LaurenceT

Absolutely superb images Lee.

Having read this thread avidly and seen Cuiv's YT I've decided that I want to keep my EQ5 permanently in the garden, just the mount, no scope.

It makes sense to me at my age to have something already set up which means no lugging heavy(ish) gear out of the garage each time I want to image.

I'm just undecided which one to get, it's probably going to be one of the smaller ones as there is no scope to cover.

Being a novice I'm always grateful for the collective wisdom on here.

Novice question from another (somewhat confused) FMA180 owner.....

were you using the Askar 65PHQ as guidescope for that image ?

11 hours ago, Elp said:

Think I need to do this along with my WO wedge (alt az screws are oddly tight, needs a disassembly to see what's up). Although the azgti is ticking on one side of the meridian the subs are fine so it'll wait until things change.

I've replaced the altitude screws on my WO wedge with these:

sourcing map M6 x 44mm Metric Male Thread Knurled Clamping Knobs Grip Thumb Screw on Type Hand Clamping Handle Bolt with Plastic Knobs Black 10 Pcs : Amazon.co.uk: DIY & Tools

makes it easier to use the wedge. I initially put some lithium grease on the original WO screws and it didn't help at all.

also @AstroNebulee made this post :

https://stargazerslounge.com/topic/391791-william-optics-wedge-declination-screws/?do=findComment&comment=4219498

Superb Lee.

Very nice image of my favourite object in the night sky.

Woke up a 5, looked out of the window and just had to go outside! With my completely untutored astro eyes I saw a beautiful Venus showing to the east and round to the south west/west Betelgeuse, Orions belt and the Pleiades were beautiful in the binos but stunning through the ST102.

I spent the early part of the evening refocusing the guide scope which was a bit frustrating but did it in the end. I wasn't going to do anything else but my wife mentioned that the stars were excellent when she came back indoors from being walked around the garden by the dog.

So instead of going upstairs like a good boy I grabbed the Startravel 102 and got excellent views of Jupiter with belts showing beautifully (I must have left a blue filter on!).

The best view of all was of the Pleiades. I suddenly realized that I could see them with my naked eyes so putting the scope on them was easy. All I can say is that the sight was breathtaking!

20 hours ago, The Lazy Astronomer said:

Important thing to note: the L3 is a broadband filter; it allows all wavelengths of light between approx 420 - 680 nm to pass through. The l-enhance is a dual narrowband filter (albeit a fairly we wide one) - it blocks around 80 - 90% of wavelengths and allows a small section around 500nm (Oiii & Hb emissions), and 656 nm (Ha emission). 

The L-enhance, as all narrowband filters, greatly improves contrast on emission nebulae by virtue of blocking most of the rest of the light spectrum.

Thanks for that, I'm now trying to learn how to process dual narrowband images from an OSC camera in Astro Pixel Processor and not PixInsight. I've found a suitable video so I'll proceed with that.

Same image with stars removed and background extraction done, just for fun!

Another session last night, same gear but with L-Enhance filter instead, 200x60s subs, no calibration frames.

57 minutes ago, knobby said:

Ah, if you don't like the stars you could try Starnet, it's free ! worth a bash !

I did download it but couldn't open the zip file!

Extracted it now.

2 minutes ago, knobby said:

You'd need to get more time on it to improve things, nothing wrong with that image, with only 1 hour of data it's going to be fairly noisy.

It's the massive number of stars that bothers me but you're quite correct about the amount of data.

I finally managed to get something out of it, can't say I'm particularly impressed with it!

Novice imager here,  I have an asi533MC pro camera and I've used it with my Askar FMA180 scope in the past using an Optolong L-Enhance filter. The images it produced had some blue fringing and I was advised that the colour correction is less than optimal and to use an Astronomik L3 luminance filter to correct this. Last night was my first opportunity and I got one hour of NGC7000 in before the clouds, 60x60 second lights, no calibration frames (yet).

The ASIair produced AsiFitsView files, a text document and a JPG file for each sub. When I look at the JPG file in Windows Photo viewer I can see mild red colour in the nebula. I stacked the AsiFitsView files in both DSS (which I've just started learning yesterday) and AsiStudio DeepStack and to my amazement it produced a greyscale image! I'm now assuming that's exactly what a luminance filter does. So my question is how do I finally get a colour image. Do I make another set of subs with my L-Enhance filter? If I do how do I do this in the same imaging session and can I then process both the luminance images and narrowband images together?

