LuckieEddie

It's identified further down the astro bin card

At work, we use Indu-Tek "Friction Free" Grease for damping small mechanisms. I have a lot of it and can pop you a few CC's in the post for the price of the postage. PM me if your interested.

Sometimes less is more, and sometimes more is more. So here's less focal length, giving more galaxies. This is the Markarian Chain and friends. This was shot on 26th March from my heavily light polluted garden using my Fuji X-T2 with a 50-230mm lens (at 230mm) on my Losmandy G11. 4 hours worth of 60sec subs. I knew there were a lot of galaxies in this region but until I started peering at it in order to annotate I didn't realise quite how many. I've made out over 50 in this shot and I can see a few more in there but both KStars and SkySafari top out at magnitude 16 so I can't identify the really faint fuzzies. Annotated version... hl;

Well, you can't have an Orion topic without a few Horse Heads can you? So here's mine. Fuji X-T2, Onstep modified EQ5, Skywatcher N200/1000 (original blue version not a later 'P'). About 4 1/2 hours of 30sec subs, unguided. I had a hard time processing out the light pollution gradients on this one due to the busyness and variation across the frame. Stacked in Siril with a sequence (per frame) background removal. Processed in StartTools.

I've set up monthly patreon's for all the open source SW that I rely on, Siril, Telescopius & GIMP. Regular payments help the developers that help us get the most out of our hobby. Being active in their communities also helps, there's normally plenty of things that can be done outside of coding as well - documenting, testing beta builds, bug reporting, supporting new users on forums, etc.

Here's a M42. Taken with a Fuji X-T2 using a SkyWatcher N200/1000 on a Onstep modified EQ-5. 236 x 30 sec subs, no guiding. Stacked in Siril, processed in StarTools.

Here's my entry for category 2. This was taken last night using a Fuji X-T2 on my Onstep modified EQ5. No guiding, 30 sec subs, a total of 2 3/4 hours, Bortle 6ish. Stacked in Siril, and then processed in StarTools.

I have a different opinion. We use canned air when cleaning optics at work. There are a couple of things you need to take care of though. There's a big difference in the quality between different brands, particularly in propellant discharge. Always keep the can upright. Start the air discharging while pointing away from the glass and then pass the stream over it and off the other side. Then stop and repeat if necessary. It's a bit like the technique for paint spraying.

Yep, I agree. The latest alpha HDR module is a step backwards for me. To be clear this is using a GPU version, the new module is very heavy on CPU usage on load, even on the GPU accelerated version.

The time taken in Siril could be down to storage I/O throughput. I've got an old 2008 MacBook running Linux but with its SSD a typical stacking time is 10-20 minutes. The same stack, same Siril version, same OS on my work laptop (2019 i7 16GB) is 10 hours+ if the images are stored on it's HDD, and about the same time (10-20 minutes) if they are on it's SSD.

Autostakkert runs flawlessly under wine (in my experience) , which runs on macOS as well as Linux. Another vote from me for Siril for dso stacking.

Here's the final entry from me for this competition, NGC7023 The Iris Nebula. Taken last night (16th) this is the best 220 30 second subs of the night. Not quite up to the IKO dataset standards but I'm fairly happy with it for my set up. Taken with my SW 200N, and full spectrum modified Olympus E-PL5. Stacked in Siril and processed in StarTools.

Here's my entry. Processed in StarTools 1.8 Alpha. Loaded in Compose using L + Synthetic L from RGB, RGB, Ha into NB accent. Dialled in relative exposure times. AutoDev, Crop edges, and Wipe with Narrowband setting. Re-do AutoDev with no ROI. Contrast at default, HDR at default, Wavelet Sharpen with default mask. Spatially Variant PSF Deconvolution using sample mode and sampling only the best ~40 stars with a roughly even spread across the image. Colour with Scientific style and saturation bumped up to 250%. Shrink stars with Tighten preset. Superstructure with Saturation preset and gamma set to 0.33. Add the Ha using the Narrowband Accent set to Galaxy preset. De-noise at defaults. Lastly, applied Fractal Flux using mask set on the galaxies and the Add Detail algorithm.

