The Lazy Astronomer

FYI, with NINA you can give it an image and get it to plate solve on that. Alternatively (and this is what I do): use Stellarium/CdC/whatever to select a target and import the coordinates to NINA, then just leave NINA open between sessions. All you need to do then is click slew to target in the framing assistant. You can also save a sequence with the target information and load it back up next time... So many options!

Can I ask why you want such a long focal length? With your camera's pixel size, that would give you a sampling rate of around 0.4"/px, which is well below what the atmosphere is going to allow for long exposure deep sky work.

I'll post my entry in here from quite possibly the smallest scope used so far Celestron C6 @F15(ish), ASI290MM, best 25% of 15000 frames in each colour channel. Synthetic luminance made from 60% red, 30% green, and 10% blue. Stacked in AS!3, processing in Registax and Startools. Some amazing images in here - l think they might be conjuring up some aperture fever in me!

My first thought here is maybe try brill? Don't know if you've ever been (and I've only been there in the daytime when I used to live in the general area), but it's basically a hill with an old windmill on top of it. There's a small car park nearby, and there are some houses not too far away as well, so there should be some (hopefully) 'savoury' people within shouting distance just in case. It's a bortle 4 sky according to the light pollution map (which is basically as good as it seems to get in Oxfordshire), the only thing I'm not sure about is how severely (if at all) the windmill is lit up at night.

You're not wrong there! 🤣

Taken a break from deep sky work over the past few weeks to try and catch Jupiter at opposition. Unfortunately only managed one half decent capture, but when tranferring the data to my processing PC, I discovered loads of other planetary data from last year I just never got around to doing something with. All images taken with a 6" SCT at somewhere between F15 and F22 and an ASI290MM. Jupiter 11/08/2021: Saturn 10/07/2020: Mars 13/09/2020: Mars 10/10/2020:

I had exactly the same situation as you on the May bank holiday - I decided to take all my equipment, and, while it was a pain to move everything, at no point did I regret it! (I got a rather pleasing image of m16, which isn't really visible from my garden) For transport, all I did was lay the fully assembled scope* across the back seats in the car and strap the seatbelts over it. It was absolutely fine for the entire 3 hour drive. *fully assembled scope = imaging scope, flattener, filter wheel, imaging camera, guide scope, guide camera, all mounting hardware and all data cables.

They do seem to have had some early issues with their quality control, which is disappointing. Hopefully these are all resolved on later batches. Bit of both really. Any glass surface has the potential to be a reflection source. It depends how bad it is - small halos can be relatively easily reduced/removed with software, larger halos, especially around large bright stars, are trickier to get rid of without introducing processing artifacts or an unnatural look.

😲 Sacrilege! I kid! In all seriousness though, with narrowband ideally you want the narrowest you can afford (or are willing to spend) to increase the contrast. Star halos and reflections can be issue, particularly with cheaper OIII filters. There is a thread on here showing the performance of Baader's new ultra narrowband filters which may be of interest. FLO's IKI observatory uses Optolong I believe, so you could check out the images produced by that to get a feel for them. Personally, I've had mediocre experiences with ZWO's offerings (broadband though, not NB), so I would probably take a pass on them. No experience with Atik filters, so no comment on those. Again, personal opinion here, but I found for price point vs performance, Astronomik's hit the spot for me. Chroma and Astrodon still the clear favourites for the 'serious' imager, but no way am I spending £400-ish on a single filter!!

And another one with such an interesting sense of depth in m81. Love your IFN as well, prominant but still very nice and wispy and natural looking - much better than anything I managed to do with it!

OIII is more sensitive to moonlight, so it's best to try and capture it when the moon is less prominent or you'll lose contrast. For filter and target choice, all you really need to do is look up your intended target(s) to see what filter(s) will give you good results. You can't really go wrong with Ha on nebulae as most (all?) emit strongly at that wavelength, but some targets can be practically completely devoid of SII, for example. A test shot would probably tell you all you needed to know if unsure if a filter would be worth it. Ideal integration time is a little trickier to determine, other than "lots". I've used this tool to get an idea of SNR for given targets and integration times: https://snrcalc.vercel.app/calculators. It's designed for luminance filters on mono cameras, so probably isn't much use with NB work though...

