Rallemikken

I have this newt, and got this https://www.firstlightoptics.com/coma-correctors/skywatcher-coma-corrector.html coma corrector. Gives perfect stars all over, even with my Canon 5D MkII fullframe. Focuser seems solid and stable. Primary mirror cell not so good. DO NOT thighten the three supporting screws in the bottom. And there are some light leaks. Small details. All-in-all, a good scope.

Exactly! And is anything sticking out in the lightcone? A screw, partly loose paint and such?

It will. But most ST80's has a focuser for the smaller eyepieces. I had to do some wizardry to get my Canon adapter to fit, but I managed with things from my drawers. For deep sky imaging you will need a mount or tracker that follows the sky. They must have motors, and they must be polar aligned. If the motors have controllers, you can hook them up to a computer, and if you have two motors with controllers you can do guiding and plate solving. The world of DSO imaging is at your feet. If you get your hands on a StarAdventurer tracker head, you will still need a wedge (or foot) to hold it still while polar aligned. The dovetail bracket and counterweights are also handy. A ball head to. I use my StarTracker on my old HEQ5 tripod, yours should be OK with some tweaking, but I'd recommend the accesories that goes with the full kit. My rig, and two images. 30 sec exposures, less than one hour total on each. Was meant as an experiment, pleasently surprised over the result.

Some confusion on this issue. First you must get a DSLR adapter for Canon EOS. They are also called 'DSLR-M48 Ring Adapter', as it says, it has M48 inner threads. Then you need a barrel with the same outer threads that screws on to the adapter, and fits in the 2" eyepiece holder. Different solutions on this. Some use a loose barrel that is fixated with grub screws. The point is that the barrel should be fixated like an ordinairy eyepiece on the telescope, in this way you can rotate it freely. Barlow? With this camera and an 8" newtonian you barely fit the whole moon in the image. With a barlow you will only fit a fourth of it. Field-of-view. You might need a barlow to get focus, but this is easily remedied by lifting up the primary mirror a few millimeters. Plenty of guides on this operation. Makes the whole combo more versatile. The problem is that you don't get enaugh inward travel on the focus tube, you screw it all the way in and still don't get focus. This is caused by the way a DSLR is condtructed, the distance from the lens fittings to the sensor is longer than on an eyepiece or dedicated astro camera. Maybe your Orion get focus without, don't worry untill you have tried. This Canon is capable of deep sky imaging, but not with a plain dobsonian. You will at least need a star-tracker that follows the earth's rotation. The focal lenght and quality of the lens (together with your skills) will determine how good images you can expect. Once you have the tracker, consider a ST80, 'Short Tube 80mm'. Very cheap, 400mm focal lenght and sold under many brands. The Sky-Watcher Star Adventurer star-tracker holds this scope with a good margin. Have taken some gorgeous pictures with this combo myself. Hard to give advice to newbies on this topic. I went in head first, no experience whatever, and bought a medium size eq-mount and a 8" reflector. It was not cheap, but I was lucky. It worked! Very easy to waste money on things that don't fit together, or don't fit good to the things you want to image. But money used on a star-tracker is never wasted. Once you have it, you will never sell it. Good place to start. And the ST80 isn't the worlds best scope, but hey, if you decide to advance in this hobby, you can always use it as a guide scope!

Very nice picture. I'm considering one of those for next season, most likely the StellaLyra 8" f/8. What camera did you use on this?

They are all accesible in the Indi Control Panel, but I guess you are familiar with that if you have used this software before. When it comes to odd equipment, I sometimes spend a little time searching for clues regarding chipsets and such. (sudo) lsusb and dmesg are two terminal commands that can help. Then it's google. PS: It don't hurt to present the camera with another driver. These things are not written in stone. One thing is the outside, the inside can hide parts and electronics used by other manufacturers. If it works at all with another driver, try to tweak it. Things to do on a cloudy night.

