The Lazy Astronomer

DSS needs a minimum of 8 stars which are common to all frames in order to stack. My guess is it simply can't find enough matching stars between the frames; try lowering the detection threshold.

Sounds like one of these is what you need: https://www.firstlightoptics.com/esprit-professional-refractors/astro-essentials-filter-cell-adapter-for-sky-watcher-esprit-flatteners.html

Still frames for DSOs, video for planets and moon. I'm not sure on this, but I believe due to the way DSLRs handle shooting video, it will only record at a reduced resolution. Planetary cameras are much cheaper than deep sky ones, and can be had for a couple of hundred new.

Another thing to bear in mind (for deep sky work) is dedicated astro cams have set point cooling to help reduce noise. My opinion: if you can't (yet!) justify the expense of an astro cam, just stick to your current DSLR a little while longer. If you then realise your interest is long term, you'll know an investment in a dedicated camera is worth it.

Possibly not, but if you wanted to go more narrowband, then you could look at the Optolong l-extreme, which would give you a 7nm passband on Oiii and Ha

No real need for a filter wheel with your camera. If you wanted to do narrowband, you'd probably be better off going for one of those dual narrowband filters, in which case you'd just screw it straight into the imaging train somewhere. No need for a light pollution filter when using a narrowband filter either. I suppose if you were lazy (like me), you could get a filter wheel to swap between a light pollution filter (for broadband imaging), and a dual narrowband filter (for narrowband imaging), without having to break the imaging train. With the sensor size of the 533, you'd be fine with 1.25" filters. P.s. no imaging time is wasted when using mono and filters - if clouds roll in before all colour channels have been collected, you just get the rest in the next session(s).

Could say that about anything really. Want to see the Andromeda galaxy? Nah, just Google it. How about looking for birds of paradise deep in the rainforest? Why bother, Attenborough's shown them to me already. Sistine chapel? No point mate, got a picture right here. There is an experience associated with viewing or imaging something for yourself, which makes the whole thing much more fun/rewarding/enjoyable/whatever than just looking it up online.

Today has been a good day. Teaser:

Another vote for autostakkert!3 - it's the default option for stacking lunar and planetary images. I find it much easier to use than Registax for stacking.

Having only just started my journey into astronomy a few short months before the pandemic began, my lockdown spending on various equipment has been somewhat considerably higher than the pre-lockdown spending... ...But all absolutely necessary! 🙃

Galaxies are very small (with a couple of exceptions). Unless you have exceptional skies (and probably a £10k+ mount), I very much doubt that going below 1"/px will net you better images. Embrace the wider FOV and enjoy it! 😁

Excellent choice 👍 Sure, it's a long wait, but you'll still have a good few months to get everything playing together nicely for a good winter's imaging.

Pretty sure both the az-eq6 gt and the eq6r pro are belt driven. Go for the latter unless you particularly value the option of using the alt az mode for visual. In my opinion there's no mount that beats an eq6r pro in its price range. That big newt should be pretty good for galaxies (considering one for myself for next year's galaxy season) and the eq6r should handle it. If you decide to make the move to a dedicated astro cam, go straight for mono as you already have a decent DSLR for OSC (maybe mod it in the interim?). When you're looking at cameras, try to match the pixel size to the telescope(s) to get the optimum sampling rate for your typical skies. I follow the general advice of others on this forum that there's no real benefit of going below 1"/px. Somewhere in the 1 - 2"/px range should get you good results. My only specific advice re: cameras is to take a pass on the 1600 (it's "old tech" now). If you're looking for a 4/3 sensor, go for the 294MM (or QHY equivalent) - higher QE, larger full well depth, greater dynamic range (unless you use it at some weird gain), lower dark current (not that that really matters given that dark currents are so low with either camera they are of no real consequence), and finally, no microlensing artifacts on bright stars. Basically there's nothing not to like 😁 For APS-C size, the recent IMX571 based mono astro cameras seem to be getting good press on the forums. Good luck with your purchasing decisions!

I've recently started using this website: https://snrcalc.vercel.app/calculators Input your info, and it'll give you either (depending on which option you select) the total SNR of the final stack for a given integration time, or the total integration time required for a given SNR. As vlaiv says, there are a lot of variables, so take it as more of an indication, rather than an accurate figure. Also, the tool was designed to give figures for a mono camera shooting luminance, but again, it should be ale to give you a general indication of the total time needed of you're using a OSC.

