, that's the Darks, Flats, DarkFlats etc. each set does something very specific to remove noise from your image and increase Signal to Noise ratio.

Here's my first Orion, 2nd January 2017, the nebula is one of the out of focus blobs, the slightly pinker one.  Thats 16 sec at F1.4 ISO 400 on a Nikon D800E, 85mm lens.

Ed.

this might be a bit better...

With clear skies on the radar for my ski trip I lugged the rig over to Courchevel in the French Alps, passing through the tunnel at about 2:30 on the Friday 17th having packed everything at the last minute and picked the wife and kids up from school. Not so hard for us living about 20 minutes from the tunnel but my sympathies to anyone having to cancel at the last minute due to Macron's announcement.

Anyhow. here's my Orion Nebula. Its LRGB stacked in APP and processed in Pixinsight.

Seems a bit overblown in the middle, not sure what to do to bring more detail out in that region, maybe dial down the luminance channel a bit? I also didn't rebuild flat and dark libraries whilst out there, too much else to do with 10 of us out there so I am using my existing libraries. same rig but a lot colder up there. also I normally shoot 120s exposures but on Orion I had to cut that to 15 sec. Not the main point of the holiday so, I am more than happy with this so far. I have the Heart Nebula and the Pleiades to play with as well.

The French for "Bolt" incidentally is "Boulon" and the French for washer is "Rondelle" and a decent B&Q substitute is Weldom. here's the one in Moutiers  The bolt for my pier was too long for the tripod so I had to go on a little trip.
 

Ed.

First clear night in forever the other day, and I managed to get a good few hours on a new target, the Rosette Nebula. I'm really pleased with the result and I think it's a big step forward from my elephant trunk shot.

Changes - well,  I shot this with 3 minute subs not 10 and I have rebalanced the rig and dialled in what I think is my best polar alignment. PHD2 played ball all evening with only half a pixel or so of movement which is a massive improvement. I think the angle of IC1396 where I am makes it really hard on the  equipment, I will go back to it and check once I am done with some other stuff. I have bought pixinsight and started putting some time into learning that. 

Ed

20 hours ago, Andy R said:

First clear night since middle of October last night, which is an improvement compared to last years 5 months of solid cloud cover.  In fact I did actually take some night pics last year of the clouds out of desperation. 
 

 

That's actually a bloody nice picture. I would be very pleased with that. Bit short on stars, obviously but otherwise very nice indeed.

As I am entering my second month of 100% cloud cover I rather wish I had chosen to study the buggers

I have been wondering for a while what the "high cloud" is, that seems to be the layer that is always contributing to the cloud cover but it's not really visible from the ground.

So its raining and miserable and looks to be staying that way. I had moved my scope inside off the pier to try re-wiring it the the garage where its dry, stable and I can clamp the thing in a vice.

I lost a power cable and damaged my focuser unit last week with a cable snag so I was keen to try and prevent this in the future. Also the 30M powered USB cable gave up the ghost, flat out refused to connect to, or even see my equipment. I have been thinking about getting a remote mini-pc for a while and this seemed to be a good opportunity.

This is what I have come up with. Using the right hand side mount for a guidescope shoe I have attached the Pegasus Powerbox 2 and the mini-pc back to back mounted in an aluminium chassis, then I have routed all the wires that do not move relative to the scope and cable tied them together.

Only four wires should move relative to the scope, that's the NUC power, the powerbox power, the mount power ( which thinking about it I could actually opt *not* to run off the powerbox which would mean one less wire that moves ) and finally a network cable that runs to the PC.

Its actually fairly well balanced because the new powerbox / PC unit counterbalances the guidescope / camera / focuser. The bunch of wires hanging down connect into power or mount, the rest of them should be static no matter where the scope points.

Ed.