No clipping. See image. If I touched the left handle here, I would start clipping the black immediatly. The righthand one could tolerate some adjustment, but for this purpose I always use the handle in the middle. Zoom in heavily on a neutral spot in the background. 200-400%. Choose one channel, and move the slider in the middle a little bit while prewiev is enabled. I rarely move more than 0.05%. There is no right or wrong way in dealing with this issue; this is how I do it.

I've imaged with modified Canon's for several years. Firstly I'd suggest you try out Siril, and it's "Photometric color calibration" tool. If that fails, use the standard color calibration tool. This will most likely give you a neutral background. For fine-tuning I use the "levels"-tool in my image manipulation software (Gimp). Choose the channel you want to reduce or increase, and move the middle slider a little bit sideways. Easy does it.

Mine is 0.22.2 on a Linux desktop. The galaxies are faint, and Stellarium handles that with the sliders shown. And you must tick those catalouges you want visible.

First you must tick the "Deep Sky Objects" icon on the bottom toolbar. Then you can adjust what to see, and how much (sensivity) under the square icon (speech bubble-like) on the vertical left side toolbar. At least, this is how it looks like on my desktop install.

...anfd some of these Canon DSLR's don't play well unless you remove the SD (or CF) card. And they don't play well if the power supply don't provide enough current. Regardless if you have a 220v/12V/USB supply, the battery indicator on the camera should show full.

I won't, but it would be nice. Looks good. KStars and Ekos does have some faults. Their sky-atlas is a disaster, and the whole user interface may be regarded as a little childish. That said, I can't see any feature in NINA that lacks in KStars/Ekos. People may use whatever OS they want, but I will encourage all to try Linux to get a taste of if. I left Microsoft 20 years ago myself, but still do support for friends and family with Windows. Computerwise, I consider the Windows/Linux divide as parallel universes. Grab an old laptop, install the latest Linux Mint, and go for an adventure!!

Exactly! And check the angle of the focus tube, it must be spot-on in both axis. These are the two things you should start with on a newt.

You said it yourself. Allow me to elaborate: Do you regard the control of your AP-rig as missioncritical? I do. Windows was never considered. Soon ending my third full season, and never missed a minute of capture time. How? Linux. It never stops to amaze me. Highly technically skilled folks, able to master a complicated AP-setup, and they lay their software foundations on Windows?

First you must check that your image viewer renders the native .cr2-images from Canon without any messing around. Then you must check the EXIF-data of each sub, to get a grip of what's happening. Did you capture with the camera in "M"-mode? Only mode usable on this camera for astro images.

That's the RA axis. Maybe at one time a motor was fastened to the cam and meshed to the gear? Would make long-time exposures possible if PA was on spot.

We'll all have to start somewhere. I'm no familiar with any other than DSLR's, but one thing springs to mind: The galaxy as a whole seems transparent. You have those beautiful red regions that I'll never find in such a small target, but the spiral arms lack some depth and content. My guess is that you have lost some of that in focusing on the background, that is, you have clipped the black or lacked in bringing it forward. When you image a target like this there will always be a compromise between a dark, colorless background and the faintest details in the motif. The sky is never pitch black, nor is it colorless.

Must disagree. The "quality rating thing" in Siril is far better, but it require you to do the stacking in three steps: Preprocessing and registration, quality sorting (throwing out bad frames manually) and finally stacking. Supereasy and not hard to learn once you get the grips of it. As a beginning, take the Siril script "OSC_Preprocessing.ssf" and comment out (or delete) the line beginning with "stack r_pp_light". Save the file as "OSC_Preprocessing_no_stack.ssf" in the same folder. See if you find your way from here!

Soon ending my third full season with a HEQ5 and a 200PDS. Finderscope with guidecamera and DSLr's. Among them a hefty 5D MkII. No problems, as long as you shield it from the wind. And the tripod stands firm. Best is a fixed pillar. I have a StellaLyra 6" f/4 with the 0.9 cc as a supplement for those wide angles. Use the 200PDS most. You need this focal lenght for galaxies and small stuff.

