IDM

Thanks for your response and you comments are helpful. I will just have to keep plugging away with the leaning curve. Thanks, Ian

Thanks for the Youtube link, its very useful. I did buy the Altair and use it with an Altair 26C camera. I haven't regretted the purchases for a second. I get pin sharp stars and don't have to think about flattener back focus. Ian

Thank you for the kind words. What did you do to overcome the yellow hue?

I am not aware that I did but it’s possible as the videos were all similar.

I used an LD of 1. Kon has mentioned to me previously about possibly reducing it to 0.7, which does reduce the attract but when I used it I thought the image became more blurred. Though maybe it was my imagination, I may try reprocessing. thanks for the feedback. Ian

I did use colour balance but if anything it seemed to make it worse. I don’t understand quite where it came from.

The weather on the 13th seemed pretty good given how poor it has been of late so I had another go at capturing Jupiter. I took quite a few 60 second videos, stacked and processed as normal but when I reviewed the stacked images many of them had a rather horrible orange/brown cast. So I ended up taking the 4 best and putting them through Winjupos and Astrosurface. The result is attached. I was pleased to finally clearly capture the giant red spot, but was slightly disappointed by the overall quality. Ian

Hi, I have been doing OSC astrophotography for a couple of years but have just taken the plunge into mono imaging and so I trying to get to grips with a QHY268M camera with QHY filter wheel and Astronomik LRGBSHO filters. What I am struggling the most with is the processing. My first night out was imaging the Rosette nebula in SHO. I have had some success stacking with DSS and using a reference frame to keep everything aligned but don’t really know what to do after that. Do you process all three images separately and then combine or combine at the beginning and stretch and process together? I have previously done most processing with Siril and then some input from GIMP. However, mono seems so different. The image below which is far from perfect (the star colour alone are terrible) but this was done by combining the three images and doing separate colour stretches until I ended up with something. Can someone please recommend some decent books and or Youtube tutorials so I can make some progress up this steep learning curve? As stated I normally process with Siril and Gimp, but should I now take the plunge with some other software? Any help and advise is gratefully received Ian

Totally clear here just West of Newcastle upon Tyne. Thought to be fair we have had probably 6 weeks of cloud and rain prior to the last couple of days

Hi, Yes I downloaded everything from QHY website. I have done some testing today and the wheel is definitely still bi-directional. I will have to contact QHY and se what they say 😕

Hi, I just bought a QHY CFW3 and have tried to follow QHY's firmware update instructions but when I press upload I get the following message: avrdude.exe: invalid file format '/cfw3' in update specifier avrdude.exe: error parsing update operation 'flash:w:C:/cfw3' Any ideas on what I am doing wrong? Thanks, Ian

Weather has made planetary imaging all but impossible. This image was taken in a 30 minute window between clouds on the 4th of January 2024 and consists of 10 x 1 minute videos processed through, PIPP, Autostakkert, Registax and Winjupos befiore final processing in Astrosurface and GIMP.

I have recently had an issue with the control board from my Skywatcher EQ6R mount and have managed to successfully repair the board by replacing a damaged Q3. I detailed the identification and replacement of Q3 in this thread: I have ended up with about 50 spare transistors which I am holding in stock and can happily provide these to anyone who has the same issue. If you cannot do the fix and do not or cannot find someone who can do the soldering, I would be happy to assist as long as you understand any work I do is at your risk, I don't of course want any payment. I also know there are others who are probably more competent than me in doing the work, in particular @malc-c. Hope this is helpful. Happy New Year Ian

As an update on this issue the strip of 50 transistors I ordered through Ebay arrived from China just before new year. I removed the damaged Q3 using a soldering iron and watchmakers screw drive to lift the broken transistors. Once one side was done I let the board cool before doing the other side, thus removing the device. Excess solder was removed with the iron. I then cleaned the flux up by scrubbing the board with propan-2-ol and an old tooth brush. See image below. The next part is the more difficult in that soldering surface mount devices is always a bit of a challenge (or at least it is for me). I took one transistor held it in place with fine tweezers and added heat from the soldering iron which I had loaded with fresh solder to just one of the three pins. I did this as quickly as possible to avoid excess heating of the transistor. I held the device until the solder had definitely set before repeating the process for the other two pins of the transistor. Once done I re-flowed the solder to pin1 to check all were reasonably soldered. See second photo. Once complete I applied power to the board without connecting it to the mount. The red LED lit up so at least I was now getting power. I then attached a USB cable and was ASCOM could detect the board and see it as a parked mount. I finally put the board back in to the mount for final testing and all seems to be well. The mount un-parks and will slew to targets. So in summary if you get a board that appears dead, then check Q3 as this was the only device that failed on my board. If you find Q3 appears damaged I have lots of them that I can provide if you want to attempt your own repair. Alternatively if you know someone who can do the work then I am again happy to supple them. Or if you are totally stuck I don't mind attempting the repair for you, at no cost other than the shipping of the board. I hope someone finds this helpful. Kind regards and happy New Year Ian