Yet another galaxy from me, M74 this time. Just under 2 hours of 30 second exposures, unguided, taken last night. Taken with my Fuji X-T2, stacked in Siril, and processed in StarTools.

Another one from me, M15 taken as a fill in on the end of my session on 16th/17th July. Only 22.5 minutes total of 30 sec subs.

I've recently obtained a Fuji X-T2 camera and this is my first target captured with it - IC342 The Hidden Galaxy. This was captured over three nights (16th-18th July 2021) from my heavily overlooked and light polluted back garden. In total this was 560 x 30 sec subs, unguided using my SW 200 & EQ5. I messed up my polar alignment on the first night resulting in a lot of walking noise some of which is still evident in the background but managed to improve the PA for the 18th.

Here's my entry, IC342 - The Hidden Galaxy. This was shot on 12/04/2021 under Bortle 6. 420x30sec giving 3 and a half hours total. SkyWatcher N200 (the old blue one), EQ5 modified with Onstep goto system, Full spectrum modified Olympus E-PL5, Baader UV/IR filter, Baader MPCC. Stacked with flats and darks in Siril, processed in StarTools.

Here's my latest effort. This is my first shot without Astronomical darkness - my first summer season as I only took up the hobby about 9 months ago, you certainly don't get much in the way of darkness these days. All my shots would qualify for this challenge as I've been shooting unguided and so I default to 30 second subs. Progressing to guided soon. This is M63, The Sunflower Galaxy. Shot on 13/06/2021 under Bortle 6 (according to ClearOutside), 196x30sec subs giving 1hour 38mins total. SkyWatcher N200 (the old blue one), EQ5 modified with Onstep goto system, Full spectrum modified Olympus E-PL5, Baader UV/IR filter, Baader MPCC. Stacked with flats and darks in Siril, processed in StarTools.

Thanks John for the super quick reply. 👍

Please can one of you fine folks with much more experience than me identify which mount this is? I've searched online through all the manufacturers I'm aware of but can't find it. Thanks in advance.

I put in the true focal length and the sensor size of the camera and it seems to just work - what the simulator shows matches very well with the actual framing. I use a micro 4/3rds camera, not full frame.

Here's my first attempt at this target. This was about 3½ hours. I captured around 6 hours but there were a lot of poor quality subs that I threw away. Taken with SkyWatcher N200, Olympus E-PL5, EQ-5, unguided, under Bortle 6 on 12th April 2021. Stacked in Siril, processed in StarTools which I've only just started with. I'd welcome and comment/criticisms/processing suggestions, other than the obvious 'more time, more data' 😉.

Here's my attempt... My processing was entirely using StarTools (which I've only started with in the last week), other than final format conversion in GIMP. Workflow was: Compose>AutoDev>Bin50%>Wipe>AutoDev>Contrast>HDR>Deconv>Colour>Shrink>Entropy>SuperStructure>Denoise>Flux. Full processing log (minus mask data - default auto masks used) is attached. Iris.log

I just bought a couple of Baader filters last week (Ha & Oiii - thanks Francis). Last night was my first ever attempt at capturing something using a narrowband filter. I choose NGC7822 because of it's apparent FOV and because I can actually see it from my heavily occluded back garden. This was 1½hrs of Ha & 20mins of RGB. Taken with my Olympus E-PL5 (full spectrum modded) using a SkyWatcher N200, EQ-5 & Baader MPCC, unguided. Processing was an interesting challenge being the first time I've combined data sets. My workflow was: Preprocess, register and stack each data set separately in Siril. Then make a sequence of just the two resultant fits, and register those together, again in Siril. Photometric colour calibration of the RGB data set in Siril. Then into GIMP. Stretch Ha data. Heal the stars diffraction spikes, convert to 16-bit greyscale and export as .tif. Run the .tif through Starnet++, bring the result back into GIMP and colour using Colours->Components->Channel Mixer. Stretch the RGB data, make a starmask, add the Ha data as a new layer, using Dodge blend mode. A final bit of masked stretching with curves, and that was it. Not the sharpest or most detailed of nebula images but I'm quite happy for a first attempt and the lack of exposure time.