The Lazy Astronomer

Which scope is it specifically, and on what mount? Do you have any autoguiding capability? Ha exposures will likely need to be quite long with a CCD

If you're not picky, then pretty much any emission nebula will look nice in ha. You don't mention the scope, but I think the rosette, bubble and flaming star look good at many different focal lengths

Yeah, and as Clarkey pointed out, l didn't even consider all the other mounting hardware needed either. I have the Esprit 100, which I bought on the strength of its reputation and have not been disappointed. The optics seem quality to me and the focuser is solid, the flattener gives nice round stars across the sensor and the 550mm focal length allows pretty good framing on most nebulae (I use a 4/3 sensor) - it's just an easy plug and play imaging system that works with a minimum of fuss in my experience. You can also use 1.25" filters with it (l do) provided you can get them close to the sensor, and the filters have 26 - 27mm clear aperture. The only negative point is the tube rings are rubbish, they just don't clamp the tube tight enough and it slides easily in the rings. It can be remedied simply by shimming the rings though - I just used a couple of layers of paper. Another neutral point: it is a heavy beast! I weighed mine the other day, and fully loaded with all imaging and guiding equipment, it was pushing 10kg.

That's a healthy budget - you could double up and get 2x Stellamira 90mm's!! (The additional flatteners would take you very slightly over the budget). Alternatively, the Esprit 100 or 120 are good choices.

Not sure about StarX, but for Starnet, your CPU must support the SSE2 instruction set - if you're using a fairly old machine it may not have support for it.

Your title was somewhat off putting! 😅 I'm still not convinced you don't have some kind of localised weather control, because I've not seen a star for weeks!!

Scathing!! 🤣 I'd say the M42 is not bad - it's noisy and black clipped in processing, probably to try and hide issues with the background, which suggests to me the seller is likey a beginner. The M31 on the other hand... yeeaaahhh...

Recommended to post images as jpg or png so they display as images oon the forum (saves people having to download the tif to view it).

It sounds complicated, but it's just a case of unzipping and moving 5 or so files into a couple of locations.

FLO sell them but they're pretty pricy, especially if you're filling a whole filter wheel https://www.firstlightoptics.com/zwo-accessories/zwo-2-125-filter-adapter-ring.html Still, a lot cheaper than 2" filters though!

To back up tooth dr, l use a similar sized sensor with 1.25" filters at f5.5 (filters are very close to sensor)

Interesting - I've not noticed a halo problem with mine so far. I have some data on the jellyfish from a few months ago I've not yet gotten around to processing, that'll probably be the first proper test with a big bright star in the frame. I may well come back and change my mind then!!

I'd do away with the probe all together and base a refocus trigger solely on a change to measured star size (or filter change). I have a probe on mine anyway, but I've literally never used it for refocus purposes, all it does now is provide me information about the ambient temp, so I know exactly how cold I'll be when l go back out to pack up after a session 😁

I rate Astronomik filters, personally. I think they're the next best thing the Chroma/Astrodon (that said, I've never tried Antlia). A full suite of 2" filters are going to be pretty pricey no matter the brand, but given the relatively small size of the sensor, I think you'll probably be able to get away with smaller ones - this tool can advise if you enter your equipment details: https://astronomy.tools/calculators/ccd_filter_size

That seems like an incredibly poor piece of engineering... Good one Celestron! I'd probably still get in contact with retailer to be honest - for the significant monetary outlay of that scope, l really would expect better quality (on the plus side, maybe the fact that the mounting points are so poor means Celestron have spent all their money on the optics). Have you checked to see that the threads on the plate haven't been stripped or otherwise damaged in such a way such that they won't accept a bolt?

Equipment order of importance: 1. Mount 2. Mount 3. Mount If you're thinking of moving on from a lens to a telescope, then it's likely a mount will be your best investment.

That's exactly the feeling I'm looking for! I'm a paradox of wanting long integration times (around 20hrs) and impatience - it honestly it feels like a dual rig setup is the only way to go with UK weather...

That is looking nice, good detail in there, and I like the colour too! Just looking at your processing summary: deconvolution should be done when the image is still linear - it's one of the first things l do (after cropping and background extraction). The idea behind deconvolution is to reverse some of the blurring caused by the atmosphere, and in order for the algorithm to function properly, it needs a measurement of the point spread function (PSF), which you can think of as essentially the amount of blurring that has been caused to a point source of light. As stars are point sources of light, you can measure them to derive the PSF, but crucially, the image needs to be linear to get a proper measurement.

To double the SNR you need quadruple the integration time. Logically, I would guess doubling the integration time boosts SNR by about 1.5x, which obviously is an improvement, but maybe not as much as you think you should have got for your time (and maybe not even particularly noticeable). That said, it's a lovely image with some great detail and a myriad of background galaxies. As already mentioned, l think the colours are shifted a bit towards purple, and for me, l think the stars have been pushed a bit too much into the background - that is a personal thing though, and l appreciate you've done it in order to allow all the galaxies to jump out more. Unrelated question: I'm thinking about the possibility of setting up a dual rig (2 x Esprit 100s, so a baby version of yours) and was wondering how you dealt with the mounting of both scopes to get them aligned with each other?

A good effort here, particularly given the difficulties of the conditions. I've never attempted this one myself, but l did look for it once, to try and get an idea of framing with my setup - took several test exposures and saw absolutely nothing at all, not even a hint of nebulosity. I decided to move on to something easier after that 😁 The cropped image looks to have a different colour balance which I think looks a bit better, the full image has a magenta-ish tone to my eye.

Well, m31 is blueshifted, so spot on 😁

That's lovely. I like the colours, nothing overly-showy, nice and tastefully natural. The starless version does allow m31 to jump out a bit more, but I think the starry one has the edge for me too.

I see you're receiving a lot of posts about making your existing guider work - I can't advise there, but if you decide to go down the route of purchasing another one, I'd say the SW50 is overkill unless you're also planning on using it as a widefield imager as it's a decent doublet in its own right (I say this as an owner of said scope, which is now only used exclusively for guiding).

Just to add my opinion: I think unless you're using some seriously premium optics, then a UV/IR filter which cuts a bit more aggressively is better. I decided to use the L3 with my Esprit after doing a comparison with a ZWO luminance filter (wider bandpass) and found less bloat with the L3.

Apologies, perhaps I wasn't very clear - I think a dual narrowband filter is the best option for a DSLR (or any OSC colour camera) over a single bandpass filter because it makes use of the whole sensor. If you had a Ha only filter, then only the red pixels would register signal - the green and blue pixels would do virtually nothing. If you only wanted to use the Ha signal in an image, there are ways split the channels in processing. When doing narrowband imaging, the narrower the bandpass, the better the result. I think the filters with 6 - 7nm bandpasses are the best comprise between performance and cost, but unfortunately the 600d does have a relatively low QE and relatively high read noise, so long exposures would probably be needed (maybe something in the region of 10 - 20 minutes!). I think the 600d is quite a common camera choice, so it would be worth having a hunt around for some images on here or astrobin to see what sort of results others are getting with similar set ups and hopefully they will have included some capture info that will give a better idea of what can be obtained in the real world.