StuartT

3 hours ago, powerlord said:

yup. with NB - well it'll be even narrower this summer with my 3nm L-ultimates, it still seems possible to get decent images. plus there's planets of course, and the moon.

stu

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

On 17/04/2023 at 16:38, powerlord said:

I dunno, I've always managed to get 2-3 hours nb through the summer. Down south anyway.

 

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)

15 hours ago, scotty38 said:

Sort of same, looks ok at first glance but then it's just small patches amongst clouds and even that doesn't last.

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 🤣)

On 15/04/2023 at 10:07, scotty38 said:

Nice image but more importantly where is everyone getting these clear nights from as I'm not seeing them here 🙂

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.

1 hour ago, Martin Farmer said:

As I understand it it won't annotate the stars whilst it is performing the autofocus routine. If you watched the excellent Patriot video it's a bit misleading in the fact that Chad has annotation on his stars within running the autofocus routine - What I think he has done it to edit in the saved images from a Hocus Focus run. This is something you can do and is very useful to go back and review the saved information whilst not at the telescope.

You will only see the effects of the autofocus on HFR within this data - just enable the save and the save path, but be aware it generates quite some data..

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

On 14/03/2023 at 22:33, blinky said:

See the screenshot, I think I've enabled everything but Hocus Focus is not annotating the starts with the HFR data, what have I done wrong?

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

9 minutes ago, The Admiral said:

I thought that this is a common issue with this filter, irrespective of placement. I can imagine though that the size of the halo might be different for different optical arrangements.

Ian

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.

2 hours ago, 900SL said:

Something I noticed btw.. I have my filter drawer about 10mm or so from my camera using a spacer. No haloes with the ALP-T.

I tried it reversed with the filter drawer mounted directly to the camera, and have a very faint halo after a hard stretch and poor SN. In this case the halo may be coming from a back reflection from the 533MC glass sensor cover

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.

On 21/02/2023 at 17:01, dark knight said:

Thank you FLO and dpd for another successful delivery

 

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

19 hours ago, Ratlet said:

Probably need to get a new eyepiece/scope to make the experience truly magical for them...

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

17 hours ago, Gfamily said:

Of course it's only instantaneously accurate. Next year, it'll be a different star. 

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

On 08/02/2023 at 10:15, 900SL said:

I've just bought an ALP-T as I trust Antlia more than Askar for QC   

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

On 09/02/2023 at 13:17, FLO said:

The Askar ColourMagic 6nm OIII/SII Duo Band D2 is a popular filter.

Until today, none of our customers has expressed concern of any kind. And, so far, nobody has returned one. So, speaking as a retailer, all looks good. 

Currently, we don't feel it is necessary for us to check a manufacturer's specification using a spectrometer. If that changes, then we will 🙂 

We will follow this discussion with interest.

HTH, 

Steve 

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.

43 minutes ago, The Admiral said:

I'd be interested to know how FLO views the issue of filters not meeting the stated specification, and the practicability of testing those it sells.

Ian

excellent question! I'll ask them

On 05/02/2023 at 09:38, rnobleeddy said:

Are there opinions on these in general? 

I've just got a 2600MC and I'm using a L-extreme. I like the thought of the H/O & S/O filter as it makes collection very efficient with a OSC - for example, I'd considered just getting an S filter to add S to the occasional target .

But given the price, I do wonder if there's any advantage left over using a mono camera & FW.  I realise this opinion is contentious, but for me is mainly around simplicity, but it's also cheaper. The downside of OSC + dual band is that without processing wizardry, the images produced by the dual band filters are not as good as SHO images from a mono camera.

On 05/02/2023 at 10:37, Lee_P said:

“But given the price, I do wonder if there's any advantage left over using a mono camera & FW.”
I think this depends on whether you will do purely SHO imaging, or want RGB as well. If you’re only ever going to do SHO then my advice would likely sway toward going mono. But if you want RGB as well; either to image broadband targets, or to add RGB stars to narrowband data, then data acquisition is still much simpler with OSC plus Ha/OII and SII/OIII filters (considering that no filters gives you RGB). This is my approach and I’m just using a filter holder, rather than an electronic filter wheel.

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.

On 03/02/2023 at 09:19, michael8554 said:

I see you've posted on the PHD2 Help Forum  😆

Please Keep us posted.

Michael

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

1 hour ago, david_taurus83 said:

Are you using the latest developer version?

I had issues this week with PHD calibration. When I'm pointed to Dec 0 I always click on the brain button, go into the guide tab and reset the steps. It usually goes to 500 steps or so but after experiencing issues, mount not moving, PHD hanging etc when I tried to reset as above again, the steps always defaulted to 10000. If I remember correctly PHD offered a recent update to the developer version...

I installed the normal version and my problem went away.

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!

On 01/02/2023 at 19:47, Starflyer said:

The calibration works over 25 pixels and afaik that's set and can't be changed.  I aim for about 12 steps, you're getting four or five steps at 1050ms calibration step size, try dropping it to 350ms, that should sort it out.

3 hours ago, michael8554 said:

Don't alter the PHD2 Cal Step size.

=======================================

So now I have two directly contradictory pieces of advice.

reduce guide step size

dont reduce guide step size

🤔

3 hours ago, alacant said:

The settings you have given for PHD2 to work with.

It looks like you've entered the focal length of your imaging telescope, 808mm, rather than your guide telescope.
With camera and mount connected,  make a new profile. Be sure to enter only what it asks. Change nothing.

Cheers and HTH

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