I used to have an east facing garden (recently moved to a new place with a south-westerly aspect), and while it was ok, I would mainly find myself looking towards the southerly direction, and it was a bit of race to image things before they went too far towards the south and got blocked by neighbours houses. As Olly said, you won't get things at their best. There are interesting things in the north - mainly galaxies though, and (again, as Olly said) basically the same objects will always be there year-round. On the flip side, it will allow you to get a lot of practice in throughout the year and get really good at imaging them 😉

Sounds like someone may have given you misleading or incorrect information. Whilst generally you would use a guide scope and guide camera to run the Sharpcap polar alignment routine, this is just polar alignment, not guiding/autoguiding. Edit: vlaiv beat me to it by seconds! 😃

If you're not guiding, you are asking A LOT from your mount to do 2 minute exposures at 1600mm of focal length. I'm only at 267mm focal length, and with 2 minute exposures I probably have to throw away 1 frame out every 4 or 5 due to periodic error.

New and improved (in my opinion) with a less purple hue to the stars. Binned the original data which helped with the noise, and went less aggressive with the noise reduction. Decided to go with a less tight crop as well - I quite like the way it seems to be hanging out it by itself the vast emptiness of space.

Simplest way to get started is just to hold a camera to the eyepiece. People usually do this with their phones, and there are several cheap brackets you can buy to hold a phone steady over the eyepiece. Next step up would be prime focus photography by attaching your DSLR onto the focuser. Not familiar with your scope, so can't be specific, but assuming it's a fairly standard 1.25" focuser, you'd be looking for a t-ring that fits your camera. Newtonian telescopes can have a bit of an issue with focuser travel (i.e. not enough to focus a camera), so you may also need a 2x barlow to push the focus point out a bit - this will also have the effect of increasing your focal length 2-fold (which is good for planets - you want a lot of focal length, otherwise you'll just see a small fuzzy blob). The "normal" way to do lunar and planetary work is called lucky imaging, which involves taking thousands of frames (basically shooting a video), then using software to select the best frames and stack those together to create an image. With a DSLR, though, I think you may have to take single pictures and stack those as I don't think DSLRs can take full resolution videos. Next step up again is a dedicated lunar/planetary astro camera, this will allow you to capture objects using video, although they have to be controlled via a seperate computer, so you'd also need a laptop or some other portable hardware. Obviously option 1 is the cheapest, option 2 a bit more expensive - maybe £100-ish - but will get you a better image. Option 3 should get you the best image, but you'd be looking at several hundred £s, and honestly at tis point, you might as well consider upgrading the scope as well, because the camera would have a much higher potential than would ever be realised your scope. Edit: should also point out that all the software required can be had for free (eg. AutoStakkert!3 for stacking, Registax 6 and GIMP for image editing)

Very nice, especially for just 1 hour! 👍

This is exactly right. I think though, that anything in the 'main' tab is applied to all of the other groups, although I may be wrong. I usually just put my darks in the main group and then put the lights and relevant calibration frames in their respective groups.

Stack all the raw files together. If your equipment is relatively dust-free then you could probably get away with reusing the flats from the previous session. If you've got a few dust motes visible in the image then take flat frames for each session. When you're stacking, tell the software to associate lights from night 1 with flats from night 1, lights from night 2 with flats from night 2, and so on. What software are you using to stack?

From what I read from the experienced guys on this forum, going below 1"/px is a waste of time for most people (with typical skies) as the seeing just will not allow you to use a resolution that high most of the time (or ever?!) From what I found online, the pixels in your current camera are 4.3um, which gives you a sampling rate of 0.55"/px with the RC8 at native FL, which is already a very high sampling rate - it is unlikely the atmosphere will allow you to make full use of this resolution. You may therefore consider binning your data in post; I'm not sure how easy this is to do with DSLR/OSC data as I'm strictly a mono+filters guy, but I'm sure others on here can advise. In an oversampled image, binning is preferable to just cropping away as it will increase your SNR - if you were to bin your images x2, this would take your resolution to 1.1"/px, which would probably be a good sampling rate. The next thing you could do to improve your images would simply be more integration time. I've recently been using this online calculator to help me decide how long to spend on various targets, which I've found really useful: https://snrcalc.vercel.app/home If you were interested in purchasing some new equipment, then I'd suggest a dedicated astro camera - l think this would give you a bigger benefit than a new scope, but happy to be corrected by anyone more knowledgeable than myself in this regard. In terms of which camera, well, that's a whole other thread in itself! 😉

Well that's good - it must be a software issue then. If you open eqmod and go to driver setup, how do you have it configured?

Hmm, you've got me tempted to dust off the (non-edge HD) SCT now!