powerlord

So this place is great if you are self contained like me in Motorhome or happy to wild camp. There are 2 wee shack things for toilet and shower, and are clean, etc. Just basic.. So you know. But basically I have a massive field to myself in the middle of knowhere. It has not been clear at night, but I will be back. Especially as its only 11 miles away as crow flies from my house!!

Well unfortunately even though all forecasts were adament that it was a clear sky.. It was not. I kept checking and at 1am it cleared up, looked great.. I PAed main mount, focused, trained guiding, took one test shot.. Then couldn't see a star in the sky. Arg Stayed that way. Bummer. For the brief time it was clear I was surprised by the visual difference between bortle 6 at home and 4 here. And it's only 11 miles away as the crow (or me on my paramotor) flies. I will be back

aye that'll work fine. If you really want to, it's not rocket science to take em to bits and clean (it will be oil on the blades sticking them). I've done this before. It's is very very fiddly, but plenty of youtube help out there. I'm only saying because I doubt you'll get very good results with the aperture wide open. stu

thanks - I'll looks again - the gain didn't seem to be in the same units as zwo gain so wasn't sure what to set in sharpcap.

it was a bit too high up the histogram with 180. But it was start of night, ZWO filters have some light pollution rejection in the RGB I believe which might explain it ? So when I can get away with it, I shoot all the same, but don't think ever shoot L longer than RGB prob because of that ? maybe I should then ?

ah, forgot about uvir. doubt I can do anything about that then. i think i'll use the laptop. I tried last night pointed at ceiling, creating 120x30sec ser files. so one every hour. and that seemed to work ok in sharpcap pro. oh.. gain wise, just set to 0 in smartcap as doesn't display zwo gain, and that seemed to work ?

Hi chaps, I'm going to a campsite friday and friday night looks good for imaging. bortle 4 vs my usual bortle 6. While doing my imaging lark with my eq5, 80ed, etc I thought I would also try and setup my as224mc with the allsky lens it came with on top of the motorhome all night and capture. firstly, android would be easier as could just use a tablet phone, but app seems to get poor reviews - anyone use it or is it too unreliable ? If pc, I assume Id setup sharpcap pro - try to get focus as good as I can in daylight on distant object, and setup for 30 sec subs (that about max for no trails?), and repeat all night. then I can choose to stack or animate or both. Am I missing anything or a better way of doing it ? I think unity gain in 12 bit is 135, so set gain to 135 and 16 mit capture ? I thought also I might put a wee tube around camera sitting on roof, so lower lights not in FOV don't cause glow. It's one of those 'don't get a chance to do this very often' things, so want to get it right.

Sure, download it and unzip it. https://starnetastro.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/StarNetv2CLI_MacOS.zip open a terminal window and cd to that location. and then run the following: chmod 777 starnet++ xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine libtensorflow_framework.2.dylib xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine libtensorflow.2.dylib xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine starnet++ you should now be able to run. I notice the example is wrong filename, so if you want to try that, do mv rgb_test.tif rgb_test5.tif chmod 777 run_starnet.sh ./run_starnet.sh If you find that you can't run shell scripts, either don't worry and just use the command line: ./starnet++ in.rif out.tif or, control panel, security, privacy and under full disk access add terminal Its not optimised for the M1's AI subprocessor, so will just run on the CPU but it works well enough.

Nice. Exact same setup and target I posted today. 😀

Starnet works fine on m1s. I use it myself. Stu

Oops, sorry. Could u move to imaging please @admin ?

Last night I took some Ha with my asi1600 on the SW200PDS. So I took the opportunity to rework it from scratch as I wasn't happy with colours first time (see earlier post - magenta, no blue coming through, etc). I'm much happier with the results this time, and the Ha makes it pop I think.

Shot last night on my SW 200PDS with asi1600. About an hour each channel - 3 mins for R,G and B, 2 mins for L.

I know this is probably common, but meant to post it at the time.. Just remembered...

Finally got my dodgy EQ6 guiding decent last night. Gave it a challenge - C925 with 6.3 reducer/flattener fitted. Seeing was good, not great but still impressed with how the big SCT performed, and my DEC was always around 0.3rms. I still have some work to do on the RA which was around 0.6rms but spikes going to 2 or even 4 occasionally, which the DEC didn't have. ASI533 and 300 sec exposures. 200 mins total. Lots and lots of wee galaxies there too Again, lighter and darker background. Neither clipped. Which to you prefer ? I still like darker myself.

Attack attack attack

Yup, see last v5 for sorting that. (same here - 5k imac)

thanks - no clipping though - it was taken down to about 15/15/15 in first one. It's probably your monitor. I do find that most folks monitors, tvs are set to clip blacks for more contrast. Since I calibrated all my monitors, I see a true dark grey, but on, say my work PC which is not calibrated I see it look like it's clipped. stu

I might star again with this, as I think I'm no getting the colours right. It doesn't help that there are a plethora of different looks to it when you look online. Might try starting with Siril's photometric calibration. Anywhere v5:

I agree magenta wise. I did shoot with ir cut, no ha. I actually thought I'd toned the magenta down but it's come back somehow. I'll try again and see if I can just tweak the contrast a wee bit, and lose that magenta. 👍

this ?

Just from subs last night. 200PDS, asi533. 300 second subs. 4 hours of subs. Came out quite nice. I might try combining all my data on M51 sometime, but I quite like trying new every time too. 2 below, one with a bit darker background, one with a more flat look. whiich do you prefer ? stu

Im going up to here next weekend: https://www.pitchup.com/campsites/England/East_Anglia/Suffolk/Woodbridge/kingfishers_at_cretingham_country_park/?adults=1&arrive=2022-04-29&depart=2022-05-02&type=10&#&gid=1&pid=15 Ive never been there before, but with Haw Farm closed I looked around and this seemed like it could be ok for a break, and maybe some imaging if the nights are clear. As I say, no idea what it will actually be like though, but when I booked on wed they did have a bit of availability for next weekend (May BH weekend) which was more than most had so grabbed 3 nights.

thanks, but yeh I know what you mean - it was the right size for my FL, so I felt I had to have a go, but doubt I'll try again. I've seen some pull out a bit of red in the centre, but there was nothing there is mine that I could find.

Very good seeing last night. I feel I kind of wasted it all on this galaxy to be honest, which doesn't really look that great for 242 minutes imho. But hey ho, here's the best I can make of it - 300 second exposures mostly. SW 200PDS, ASI533.