Good grief, I am in Ryton so only about 2-3 miles from you. Very happy to meet up and have a chat. We can talk about clouds and rain 😄. But seriously more than happy to meet up, I also have a CPC scope which I use for planetary photography as well as refractors for DSO astrophotography, perhaps we could meet with Peter in Hexham as well. I have made the same observations about the Newcastle and Sunderland clubs in that the Sunderland club does appear far more active at least in terms of website updates. Welcome to SGL, it is the most friendly and helpful forum I have ever been a member of. Ian

Thanks for all the positive comments. Ian

Following on from my previous posting of a rather over over aggressively processed image of Jupiter I have gone back to the drawing board and re-processed the data. I did this because I was convinced that the seeing had been good on the night and that therefore there was a reasonable picture if only it could be processed appropriately. I have had a lengthy discussion with @Kon on the best ways to process videos and what became very clear to me was that correct processing can be quite an involved process and I learnt a lot from Kostas and am hoping the conditions improve again soon so I can put my newly learnt knowledge into action. To recap the image below consists of 9 1 minute videos with the best 20% of frame stacked in Autostakkert. The resulting stacked image was wavelet sharpened in Registax, along with RGB align and balancing. The resulting 9 images were then put through Winjupos to create a single image. This image had additional wavelt sharpening and saturation boost using Astrosurface. The resulting image was then opened in Image Analyzer where gentle colour denoisising was done. The result was then reloaded into Astrosurface for sharpening and increasing the brightness. Getting the right level of sharpening was quite difficult and I share multiple attempts with Kostas for his feedback. I was finally left with 2 images one a little soft and one a little over sharp. I loaded both into Gimp as layers and adjusted the opacity of the iage that was too-sharp until the balance was about right and this is what I have show. I have to thank offer my sincere thanks to Kostas for his patience and skill in helping me to understand the processes required to reveal the best picture from my capture data. Ian

I totally agree. The issue becomes that trying to force their hand further was going to take time even if successful and needed a working mount. However, next mount I buy must have a minimum of 2 years warranty. I see that Zwo provide 2 years with the AM5.

Yes, I was planning on doing that. I had to order 50 transistors (they are cheap) so if the repair works, I am more than happy to help anybody out who has the same problem.

Thank you very much.

As an update I exchanged a few calls with the retailer and they also contacted Skywatcher who stated that the warranty was out even though the mount was 3 days short of 2 years old. They offered to sell me a board at cost price and at the end of the day I didn't want an expensive doorstop, so a new board has just arrived. I have just checked Q3 and it was initially covered in flux but with a bit of careful wiping with iso-propanol I can read the part number as A49T. Google seems to name it as A49T AO3404 which is a 5.8A N-channel MOSFET. I could not locate the part easily in the UK and most of the suppliers are in Asia. I have ordered a strip off Ebay. I know its not the best place to buy legit components, but I do have the capacity to test the transistors so will check them out before attempting the fix. Many thanks to Mal-C for his help and support and to Ryachu for inspecting his board. I will let you know how things progress. Thanks, Ian

I have been in contact with him already and his boards unfortunately don't fit the EQ6r pro mount. But thanks for the idea. Ian

My EQ6 R Pro mount died last night and on pulling the controller board out I found that Q3 had fried (See photo). I don't suppose anybody has a high resolution photo of the board or indeed has a board visible so they could tell me the part number? Unfortunately my Q3 is so damaged I cannot read it properly. I think I can see X4RV but not sure about the 4. All very frustrating. Cheers Ian

Hi Kostas, based on your feedback I went back to the Winjupos result which was 9 x 60 seconds derotated and took that image back into Astro Surface and played with the settings to try and push the clarity and leave a smoother more natural look. This is the result. Any better?

Hi Kostas, Yes that image has been de-noised. Whilst the image is pretty good without denoise, it is not as crisp, hence i denoised with very low settings. What do you recommend to pull the detail out? Thanks, Ian