That's really nice - very smooth. All you need now is another 6 hours of OIII and that'll be a cracking image 👍

They're really very simple, and if you're using software such as NINA to control imaging runs, it will carry out the whole process without any input from you at all.

^that. EQMOD has a safety setting which limits the mount movement at the meridian (to stop scope and camera crashing into the mount). If you'd just left it, NINA would have carried out the flip and continued as normal once the timer ran down. Personally, I trust NINA enough to just turn the meridian limit setting off completely in EQMOD - I don't particularly like the potential for software to be trying to do conflicting things.

Ooh l like the sense of depth in the core of Bode's

Another recommendation for Startools. The thing l like about is its duality of simplicity and complexity - due to its fairly large degree of automation, you can knock out a decent image in 10 minutes using mostly default settings, but equally, you can spend hours tweaking to perfect and bring out interesting features and detail.

General rule of thumb is to go for an f ratio approx 5x - 7x your pixel size. Focus as best you can, then use high gain, exposures of sub 10ms - the image will look terrible on the capture software, but stacking and sharpening will fix it (if conditions are good; if your sky condition is bad, then you've got no hope).

Alright, so three new versions incoming (it's been very cloudy here this week) 1. Just a simple colour rebalance of my earlier attempt to make it a bit less purple: 2. Complete reprocess from scratch with hopefully a more accurate colour representation and improved/toned down IFN. HaLRGB composition, with both galaxies, the IFN and the stars processed independently and all layered back together. All done entirely in Startools 1.8.506 (full resolution this time - i.e. not binned): 3. And finally, for a bit of fun, the @vlaiv special (one for the pop art collage) 😁

Or maybe harder stretching in post? OP hasn't mentioned what calibration frames they're using, nor whether their camera is the standard or cooled version. Amp glow should be really easy to remove with darks, but less so if OP isn't able to temperature match with the lights.

Yep, that pretty much exactly matches the amp glow pattern of the 178 sensor.

You're Bortle 3 though (super jealous), so at least when it is clear, you get good skies!

Just FYI, AutoStakkert is a far better stacking program than Registax, so continue to stack with AS!3, then open the stacked image in Registax for wavelet sharpening.

No first hand experience, but l was in the market for a triplet earlier this year and considered a Sharpstar - the general consensus l got was that they're good, but not great. I went with an Esprit in the end.

I'll preface this by saying I fudged loads of stuff in my attempt at processing this, and certainly am not happy with the colour reproduction l got (and is something I'm working on for v2), but I think we have to allow for a certain degree of artistic license because this is a competition, and, processing errors notwithstanding, individuals need to make their images stand out from the others; one to do this is with variations in colour. In these such circumstances, l think it is acceptable to move away from true documentary photography, provided that the processes undertaken on the data are described and it is not presented as documentary. If everyone stuck to true documentary photography in this, then we'd end up with x number of pratically identical images, which doesn't make for a great competition.

Congratulations on your new camera! As your camera doesn't suffer from amp glow, darks may not necessarily be needed if you dither, however as you now have the advantage of set point cooling, darks will be much more effective at removing hot pixels and such (than with a DSLR). You can reuse darks for ages, so it doesn't hurt to build a dark library in the daytime or a cloudy night (tip: take your darks somewhere dark to avoid potential for light leaks) There's no optimal exposure length for flats so to speak, you may find that keeping the exposure length over 1 - 2 seconds yields better results, but just aim for a mean ADU value of somewhere between 1/3 to 1/2 of maximum. Use flat darks instead of bias (no need for bias frames at all). If you leave your imaging train intact between sessions you can also reuse flats and flat darks - you should be able to get several months use out of them unless you have a particularly dusty environment. This next point may not be an issue for you, but with my ZWO camera (not the same as yours), I found that temperature matching lights and all calibration frames gave me much better results - I was having issues with my flats not properly correcting until l did this.