powerlord

I've just spent night shooting with a cheap 28mm vintage on an asi533. Even stopped down its not one for star peepers but I think it should still be decent, watch imaging dso forum for results today or tomorrow.

hi. ive a bunch of vintage lenses for my 6d ive got off ebay. all have been fine reaching infinity with m42 to eos adapter. some have been sharp with stars, some are terrible. its a case kf just getti g some cheap and trying. takamurs are held up as good (my 200 is). but i have others which work great for daylight photos, but terrible star shapes. stu

But I mean... She's got a kitchen I assume ? You've not got an obsy. What new amazing capabilities will this new kitchen have? I'd wager nothing. I'm sure once you explain it all logically she will understand. 🤔

Thanks though having watched it I'm none the wiser. Seems that the angle asiair is showing is relative to something other than a rotation from 'level' on polaris... Instead, I looked at one I took 4 nights ago (m51), saw that the tail in up. And worked out that was a rotation of 0. So then I could move 30 from that to get to what I wanted. Pity its not simpler.

Hi chaps - is there a way from the plate solve to work out what the field rotation is ? With the asi1600 connected to the newt it's not obvious at all what 'up' is. so when I check framing in sky safari I don't know what offset to set the field rotation too. I suppose taking a long exposure of a dso then working it out from there manually, but figured there might be a more obvious way I'm missing? stu

Two eq6 mounts setup tonight, one guided with the 150 newt and asi1600, one not with ultra wide field 28mm on an asi533. Both asiair controlled. Let the forecast me correct. 🤞

however rubbish the data is, always best to balance the mono channels first, then merge. most software will do this for you, but otherwise, a visual look of the histograms - and adjust till the 'humps' are around the same point. If your green or blue (blue often rubbish I find) is terrrible, you can apply some extra denoising and stetching to the blue. and consider using the R for L if you didn't take L. Have a look at my xmas tree I posted today - that was NB I grant you, but the H (green) was good, the S (red) was rubbish, and the O (blue) was so bad I stetched, and guassian blurred. but result still went ok. here's a pic of the 3 channels so you can see what I did. always use the cleanest channel as L if you don't have any L.

yup - just download from zwo direct and install. i've got it running on a 30 quid 7" fire. hold on - ignore me - I'm talking about asiair. I don't use synscan. sorry. stu

thanks. the central star is missing, as it just bloated out all channels. i need to see if I can put something of it back, and starnet wouldn't take stars out very well at all either. It's not one for pixel peepers, but from a distance it looks ok. 🙂

i know it's a cop out - but I'd say, try a different device. old tablet ? it doesn't need much resources to use. an cheap as chips kindle fire works great and you have the bigger screen, etc. stu

Full moon, and my S and O were frankly terrible. So this is the best I could make of a target I've tried a few times now without success. Shot with TS-Photon 150 and asi1600 in SHO.

Try siril (free) and Affinity Photo (trial and then very cheap). Have a look at my posts. All done with those. PI does not deserve your money. Stu

Shot with my new (to me) Altair 80ED with 0.8 FF. Asi533 and L-extreme. Shot under nearly full moon, 220 minutes. Edited in Siril and Affinity Photo. Same target, same night, shot with my TS-Photon 150 and asi1600 in NB.

Thanks. No those were the last of the night, so scope had been out for hours by then. Guiding was good generally, but was a bit worse at that point I think.. I'll check logs.

So.. turns out al the subs are like that. collimation thing ? here's one sub:

oh that is just intentional. just liked them that way. but the other stars above are not 'unprocessed' - just as stacked. but yeh, some of the brighter ones, I pulled back in after dimming the others. There's no core, because that's what the stack was - maxed out. I just popped them back in to give the composition some framing. I'm not in any way aiming for scientific accuracy here. stu

wasnt having a go, just genuinely didn't notice. As I said above - might be I stacked a frame I shouldn't have stacked. not stacking it might sharpen M51 too, so I'll have a look tomorrow - see if I can find the culprit - it was 60 sec subs - all 185 of em, so i skipped through them pretty quickly (prefer an eyeball check before i put them into APP). chances are I missed a rubbish one or two.

well, that's better than before yes ? what you see there, is what I got out of stacking with APP. seems to only be some that are 'doubled'. maybe stacked a few dodgy files I supppose.

voila.

topaz denoise. Sorry - not a star peeper so didn't really notice. I might got back and correct. stu

More and more impressed with this TS-Photon 150 the more I use it. This was shot last night - an hour of each R,G,B and 25 mins of Ha. Processed in Siril, startools and affinity. I've annotated it with astrometry.net some really tiny galaxies picked out there.

It's also about 'what works' as well, and then there's the need to have radiation hardened electronics. Military wise, I suppose it explains the fact that we have just entered the 10th year since drones (i.e. quadcopters) were made possible from a 'build it yerself' POV (that's when I built my first one too) - and yet they are not exactly everywhere in the military (wee personal ones I mean). which does seem incredible). I want my DJI Astroscope.It takes off, flies to 10k, starts its rockets (just fill with fuel to reuse) and moves up to 150k miles above your house. It then spends freefall time targetting and imaging your chosen DSOs, before falling back down to 10k, where the rotors start again, slowing it down into a hover again by 1k, and landing back in your garden. I don't know if you've seen the latest DJI drones with stablized telephoto lens ?

Well, it was a disaster anyway. Firstly took till 9pm for high clouds to clear which was not forecast then As I said - too many new things. new mount wasn't behaving and causing me lots of hassle. And then faffing around with firecapture on mac.. for some reason it kept stopping writing frames after a few seconds... i mean it's not speed - my macbook ssd can do 2GB/s write speed. No idea what the issue was. Eventually managed to get 10k frames of a section, but moon was drifting out of frame by end of 5 mins every time too, even though mount was set to lunar (is this normal ?). So by this time I had been sitting out there in the freezing cold (literally - frost forming as I sit there) for 2 hours and had had enough. Tried some normal imaging then, but with the C9.25 even with heater on corrector it was dewing up around the secondary. gave in and brought everything inside. sigh. TRYING to process now but so far not having a lot of luck getting anything out of the 40GB of frames I did get 😞 Tonight looks good, but gonna stick to DSOs - much easier.

Here's another. Altair 80ED flattened to 400mm, with asi533 and L-extreme.

okdokey - will it all a try then tonight. fingers crossed. I'm breaking my well learned rule and trying too many new things tonight - new second mount, first time with 80ed and flattener on that, etc...