powerlord

ah. clearly 3.3 was majorly borked then. thanks for heads up

nice. must be tricky dragging that ladder around 🙂

link dead ?

I like it. It kinda shows it as a lonely galaxy out there, and shows how small it looks, but you still have great detail in there. Might be worth trying to pop a barlow in the image chain if you have one ?

If you decide to go for the cheap motors/controller tracking only option, pm me - I have an set unused in box I'll sell you as I got them, then got an eqstarpro imediately as decided I wanted goto. stu

huh. frankly I never thought to bother about it. Are you getting dew on it ? I'm not sure I checked, I will next dewy night, but I'd doubt you'd get much, and if its just landing on top - shouldn't be an issue surely ? Yours is under the scope so it's not gonna get much anyway even if the heat doesn't keep it off. Interested in your dew heater placement over hood. Does that work ? I have mine around top of scope proper (i.e end of black bit) so its on the lens. It works fine there, but maybe I'm creating distortion ? And I've never bothered with heater on guide cam - even when it gets a bit of dew, it still sees stars ok, and thats all it's there for, but I suppose it doesn't hurt. What sort of guiding are you getting with the az gti ? I've just upgraded to 3.3 because I was getting mince before - guiding seemed to be going the wrong way - it did better turned off. I'm hoping next time I try 3.3 has fixed it. Oh, and be good to see your settings (agressiveness, max pulses, camera shutter speed, etc) you are using for guiding ? stu

yeh, I've got one of those. they are good in the autumn - keep the garden tidy.

I resent that ! I was deranged long before I started AP ! - I fly in the sky with a frecking lawnmower engine and fan strapped to my back for example 🤪

well most of them were done on the first 1k tbh. the last 4k was asi1600 and all the gubins and the eq6, and other mince. oh and the mindset is important to cultivate - I'm not SPENDING 5k - resale is good - I'm just spending 1k.. the rest is just 'resting' in AP kit rather than in the bank... 🤪

That's an old RF fit - they tend to be cheaper. Wide angle - depends what you wany I suppose. IF you want to get the whole arch in one shot, you will need an 8mm on a FF. Don't know if even an 8mm on an APS-C will do it - here's fov on my 6d with the 14mm for example.

asiair uses zwo drivers. it only uses indi drivers for dslr. I believe folk have tried to inject other indi drivers for example to support non ZWO astro cameras without success.

I got a Samyang 14mm off ebay last week for the same reason. It was £180 as a petal of the rose had snapped off, but I fixed that easy enough with some black epoxy putty. Only used once, and sort of screwed that session up as in the dark I wasn't sure why I couldnt get focus - till in daylight I worked out the focus ring works backwards (infinity is at 3 feet, close up is at infinity!!) - apparently it's a common issue with Samyangs! So my first attempt at Milky way had actual focus at 3 feet, and I'd shut it down to F22 to try to get something as I thought it was broken at that point. amazingly it did come out okish - could see stars, red bits for north america nebula etc!! - Now I know where infinity actually is, I stick a big white mark there for next time. But yes, lovely and sharp, ED glass. Keep your eye out and you should be able to get one for within your budget. Though if you want a wider view, especially as you have an APS-C - maybe the 8mm ?

<4. Do you know how to spot poor seeing and recognize good seeing? can you share some tips there @vlaiv? stu

haha. yeh, My current count of 'vintage' lenses is around 7 I think - M42s and a few pentax. I need to start using them more - so much to do ! stu

you can see North America nebula and pelican. The lens is clearly nice and sharp. What was the aperture shut down to ? stu

thanks. yeh flats were not an option as the filter wheel hit the wifi adapter on trying a meridian flip. when I got out there at 4am I found it stuck against it, and it had sort of loosened the filter wheel which had rotated 😞 Some re-organsing is in order for it not to happen again, so will probably have to bin those subs in the end. It's a pain that asiair doesn't give you a way of testing meridian flips. I'll need to just try selecting something as close to meridian as I can and wait so I can actually test the thing. I am getting guiding around 0.3" rms with the EQ6r-pro now though after some tweaking, but I still don't think the C8 is as good as it should be, but I'm now loath to touch it now that stars actually look like stars. I also had major issues with condensation last night even with dew heater - had to clean it off every 30 mins or so, once I realised it wasn't actually getting cloudy.. it was dew... Good tip about going back to start - though usually what I end up doing is giving up after a couple of goes, and retreating to Affinity Photo! 🤪

