powerlord

I know that vlaiv - but its a 2" filter and a canon 6d and canon fit lens. there ain't anywhere do put a 2" filter between the lens and body. 🤔 However seeing as the lens is so fast, I figured I'd get away with the aperture reduction - which as you calculate - is still very fast. And i get sharper stars from the aperture reduction. I didn't say it was F2 - just 'fully open' - since I am using the filter as the aperture mask basically. no need for using the petal aperture. @happy-kat was referring to the 3d clip in filters I printed - which allow a filter to BE put between DSLR and lens - but only 1.25in ones, and really only APS-C cameras. This was my 'thinking outside the box' solution to using an L-extreme wth my 6d without the expense of a FF clip in. Within reason, I can now use that 2" filter in a similar configuration with lots of my other lenses, or my 1200D AND when I want to use one of my OSC ZWO cameras then it can go between the camera and lens, or telescope. So allowing one filter to be a bit more flexibly used. 👍 Oh I will add, one issue with this config is that the filter is exposed. and that's not ideal, as they are not really made to be open the the elements - it's needed quite a bit of cleaning and I'm sure it will wear out long before it should. But the worry voiced by others that it just wouldn't work. i.e. just wouldn't capture enough Ha what with it being such a fast lens, combined with the light angle issues you mention - just .. well don't seem to be issues. I'm getting really nice clear shots, lots and lots of Ha and Oiii, and it's doing an awesome job of cutting any light pollution. It seems to me, its a really good option for folk wanting to buy just one (lets face it..very expensive) filter and get the use of it with all the configurations of cameras, lenses and telescopes they have. just my 2c anyhoo. stu

well, that is for aps-c really. It will be ideal for that. For 6d, I modified one to fit my 6f but 1.25 fitlers are not big enough to cover a FF sensor - so you will get a large amount of vignetting. Provided you are going to crop in quite a bit it would work though. Before I for the mono camera and all the gubbins, I shot north america in Ha like that with my 300mm F4 L lens as it was the only way I could shoot Ha - and it worked very nicely. stu

yeh, that's why I used starnet++ - I think shots like this sometimes, to my eyes anyway, just look better with the stars really cut back. here's the step downs

So last night I really tried with azgti. Initially I pointed over to the North west. And using @GoldTop57 settings above (though I then tried my old and also worked), got calibration to work - with it returning more or less to star at the end. It then started guiding ok. Not great - about 1" rms - but it WAS guiding and staying on the star... I then moved to the east around cygnus, and since different meridian, recalibrated. Now it was screwed again with runaway DEC. Tried all sorts to correct, but you could see from each calibration attempt - north would go out, south would..keep going out. When it stopped it just kept DEC wandering more and more south. turn guiding off - steady as could be (I'd PAed to less than 1" and rebooted asiair and double checked it still thought PA was good). Turn guiding back on and off for a wander it goes. If I disabled DEC guiding, it was ok - not great - RA was difficult to control - sort of spiking to 4" and keeping doing that - but not running away at least. Weirdly thought, since it WAS PAed good anyway, my DEC kept at about 0.5" unguided - better than the fecking RA was doing GUIDED. So I am wondering, other than dithering if there is any point in guiding it tbh...maybe I'll try putting the firmware back to what worked ages ago and trying that. I was wondering for those that say it works for them- are they guiding in the west ? I also connected safari to it (via asiair pro eqmod and safari driver), and that went the wrong way too when I tried to goto in safari- BUT goto in asiair was fine. Dunno if related or not, but something is screwed. I'll try and feed that back to SW on the forums. I've got 2 azgtis, so I'll put one firmware back to earlier firmware if I can find it on my computer - as not on site anymore!! see if it's any better. The other pain is if you run two asiairs like I am, switching between them is crap - as though it connects to the other one, you still get the screen from that first one which is really confusing. so if you are in the middle of a plan for example, you have to 'stop' the non existent plan before it lets you do something else - all while still showing you the image from the other one. Clearly not something that has been tested at all...however, thats asiair issues - need to raise them with ZWO if I can.

If there's no IR filter, I don't think that's ideal. I use a cheap 12 quid svbony job that works fine. ROI - I just draw a box around jupiter- you want smallest you can get away with for max frame rate. Do a few with bigger roi with some moons in and longer exposures if you want to composite those into final shot.

you just need to keep an eye on it. on amazon too where the official seller also sells. they go up and down. For example their decent 80mm APO was discounted 20% (100 quid!) on amazon recently. usually it's not discounted as much as the 50% I got - no idea how often they do that.

Just a note to say - Ivo Jager, the developer of Startools saw my post and offered to help with my issues - he spent a ridiculous amount of time putting some long details PMs with pictures together for me and going through various possible isses and settings. Amazing support. In the end, it was my unwillingness to cut of the crescent nebula which was leaving in lots of stacking artefacts and the edges - this causes the wipe not to work as I'd want. Also I interpreted the docs wrong in regard to the bi-colour workflow. I will process a startools version today and post that for comparison.

