astrojon77

From a bit of a searching lots of people seem to make suggests regarding USB power / hubs and number of USB ports in use, or limiting the USB rate. I think I’ll experiment along those lines.

I don’t have any advice for you at the moment but just wanted to add that I’ve been seeing image download failures and crashes with KStars/Ekos running on a Raspberry Pi. Sometimes the whole of Kstars crashes, just leaving PHD happily guiding. Other times, the image download freezes and I Ekos stops responding. I think (hope) it’s a software issue as usually a reboot of the RPi will be enough. But it’s very frustrating to have an imaging session fail. I will have a look at my logs.

I rechecked the PixInsight WBPP measurement today, and this time added 4x copies of the swap folder on the same SSD as the images and the result was only marginally improved to 29mins 39s.

Yes, Siril created the final integration. I should have some time this weekend to investigate this further

After spending a bit more time with PixInsight - and finding the WBPP script was taking rather a long time - I had a little look into what was happening in task manager and did a little stacking test/benchmark. I was working with 128 light frames (9MP FITS, all same exposure length), 40 flat frames, 40 bias frames, 50 darks. That's a total of ~4.5GB of input data. My PC is a Win 10, Core i5-4690 (4 cores, 4 threads), 16GB RAM and has both an SSD and an HDD. Anyway, here are the measurements: Application Script / Process SSD HDD Temp data DeepSkyStacker Register + Stack (Median Kappa Sigma) 5 mins 40s 7 mins 45s ~4GB Siril OSC_PreProcessing 5 mins 49s 26 mins 40s 27.3GB PixInsight WeightedBatchPreprocessing 30 mins 5s 32 mins 49s 32.1GB Guess where my astro photos were being stored to begin with? Yes, the HDD... 😬 I mostly kept the default app/script parameters and tried to clean everything between runs, with temporary files and master frames deleted so they had to be regenerated. PixInsight has the default setup for "Swap storage directories" - just one entry, on an SSD. I may tweak that. I will check the PixInsight SSD time - I would have expected a bigger improvement, like Siril saw. Note that DSS was NOT asked to generated temporary files for the calibrated and registered images.

@Budgie1 thanks for the links to Mitch’s tutorials. I’m going to give them a try right now. @malftobe I have only spent a few hours with Pix Insight so far. I’m still getting used to the UI… the developers have chosen different icons and paradigms than I think is the “norm”. (For example, it came as a surprise to me that the tools don’t preview automatically. You can create preview windows.) Noob error: I spent some time looking for the BatchPreProcessing script (AKA “BPP”) that was mentioned in lots of tutorials, but was missing from my version. I found reports from people who seemed to have a similar problem and followed the steps to reinstall scripts. No luck. Then it dawned on me that the BPP script might have been retired and replaced by the Weighted Batch Pre Processing (WBPP) script that appeared at the bottom of the menu… and spent another 10 minutes Googling to prove that to myself. 🤨 Off to a good start. I also watched some rather discouraging tutorials for PixInsight on YouTube… they seemed complex, with lots of steps, lots of magic values in the tools… and honestly, the results looked a bit “meh”… And I got rather fed up of people saying things like “I don’t really know what these parameters do, but they work for me and my images” I came away feeling that PI has the appearance of a serious, scientific tool, but that in the tutorials I watched some of the people were just trial-and-errroring their way through it. At which point I thought, “why aren’t you just doing this in Photoshop?!” (Or Affinity Photo or Gimp) Then I sort of came to the opinion that once your image is calibrated, registered, stacked, background calibrated and stretched*, you have finished the rigorous “science” phase and are starting an artistic phase. And maybe PI is not the best artistic tool. I don’t doubt that PI has a wide range of tools and a lot of configurability, I’m just not sure that I need them - or can make good use of them. Yet. I’m by no means a Photoshop guru, but watching someone create a star mask in PS and then apply noise reduction to the background… well it makes sense to me and the UI paradigm is more familiar. But then I also watched someone spend a while doing star minimisation in PS and I preferred the image beforehand. 😝 Jon * part of this investigation has involved me trying to learn the correct sequence of operations (workflow) and which software packages do them well etc.

