Rallemikken

I have an 8" of theese, with the black and white collimation screws. Already found a couple of design flaws. First, the nut that is embedded in the lower base plate came loose. Glued it in place, and dug out a slightly longer bolt that allowed me to fit a big spacer and nut on the underside. Also trimmed the small, shiny tube spacer 0.5mm to get everything tighter. Then I mounted my Canon 600D, and as expected, could not find focus. Set out on an endevour to rise the primary mirror 15mm, hope that is enough. On my way, I found two more flaws: The upper plate in the mirror cell looked like a propeller. Seriously twisted. It would not lye still on the table, 3-4mm twist. Now, that may be irrellevant, the mirror resides on three points, but it looked amateurish. What is worse, the black collimation bolts (M6*25mm bolts, not nuts like SW) is threaded into open holes in the upper mirror cell plate. Theese holes aligns perfectly with the EDGE of the mirror. You have no control of how well the mirror is secured, and the bolts can reach the mirror if you either overthighten the original, or swap for longer ones, like I will do. The solution was to make three M6*50mm pinbolts, and screw those into the mirror cell plate (take care, not all the way in, leave one mm). Then I secured them with a M6 nut on the underside so they will not rotate. I did some measures, and decided to wind down another nut in addition, to achieve the desired 15mm I set out for. Then I slipped down a wide spacer for the spring to sit on. The springs are wide, much wider than the 6mm bolt, so I found three smaller springs that went inside the original. Now everything is tighter, and feels more rigid. On top of the springs I slipped on another wide spacer, before I put on the lower base plate. Another set of three spacers, before everything is secured with M6 nuts. The white knobs must also be replaced with longer ones.

Nope. This is going backwards. Running an INDI-server on a Pi, even an old Pi3, is piece-of-cake, but you need ethernet connection in order to get reasonable transfer speeds of your images from the rig/Pi to your indoor laptop/tower. And you get a stable connection as a bonus. Shouldn't be a problem, buy a 50m bundle, and mount the ethernet plugs yourself. Can't see why everything need to be wireless, you need a powersource for the rig anyway. Why not roll out a network cable as well? The thought of running a complete KStars/Ekos/INDI session on a Pi has never struck me, the hardware is just to tiny and flimsy. I like to keep an eye on the subs as they roll in, maybe sort and delete along the way while KStars does it's things, and if I'm going to do all this over VNC it will put additional stress on a Pi, especially on the transfer bus. On the other hand, as a pure headless server on a cold night, it's great!

Most of the world runs Linux, from milking robots in scottish cowsheds to helicopters on Mars. And all of the web, and most financial and military operations and equipment. It's industrial standard at its heart, the kernel. And open source. Qualified people keep an eager eye on the code.

Oh.... Thaught it was a "once in the lifetime (of the camera)" thing.....

Don't most DSLR's have something called "Custom white-balance"? Seen it refered to, something about taking a picture agains a white paper sheet, and so fourth....

Before you spend a single dime, try to connect with some other software. Stellarium, Kstars or whatever. Preferably with other drivers. INDI for ASCOM and vica versa. Check that the misbehavior is consistent.

If you are using the LAN on your laptop to ONLY connect to your Pi, then it should work if you give both a static (fixed) IP on the same subnet on the LAN interfaces. I.E. 192.168..1.23 and 192.168.1.24. Or something like that. Astroberry is based on Raspberry OS, which is based on Debian, so this should be easy. Use the Ping command on your laptop to check the connection.

Tar dette på engelsk; sikkert flere nyskjerrige: I recon your season is over? What was your last night out, and when do you plan to start again? I did my last session on 7. april, and hopefully will be imaging again sometime around the second week of september.

Hei-hei! Ikke mange nordmmenn her! Velkommen, og hilsen fra Trøndelag!

Naahhh... Arn't you confusing photons with electrons? Photons are massless waveparticles? They kick loose an electron when they hit your sensor, but I doubt that they can dwell on the surface of my mirror for any lenght of time??

Call it superstition. The beaty of the reflectors is the fact that the photons travels freely, all the way from far-away to your camera sensor. Every artefact or fault on your subs can be traced to the telescope itself, which often can be enhanched and modded. Being a little more serious, I've heard it more often causes troubles on reflectors than refractors. That being said, it might be that the refractor guys are more capable of handling such things, as they rely on lenses for everything. Anyway, I've learned to deal with the slightly oblong stars at the fringes. And I'm lucky to be living under dark skies.