10 hours ago, DDH said:

I have had the ASIAIr mini for a while now and think I am missing some setting  as my guide camera and main don't work on the mini.  I have connected both my air 120 and 533mc to my laptop and both work ok, but I get no images at all when connected to the mini.  I have the mini on my Skywatcher Explorer 190MN DS pro along with an Artesky guide scope which are aligned and mounted on a Skywatcher EQ6-R pro mount which is accurately polar aligned.  I also have the ZWO EAF connected to my focuser.  I have tried to polar align using the mini and plate solve but neither work.  If I insert eyepieces to the finder and scope using the hand controller it is accurately aligned with objects ie Jupiter and then I can put the cameras in but connected to my MacBook, all is good using ASI Studio, but if I then revert to the mini , nothing!!!  However if I select the video option, then I do get images from the main camera??   I have the mount powered with a 10amp psu the mini is powered with the recommended 12v 5amp power supply and I have tried to power the 533MC camera with a third power supply.  So now I am stuck with no more ideas, would be great if someone knows an answer to this dilemma, Thanks in advance.

I'm a relatively new user of the Asiair, I have the Pro version but the functions are essentially the same. Apologies if I'm misunderstanding your problem but when I first got the Asiair I found this YT video very helpful in going through all the steps necessary for the Asiair. I also use the Asi533mc pro so I don't use a filter wheel so I just skipped through the bits about the EFW.

https://youtu.be/C43xWCLm1fw?si=nNWUQ6gmYIDRZ4kF

Can you give us some more information? What mount are you using to begin with?

On 27/10/2023 at 15:33, powerlord said:

I should go over with the dog sometime.

Our dog loves going to France, fortunately he's a good traveler in the motorhome.

You'll have to be prepared to shell out cash for the obligatory Animal Health Certificate which costs us about £180 each time although that is variable depending on where you live.

Also you have to take the dog to a vet before you return home which can cost anything from 30 to 60 Euros.

Not wishing to hijack the thread but possibly something that may be of interest to the OP.

I am a novice for information, I also have the 533mcPro camera. Should I choose to use different filters during an imaging session can these be integrated in software such as Siril or APP?

The reason that I might want to do this would be to eliminate star bloat in a certain refractor and also bring out nebulosity by using an Astronomik L3 and an L-Enhance in the same session.

If I'm talking out of my rear please put me right!

I find the campsite lighting in club sites very distracting so we spend more time these days using club  Certified Location farm sites.

They are only allowed to have 5 units on site, have minimal ground lighting and have much more space being situated in fields.

I set up last night in the usual way, Evoguide 50ED with dew strap in place, asi224mc with uv/ir cut filter on an Az GTi using Stellarmate. After the usual Stellarmate nonsense I got images of things like the globular cluster in Hercules just fine but any attempt on a gaseous or planetary nebula was an utter failure from an image point of view. Whereas in my last session a few weeks ago I was getting lovely images of these objects very quickly but not last night, just a light fuzz to show I might be there.

Target acquisition seemed perfect and bizarrely I got Jupiter dead centre and although no more than a large dot I saw 3 moons and Jupiter surface features. The one thing I noticed was that everything was quite wet and a quick check showed that humidity here was 93%. Could this have been a factor? 

49 minutes ago, bosun21 said:

As you can’t fit an external focuser you can always fit an electric focuser which allows for vibration free fine focus.

This is exactly what I have done, fitting the Skywatcher electronic focuser enables almost vibration free observing.

However it's not that easy to fit the focuser but a chap on YouTube called Vasco Ribiero in Portugal has a solution which I bought from him and it works perfectly.

I have both the Baader zoom and the Svbony zoom. I only bought the Svbony zoom because it fitted my mobile phone adapter.

Although subjectively the Baader is 'better" I use Svbony now with my Mak127 to get the planets in view before imaging and it's absolutely fine, if it were my only eyepiece I'd be perfectly happy with it.

Just now, Chrb1985 said:

Wow this Is really good images! Congratulations! Much better than my first images of the planets. Any plans on getting bigger aperture scope?

Thanks, I don't think a bigger aperture scope is on the horizon, apart from the cost there is the weight to consider.

Well,  I'm something of a novice in planetary photography so I would say that you would get an image but I'm not sure it would be a good one.

I'm using a telescope with a focal length 3 times longer than your lens, a dedicated planetary camera and a Barlow of 2.25x magnification and the resulting image is just about large enough for post processing.