Can you achieve the classic contrast enhancing S-curve with those tools in Siril? I ended up loading my final image into Photoshop to do the final curves tweaks. Thanks, Jon

I had a go with Siril for stacking today and It did a good job of removing gradients on an image. Also if I save the master frames I guess the whole process will be quicker next time. Are there some other benefits you perceive over DSS? Sun-frame selection? Or the actual stacking algorithms / results? Thanks, Jon

Thanks all. I will try Siril for (manual) stacking - so far I’ve just used the scripts. Is there something in particular you think Siril does better than DSS for stacking? (I am intrigued by the idea of applying gradient removal to each light frame before stacking.) Siril is lacking a curves adjustment tool, right?

Hi, Has anyone got a summary / comparison of the various image processing and stacking software, with (perceived) advantages and disadvantages? I started off using DSS and Gimp and was fairly happy - for my basic ability level at the time! Recently I’ve tried Siril and found the photometric calibration and background extraction are great tools. (But for now I still stack in DSS as I’m used to that…) Then I saw that lots of you are using PixInsight, so I’m trialing that - and trying to get over the learning curve. 🤪 Then I see others use Affinity Photo, others StarTools etc. So back to my question: has anyone got a nice summary / comparison? Thanks, Jon

FYI I have Astroberry running on my RPi4 with 4GB RAM right now: Ekos and Kstars are loaded, PHD2 has just finished calibrating and the imaging is in progress. Memory usage comes in at ~900MB, so about 25% of my system. So it seems to me that a 2GB RPi system should be fine, unless you do something I don’t with Astroberry

Thanks, next time it’s clear I’ll just try working with Ekos

Hi, I have Astroberry controlling my AZ GTi + camera quite well, but have a question about alignment for any of you with a similar setup. Do you still use the SynScan app to perform an alignment routine before switching over to Ekos? Or do you just use Ekos straight away with go to and plate solving? The documentation seems to say either option is possible: https://indilib.org/about/ekos/alignment-module.html Thanks Jonathan

Looks nice with some great detail! How are you finding the camera/scope combination? I have a ZS61 and am considering this camera due to the pixel scale it would give. Jonathan

It has a pretty basic 2” rack and pinion focuser; without 1:10 fine adjustment. I have found it satisfactory for photography with a DSLR, but not “refined”

Hi, I have a 6” Meade Schmidt Newtonian (plus LXD75 mount) that has served me well for many years, as a general purpose planetary and DSO imager, but not really a master of anything. I’m now looking at moving to a more portable setup. But I know how this hobby tends to send you in circles… so before I sell this I just thought I’d ask for opinions. So, how special is a Schmidt Newtonian? Does it offer (m)any advantages over a similarly size Newtonian plus a coma corrector? I know that Schmidt Newtonians are not terribly widely available (cheaply) so would I be passing up a “gem”? Thanks, Jonathan

I just took delivery of the AZ GTi ADM dual saddle upgrade from FLO and it has been, well, upgraded! The adapter plate is now a little cap/cylinder that nicely covers the exposed areas of the mount and so the chance of dust ingress should be much reduced over what was shown by Alan. Nice to see companies care enough to make improvements to their products Sorry about the clouds tonight 😆 Jonathan

Thanks everyone for the warm welcome. Nice to see some locals too And @Starwatcher2001 I'm originally from Billingham

Hi, I'd like to try some auto-guiding (again). I have an Altair GPCam IMX224C, which I think will be fairly suitable (even though it's colour). I'm thinking of getting something like the ZWO mini guide scope or the William Optics 32mm Slide-base Uniguide Scope, or perhaps an Altair MG32 Mini Guide Scope. But I'm a bit unsure how to mount the guidescopes. I need two mount points: 1. my Meade LXD75 6" telescope. The current red dot finder is mounted via two screws - see photo. 2. an L-bracket attached to my camera, I'm thinking of doing some camera+telephoto lens photography, and liked the look of Peter Zelinka's setup: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcxtdD5rQeQ Any help appreciated, Jonathan

Hello all! My name is Jonathan and I'm in Hemel Hempstead. I've been interested in astronomy since I was a kid and have had a few telescopes over the years. Currently, I have a rather old LXD75 mount and 6" Schmidt Newtonian, but it's still working pretty well. I'm mostly interested in astrophotography.