Hmm, well I read the manual, but can't say it was clear. The way I read it, for bi-colour (I will be adding Sii but its what i have for now), load Ha as R, Oiii as green. So did that, and selected the "L + Synthetic L from RGB, R(GB)(GB) (Bi-Color)" scheme. For colour module I ran through em all, but HOO was what I was aiming for. I fiddled with the bias but couldn't get it to look right at all. But looking at what I assume is my processed pic by yourself, I obviously screwed something up.. though I did go through it all about 3 times 😕 From the above is it obvious what I did wrong ? But yeh, your one is what I expected to see at this stage, so looks like my data is ok. And I'm already getting those outer shells even with one 10 min Oii, so yeh I'm hoping I can build on that and end up with something nice. 20% cloud cover tonight, so will probably give it another punt... though last night it said the same till 2am then 100% clouds - but zero chance of rain till 9am or later.. But didn't get cloudy till 4am in the end - so lost imaging time I could have used there (mount sitting there 2-4 doing nowt).. but as I was up, I took all the kit inside. At 7am the heavens opened and it pished down!! bloody weather forecasts.

So.. quicky last night between the rain. 6 10 min ha subs, 1 oiii sub. so - work in progress. 'stacks' attached. But processing in startools, this is the best I get. I seem to have found a whole bunch of Ha which looking at other pics of M27, just does not exist. Any ideas what I'm doing wrong ? C8, .67 reducer/corrector, asi1600. 21.08.08.M27-Oxygen_III-session_1.fits21.08.08.M27-Hydrogen-alpha-session_1.fits

Might be worth also using AS3 to do say a 30% and 10% output if the analysis shows a lot of variation between the frames. And did you do wavelet stuff in registax ? there's a few tutorials around, but really imho all you really need to do is select diadic and gausian, whack the first slider all the way to the right if looks ok, bring 2nd slider up as far as you can too. fiddle with small tweaks to the others, try a wee bit sharpening and noise redution (if it needs it) on the first set. job done. stu

Well, now about exactly 6 months in since I took my first astro photo, about 3 weeks after I got my first telescope. As others well testify - what started as a 'lets get a cheap scope and see if this is fun' - has now led me to spending over 6000 quid, and filling my house with telescopes, cameras, mounts and tripods. I think I've only missed a handful of nights that were clear - otherwise I'm out there shooting subs and learning. To those others beginning on this journey, I hope you enjoy it as much as I am. Here's some pics collated (and previously posted) from that last 6 months from my journey so far across the galaxy universe ! stu

I got mine from ebay for 350 quid brand new in box, so worth a look there. ZWO adapter, if you want to save a few quid you could do what I did:

Really nice. Can you provide some info on subs, filters, etc please ?

Nowt wrong with that - you've got some nice detail from the Ha, and some Oiii too (if PI is rendering that as yellow). Be interesting to see it processed in hubble pallet. You sort of don't make it easy for yourself if yer a beginnner starting with PI - possible the worst designed piece of sofware I've ever seen in my life. It does feel like there's more detail there getting lost in the noise a bit - but I don't know PI (and don't want to!), so can't help u there. Maybe give startools trial a try ? you can always screenshot the result and post here (can't save in trial version). How are you using the L-extreme ? is is a 1.25 screwed into an M42 converter into the ASI533 ? Oh, also if you can seperate the Ha and Oiii, you should be able to just use the Ha for the stars and they should be much less bloated - as Oiii/blue tends to really bloat those stars in my experience (and 1 month of it in NB...)

So , made a bit of progress last night. Now that I THINK the corrector is in roughly the right position I can actually focus stars to something approximating a point. Good enough to finally use for the planets for first time. Posted results in planet section: But, still not right. Here's the pattern that I see when I'm de-focused for example. So though rings are in the middle, there's this big 'flame' sticking through all the rings. What in the name of squirrels is that ??

C8, asi224. Finally getting somewhere with collimation of C8.. not there yet, but it's a damn site better than it was. Jupiter and Saturn. Seeing not great - had been raining a lot during the day if that makes a difference.