All u need is a really long dew shield. Around 6000ft should do it?

bummer. clear all night here in ipswich - just getting ready to set everthing up. seem to be averaging about 1 night a week at the mo. I thought not great, but didn't realise u had it so bad.. 😞

huh - u live and learn. 30 years of photography and I did not know that. stu

struggling to find anything ? I found a seller selling caps for nikon eyepeices but not canon. we are taking about the eyepeice yes ? not the 3" viewfinder. if so, anyone got a link to seller ? I'm clearly looking for wrong key words. can't find anything on thingiverse either - if I can I can just print a few out.

huh. don't think I've ever even SEEN such a cap ever on a camera. Looks like ebay time...

Hi Alacant, can you explain that one ? do you mean the optical viewfinder on DSLR ? I'd never though of covering it before for anything. Are you saying that with the mirror up, you've still seen light getting into the sensor ? cheers stu

sorry, I wasn't disagreeing or arguing with you - just trying to show that different folk get different things from the hobby. As you say, each person takes what they think looks cool. There's a hell of a lot of things to target. I'm very new to hobby, and at the moment I'm going for the 'popular' stuff because - well - those are also the ones I like most that I've seen. We are all different - some folk get their kicks observing or imaging doubles for example - which have no interest to me whatsoever. kinda the same for globular clusters. each to thier own. 👍

hmm. well it's the nature of AP isn't it ? We are not discovers here. Even the best picture we capture isn't going to be as good as Hubbles. And no one is discovering a new nebula and posting their pics of it. As has been said before - for me anyway, its the challenge. As JFK said - we'd don't do it because it is easy, we do it because it is hard. Tonight I will be shooting M27 and NGC7635. However much time I spend taking subs and processing, they ain't going to be as good as the best out there. But unlike doing the 100m fastest, at least for me that is not the point -I'm not tryinf to make it the best ever. For me, the point is the challenge of it all - taking a picture of a pin point sized bit of the sky in my backgarden and managing to make it into an awesome looking image I TOOK. It will be mine, not exactly the same as any other one. Maybe colors are different, maybe processing different, maybe my framing or whatever - but 'I DONE THAT' - I think sums it up. I'm not really looking for approval by anyone. Nor do I require validation or evaluation against other pictures. I doubt I'm alone there ? The pleasure is in the journey as they say. It's no different that say.. cycling. You could say - what is the point of cycling to get to town X. It's faster to drive. You can take more with you, etc. Well, the point is, I enjoy cycling. that's it. no more purpose required. I enjoy all that is involved to get an image. If I am happy with the image - then I had a good 'journey' - whether I ended up with something that someone else likes or not is of little interest to me frankly - other than perhaps others who feel the same way as me. My favourite shot I've taken so far is this one - I made it bright and 'tie-dye'. AND it is false colour. It's how I want it to look. So in that evaluation it is 100% correct. 😜

I use it, as it's free and available on the mac - unlike sharpcap. I've found it easy to use and reliable with all my ASI cameras. Pretty straighforward to use - can't say I've found any features missing for planatary stuff. I use the beta, as the regular version isn't happy with M1 macs for some reason - but beta seems to work - though there are some errors in the log - stacktraces for something or other - it doesn't seem to affect its functionality. One weird thing though is that it always loads my ASI cameras anyway with red off. So I have to bring up settings and 'reset color' - then it's fine. But it does this every time for reasons unknown - but it is the beta version. stu

Interesting of course, there is no such colour as Brown - objectively. It is an entirely subjective colour percieved through context. weird eh. here's a good explanation here:

i might be quite close to you ? Im in West Ipswich. stu

Canon 6d

yup, great camera. used for some DSO too. I got cheap svbony ir filter. yeh, for saturn/jupiter, I used a 2x barlow with it.

seems to work:

Here's Cygnus with an L-extreme

So folks were saying this wouldn't work as lens is too fast, but my results seem pretty decent ? This is 6d with 135mm fully open, and a 2" L-extreme screwed on the end via some step down filter rings. I know the framing isn't the best, but I didn't want to cut off the Crescent Nebula 😞 63 x 300 subs at 3200. Me and Startools seems to have had a falling out, with whatever I try with it generating total mince, so just processed manually with affinity photo. and startnet++ for some star fiddling.

nice detail in the core there. I've not tried that target yet. I see it's got its own little 'piilars of creation' at the bottom. stu

I'll add more to this. For the moment, 111 minutes total of Ha and Oiii. Shot with C8 and asi1600. I'm pretty pleased it came out so well with so little integration. It was 7x 3 min Oiii, and 30 x 3 min Ha.