powerlord

huh. my sister is a primary school teacher and says she teaches it too. Difficult to square that with 1 in 3 adults deciding to not get vaccinated though, with placards being held up claiming covid is a hoax, or that it changes your DNA. perhaps horses and water are involved.

ha! Something I find second nature too, but most don't. I've often thought rather than teaching kids about subjunctives and pronouns, a better use of the time would be to give them the mental tools they need to understand and descriminate between facts and internet mince. It's not that difficult, but seems a skill as rare as hen's teeth.

just to give you an idea - here's the green channel stretched. 🙄 Apart from anything else, I imagine this is showing it's in serious need of collimation!

pfft..i'd get none done at all if I stuck to that rule! 🤣

Here's my Horsey and Flames from last night. It's on my new TS-Photon 150. Shot in RGBH with an asi1600. I had real problems with alnitak, with the spider reflected clearly in the RGB. I had to use the H as luminosity to try to get rid of it a bit, but it's still there. My refractor certainly better with these bright stars. 20 x 2 min subs for R,G and B 10 x 5 min subs for H Stacked in APP, and edited in SiriL and Affinity Photo.

shot with asi1600 in LRGB with TS-Photon 150 and Baader coma corrector

First Light with TS-Photon 150 with the coma corrector (baader mk3). Coma corrector works well, but Alnitak not kind at all to newtonians - massive reflection of spider into the frames. Used Ha to reduce, but impossible to get rid off.

Happy New Year chaps! In another massive fail for supercomputers everywhere, every forecast I could find last night had total cloud cover, multiple layers all night with 40 mph winds. Reality..looking out the window at 6.30pm I saw stars!!! feels like weeks since last saw any.. I checked forecasts again - maybe it's just a wee blip of clarity before clouds again - forecasts said I was hallucinating - no stars to see here. So.. set up the new ts-photon 150 and Baader coma corrector with the asi1600 on the chance. 12 hours of uninterrupted imaging later, I've just packed it all away. Will post the results later today once edited, but early peeps show the coma corrector doing a great job. Hopefully the first of many sessions this year! stu

I've been using Affinity Photo for 2 years now I think - finally got sick of Adobe. After a fairly uphill struggle, I started to realise I like Affinity more. Your tutorials James made starting to use it for AP really easy when I started the hobby beginning of this year. Being native 32 bit is massive. I'd love to see integration with a 32 bit startnet++ (I sue startXterminator just now), and some sort of configurable auto stetching would also be great. Fit support has been a real biggy, but I can't say i use stacking much, it just doesn't give me the control I get with Astro Pixel Processor... though by jove its fast! I'd also like to see the align by stars get better. At the moment I find it works (i.e. does anything at all) about 10% of the time. stu

Yup don't try at night until you've done during day at something far away. When you get that working, count how many turns from full clockwise in it is. And note down. I don't know if your celestron needs an extension or not with visual, maybe others do, but if in daylight all way in and out still not bringing to focus, chances are maybe needs extension?

Been learning Siril. This is my attempt at reprocessing NB data I took last month with it instead of Affinity.

very nice image. It'd be nice to bring some of the blue out more ? And again, who names these things.. Helix.. it couldn't look more like an eye if it tried! It's a target I'd love to try myself, but looks to be very challenging and sorry for your loss. stu

those prices arn't far off what they are now... 45 year later !

Like to do a silly video at christmas. Mainly for my sister's class (she's a primary school teacher). Definately not astro related, but it is the lounge...

thought this was pretty amazing for a superzoom bridge camera!

standard non HD XLT job. with standard celestron flattener/reducer. And before that, I had an old 1980s C8 with the same flattener, and took this with it, which i was reasonably happy with.

I don't know, they appear in asiair when focusing, and in AAP when registering. I assumed pixels for it to make sense.

Not sure I really get FWHM to be honest. I get 2.5 or so if I'm shooting wider field (400mm), but only 4.5 on a good night with 1300mm. So it's related to FL it seems, and maths says my asi1600 with 1300mm (c925x6.7) is massive oversampling, but I can get this, which is miles better than widefield results.

Cygnus wall? It's this:

I got this new OTA this week, and after a quick 90 mins on the cygnus wall, it all clouded up, so I took a quick 2 part mosaic of the moon. 1080p video with asiair, then edited in the usual suspects.

6th, 10th, 16th so far dec. it's been rubbish here too. But sometimes forecasts wrong. I just keep my eyes open, and if i can see some stars, I set up. only takes me 10 mins now to get everything outside and align, so provided it ain't gonna rain and set up, those 3 times were times I got some imaging. There were about another 3 when it was a waste of time and I got nothing. I've ordered the baader mkIII coma corrector so we'll see what that does, though tbh I'm not a pixel peeper, and even without coma correct it's obviously doing ok. and not collimated, but looking at the stars, seems ok tbh. it's amazing how much smaller and managable the 150 is compared to the 200. cylinder volume, v = pi x r^2 x h. so 115k cm3 vs 48k cm3 - so less than 1/2 the area and it really makes it much easier to mount, etc. And mount, even though it's a big EQ6R-pro, seems to have a lot easier time moving it around - getting a nice 0.3-0.5 rms through the 90 mins.

Well, against the odds, about 2 hours of cloud free time last night. albeit with a full moon. So got 90 mins of data on the cygnus wall (is that what it's called ? - 'leg' of north america?) went with a 'brown' palette...not sure if that will catch on..POO? seriously, the oiii was unusable, so had to be inventive to get anything at all out of it. about 70 mins of Ha, 20 mins Oiii. Processed in Siril, Affinity, and Topaz.. where i had to denoise like crazy I'm afraid to make anything with the data. So, OTA is good. A fair bit of coma at the edges though, so have ordered a coma corrector - Baader Mark-III MPCC Coma Corrector on recommendation of FLO

yes I know. That is what I was advising people to do. regards stu

no the text underneath says 'accurate value required'. for main camera it says enter 0 if unknown and it will be calculated after platesolve. it does not platesolve guide camera images.