StuartT

yes, I also find that with my L Extreme (7nm) I can start imaging before astro twilight has ended and get decent results.

presumably you are imaging in astro twilight then? (since there is no night from 21 May to 23 July and Oxford is roughly the same latitude as Suffolk)

yep. And as the calendar marches on we are heading into only very late night sessions now before we have to pack up for the summer and just fiddle with our hardware. (astronomers - the only people who don't like the summer 🤣)

Oxford has not been too bad. But quite a few night with poor transparency. You go out and see few stars and so set up, only to find they were the mag 1 and 2 stars. Nothing else is showing through so you have to pack up again.

ah.. this explains it. I was confused by Chad's video too as he appeared to show annotations during a live run. But obviously not. In any case, I can't get HF to work, so I am going back to plain old NINA AF

I have the same problem. I used HF for the first time last night and it didn't annotate my stars in the image window either. (It also gave me very weird focus curves, so I have switched back to using NINA for autofocus)

oh boy! That's really something! Well done!

I use an OAG with my Edge HD 9.25" and am seeing some rather elongated looking stars in the guide camera. I assume this is because I am out of collimation and the OAG is obviously looking at the edge where the problems are most marked. However, my guiding is consistently good (<0.5") so I guess PHD2 is still able to calculate a centroid fairly reliably and use that to determine guide pulses. So maybe this doesn't matter all that much for guiding? Anyone have any thoughts on that?

A couple of attempts from this year's galaxy season with the Edge HD 9.25 and Optolong L Pro filter from Bortle 5/6 skies. 7h 10m on M 101 14h 15m on NGC2403

yes indeed. It's a widely reported problem with the L Ext. But @900SL was suggesting that longer spacing might help, so I was just saying it doesn't seem to with this filter. There was a thread on CN suggesting that reversing the filter might help. But it doesn't.

My filters screw in to the drawtube adapter and my OAG is then between that and my camera. So there is prob at least 15mm between filter and sensor. Despite that I get terrible halos with the L Extreme. Never thought about it being possibly related to spacing though. Interesting.

I have one of those and it's a fantastic camera! 😍

Not if you have an 8 year old in the family... it might be Sirius

yes indeed. that is why you enter the observing date too

This is amusing. It will find a star which is the same distance away in light years as your age. So when you look at it you are seeing the light that left it the moment you were born http://freeant.net/birthdaystar/home.php?lang=1

The highspeed version has some bad halos apparently. Are you using the regular speed one? Are you getting a problem with halos?

Steve (I'm the person who emailed you about this), while the primary responsibility clearly lies with the manufacturer, I am rather disappointed in the seemingly relaxed attitude FLO seems to have about this. After all, as someone on Cloudy Nights pointed out (in a very similar discussion to this one) "If I paid for a 750mm scope, but got a 600mm scope instead, I'd be pretty angry about it no matter how good the images look." In general, I think FLO provide an excellent service and I have always been extremely happy with the considerable amount of gear I have bought with them. So I am inclined to agree with @Lee_P that FLO should consider bench testing the more expensive filters (as they do with scopes). I have also written to Askar to ask them if they are prepared to test my filter. It is perfectly possible mine is as advertised (and I very much hope it is), but clearly some examples are not, so I think it's a reasonable enough question to ask.

excellent question! I'll ask them

Interesting discussion. I recently bought an Askar D2 to add in some Sii signal to my L Extreme images. I like the L Extreme very much (despite the halos) as I live in town and it's great at cutting out the bright sky or the full moon. So I was keen to try the D2 as well, but I am very alarmed to see the spectroscopy reports - clearly the Askar QC is pretty abysmal. So far, I've only managed two images combining both filters to make SHO the Rosette and the California. They're ok, but I am not yet convinced I prefer them to the plain old HOO ones I get with the L Extreme (here and here for comparison). As to the question of mono+FW, I have been thinking about this too. Spending more and more on OSC, duobands etc is probably a bit wasted when I could just take the plunge and do mono (where you have far more control, higher definition etc). I'm still cogitating, so useful to have this thread. Thanks! Does anyone know where I can get a spectroscopy report on my filter, by the way?

ok, having reduced guide rate to 0.5x in both RA and Dec I had to create a new profile. Seems to be working now. Thanks everyone!

thanks so much everyone. I have a guide rate of 0.8 set, but I'll drop it to 0.5 and do a new calibration and see if that fixes my issue.

They said (I think) that you can change either. But I am going to try your method (reducing the guide rate in EQASCOM). Presumably this means I shall need to create a new profile in PHD2 though? (since PHD2 reads details from the mount?) Thanks

That's interesting. Yes, I am using the dev version. In fact I was advised to by the people on the PHD2 google group. Maybe that's the issue then. I shall 'roll back' and give it another try. Thank you!

So now I have two directly contradictory pieces of advice. reduce guide step size dont reduce guide step size 🤔

I don't use a guide scope. My understanding was that with an OAG you should use the FL of the imaging scope, no? I always use the new profile wizard to make a profile. And did so in this case too - it's captured the various details (e.g. pixel size of the guide cam) correctly, so if a step size of 1050ms is indeed wrong (as others have pointed out) then I am puzzled. I've not changed any settings