StuartT

Welcome to SGL Mick! Yes, there is a learning curve for sure, but you have clearly made a terrific start. Some lovely images there! And you have come to exactly the right place to learn. There is a lot of expertise here and people are very happy to help, so just ask away and you'll make very rapid progress towards your goals.

Welcome to SGL Chris! What telescope do you have?

¡Bienvenido a SGL! (we are indeed very wise here... 😎)

Welcome to the happy gang at SGL! You've done well to get a good mount at the outset. Mounts are very important!

Welcome to SGL from a fellow Cheshire man (though I live down south now)

Welcome to SGL! If you don't have a telescope, you can see plenty with a pair of binoculars. Many people on SGL are bino experts, so you'll get plenty of guidance.

Hi Jim. Welcome to SGL! You have some great images on Astrobin there. You'll fit right in.

This is the result of three sessions (9h total integration time) processed in APP then tweaked in PI and Photoshop, but I am not sure of my technique and wondered if anyone might be able to squeeze anything further out of my data? I attach the stacked FITS file. Thank you! NGC_3628_third_session-session_1_session_2_session_3.fits

Excellent! Thanks. I didn't know about the L Pro, but it looks just the job! I've now ordered one 🙂

For bright emission nebulae I've been getting nice results with a OSC and an Optolong L Extreme in my Bortle 6 sky. But I am starting to try galaxies with no filter and my question is would I get better results with a UHC filter? Or would losing the blue, green, orange and yellow cut too much good stuff from the galaxy? Maybe it's just better to stick to no filter and get more integration time and process out the gradients? Thanks

thanks all! I did it as @alacant suggested in EQMOD. Second night of guiding last night and I was getting a fairly steady 0.75" with RA and Dec roughly equal. 😎 Here is the result https://www.astrobin.com/s24a6c/B/

My Quark was ex-demo and arrived without a power adapter. After a lot of trial and error I finally managed to power it from the 5V USB output from my Jackery power tank. It's annoying the Pegasus Ultimate Powerbox can't power it though, as I'd rather just have one power connection into that and then everything out of the UPB (which is kind of the point!). Pegasus insist that the UPB delivers 2.5A at 5V out of all the USB outputs, but I can't get a green light on the Quark from that for some reason

Sorry, but I don't see a drop down under the graph.

ok. Is this a setting in PHD2? In the same video I mentioned above, the PHD2 author guy said that guiding is actually improved by a worse PA! So it's really not worth obsessing over PA too much. (usually I get my PA down to a minute or two, then leave it. Life's too short).

I’ve been watching a video by the authors of PHD2 where they say you should disable backlash compensation in the mount and let PHD2 handle backlash instead. how would I do that in an EQ6R?

Thanks for this. So is there any way to get rid of the coma?

should it be that severe though? It is an old scope, I guess. About 2004

This is a Meade LX-90 (20cm SCT) and I recently collimated it. But it's still not right. Here is a defocused image to show what I mean. The centre of the field looks ok, but at the edges I am getting 'D' shapes. What could be the explanation?

Thanks both!

I'm processing some solar videos and with one of them AS!3 places a red square around the image after analysis. I can't seem to get rid of it. The problem is it's only stacking what is inside the red box and nothing else. I've never seen this before and I am pretty sure I've not changed any settings. How can I fix it?

Oh dear @vlaiv such underhand tactics! I wonder why there is no mono version made by anyone? I assumed that colour sensors were just mono ones with a Bayer matrix added (but I guess I am wrong about that). This is why I assumed there must be a mono version of the camera. Having those larger pixels in a full frame camera would be nice!

Looking at the ZWO website, they have the OSC version (ASI2400MC Pro), but not the mono version. I assume it used to exist as it's listed in some places (though unavailable) - for example here Seems a pity not to have it available any longer (with those nice big pixels). What happened? Are there any equivalents using that IMX410 sensor?

super night tonight, so I tried out my new Starfield 102ED doublet (mainly bought for solar). These are shot with a Player One Apollo M mini and a Baader solar continuum filter (thanks @vlaiv for the suggestion)

Tonight I was blessed with a crystal clear night and a waxing gibbous moon. So good was the seeing that my videos (5000 frames) were pretty good from first frame to last. So it makes me wonder what AS!3 is actually using to grade quality? This was not the usual situation where the few frames at the start were sharp and the rest were mush. Nevertheless, AS!3 graded only a few of them above 90% quality. This made me wonder... what if I just ignore the quality analysis and stack them all? The results were interesting. From the same video, I tried stacking a) only frames rated with quality >90%; b) all frames. b is less noisy than a (as I would expect given the much higher number of frames stacked). But there doesn't seem to be any advantage to having such a high quality selection in a. Which makes me wonder if there is a point to the "Analysis" stage in AS!3 Discuss.

Thanks so much everyone for these very helpful answers! Problem solved! 🙂