I do. Nice guide. I have an obsy where I sometimes use my overclocked Pi4 with full Linux/Kstars/indi setup. It's borderline on cpu-cycles, guiding became erratic when I slowed down the computer. I went back to my trusted desktop, I like to use Stellarium and the browser while capturing. A Pi5 should handle this well. I use both Raspberry Pi's and Orange Pi's for several tasks. One OrangePi Zero2 as a standalone indi-server on my StarTracker. Common for all is that I use some Debian Bookworm-based distro, that be Raspberry OS, pure Debian or Armbian. They all have the complete indi-suite in their repo's, no need to use scripts or compile. I have my obsy connected to my home router with an outdoor USB wifi-dongle on a powered hub (the Pi's don't have more than 4 USB-ports, you will need a hub anyway). It picks up time with NTP, Network Time Protocol. No need for GPS dongles. Just give the Pi time to pick up the time before you start KStars. A minute or two. And my obsy is rooted. Coordinates don't change. I always start with a headless network install. On first boot I install the Xfce4 desktop and Synaptic. It automatically pulls in X11, i don't think Xfce run on Wayland. Then it's just a matter of installing what you need, remember to activate the "contrib" and "non-free" in /etc/apt/sources.list. I use x11vnc everywhere. The inbuildt vnc-server in Raspberry Pi OS is a flavour of RealVNC which isn't open source, nor freely available elsewhere. I prefer to stick to one solution and use that everywhere, and learn to use it well. I have added the x11vnc server as a startup application in my Xfce desktop. The server starts up when I fire up the Pi. I have learned to migrate my settings, especially the index-files for platesolving. I can move them from one machine to another, that be a Raspberry or Orange, or a desktop or laptop. They are situated in the same places within your home-folder. A Pi is never further away from disaster than a faulty SD-card. Good work, should wish more people used KStars/Ekos. Never let me down. Never missed an hour capture time. For four seasons! More than 120 pictures so far!

Don't think the HDMI transfer keyboard/mouse signal. Why not run the whole thing as any other mount/camera combo? Given that someone provide INDI drivers for the mount it should be plain sailing. This is how I would do it: A headless RaspberryPi 4 set up as a INDI-server, USB-cables from the Pi to the camera and mount, and either wifi or network cable connection to your PC/laptop. On the PC you run the software for mount control and capture of your choice, I'll recommend Linux/Kstars/Ekos. Be aware that any older Pi than the 4 has a rather slow wifi, will be noticeable during capture.

Did a quick peek into my old (but still working) scripts, and that line is missing. Looks like it uses 32-bit as default is nothing else is set.

And isn't it possible to work on 16-bit only? If so, you would half the space needed with just one config setting.

With my setup, Ekos clear calibration on every slew. So each time I start a session, Ekos does the whole calibration before guiding starts. Takes 1-2 minutes. And I let it settle for a few seconds more before I start the capture. Balance, weight, wind and other factors will vary. If I decide to do big changes during the cature, switch binning or go for single-star mode, I also do a new calibration. As for config, I can do a shot next time I fire it up. I don't correct for erros less than 0.4 arcsecond, and agressiveness lies between 0.4 and 0.8. I dither 3 pixels for every 5 subs, and always gives it at least 2 seconds delay before resuming guiding. The same goes when platesolving. Despite concrete floor and sturdy pier, my newt's need that time to settle. With good PA you shouldn't really need guiding, but it is handy on windy nights, it keeps the target within the frame, despite you have to toss some frames with elongated stars. And guiding opens the door to dithering. A bless for us with old DSLR's. PS: I keep my box at 16 pixels, as seen in the screenshot, and almost NEVER bin. And I have my guidescope pointing slightly away from the target. Not much, just a little, in my opinion it gives steadier guiding. Far from optomal to guide straight into the Rosette or Orion nebula. Or any star cluster. Should be obvious.

No. On that occation the focal lenght was actually 1000mm. In the dark I started the wrong profile... It platesolved OK, so I didn't do anything with it. This perticular part of the UI is the one I never look at. I think the guide RMS is calculated on the basis of the guide scope and camera, and that is the same, no matter what scope I attache on my mount. They all have the same findershoe, that fits the 50x180mm SkyWatcher finderspoe I use.