Many things here, I'll focus on the "Raspberry PI 4". I don't trust theese small gadgets to run a full KStars/Ekos/INDI session, if that's what you are doing. To many toss away KStars and Ekos because troubles like those you describe, common for them all is that they try to run their rig from a PI, either a homebrewed setup or commercial. How many run their gear with a grown-up laptop or computer, with KStars/Ekos/INDI under it's native OS, Linux? Well, there must be more than just me.... How many of us bring all kinds of frustrations to this table, trying to sort out all kinds of weird behavior and bugs? None. as far as I know, but I'm kind of new on this forum. I'm a newbie, I fired up my rig for the first time on the 14. sept. and closed the season on the 8. april. On 64 degrees, to light summer. My log for my first year has 39 entries, and my harddisk has 45 new datasets. Not a single crash or hangup, not a single instance of "weird" behavior. Once the initial settings was sorted out, things just worked. The only thing I will continue to tinker a bit with is the guiding, but that's a thing we never settle on... My rig is run by a HP EliteDesk 800 with Linux Mint 20.3 _64-bits. If you can't take your computer out, or the evenings gets to cold, consider running a PI on your rig as a pure headless INDI-server, and connect it to your computer that runs Linux/KStars/Ekos/INDI with an ethernet cable. Takes some effort and skills, but it's the nest best. I set up a PI3 B+ as an exercise and did a test with my Canon 600D connected. It was impossible to get the PI to consume more than 152 mb of the PI's 1 gb, and the CPU-usage never got over 7,5%. Btw, don't put anything between a camera sensor and the secondary mirror in a reflector. Period.

Sure enough. Must admit, I keep wine within reach, in order to run DSS and Sequator. Just as a referance, Siril is my main stacker. Nothing else, and I mean NOTHING. I've sipped from the beer marked FREEDOM, and I've never looked back.

LOL. Ditch that pathetic C:\Users\fool and get yourselves a user@linux-mint:~$

Nico is a very versatile all-rounder. Highly recommended. As for software: Stick to what's free and (if possible) open-source in the beginning. Siril is an awesome piece of code, but it took me a whole year to master it. Today i am able to tweak the settings in the different stages of stacking in relation to what I want. I know what works on star clusters, and I know what works on galaxies, and on nebulas. The last revelation to me was the inbuildt photometry functions. They make me able to throw away more of those frames that drags the average result DOWN! Tip-of-the-day: Learn to preprocess and do photometry, then take your time and review the frames before stacking. It's basically just a matter of inserting a couple of "#" in a script.... When stacking is finished and basic image processing is done in Siril (don't overdo it; a few of the routines are a bit crude) you take your 32-bit tif into Gimp, and finishes off. No need for Photoshop, Gimp is far superior, but has a steeper learning curve.

Keep all windows/apps maximized, and cycle trough them with Alt+Tab. My best tip.

Not sure what you mean. Don't know of any scriptcollection tailored especially to astrophotography, but I use the G'mic plugins a lot. Makes a good image editor even better. https://gmic.eu/

Don't know this mount, but for me it sounds like loose bearings. If they are conical, they can be adjusted. Nothing should move under the load the mount is meant for.

The theory is this: Set the focuser midway. Put the eyepiece all the way into the focuser. You see a "ball of light", as you call it. Rotate the focuser knobs both ways. One way the ball should shrink, the other it should grow (become more fuzzy). Most likely it shrinks while you rotate the tube outwards. If you cant get enough out, maybe you can pull the eyepiece a little out of the focuser tube?

You are most likely out of focus. Set it to something faraway, street lamp or such. Put the focuser all the way in, grab the eyepiece in your hand, look through it and move it gently in the axis of the focuser tube. When things sharpen up you are in the range. Maybe you need a extension tube.

A small follow-up: On the Pleiades and Orion it is obvious that you are very aware of clipping, which is very important. But I mean that a small portion of dark skies should be present. With dark, I mean black, or at least dark-grey. This caused me a lot of headache until I found a workaround: I use Gimp, far more superior than Photoshop ( in my humble opinion). Choose Color --> Color balance. A window pops up, and by default the Midtones will be selected. Select Shadows, and drag the three color sliders a bit to the left, lets say -8 as a starting point. UNTICK the Preserve luminocity and keep the default Replace mode. This will desaturate the shadows, and make them a little darker. Play around with this, if you use other software, check if this function is available.

Very nice, especially the Orion nebula. True and consistent colors, the thing I love most with DSLR's. Impressive result with such a small scope. As for the Pleiades, I like it best in portrait, with Atlas and Pleione in the lower left corner...... As if they are watching over their daughters!

I live just below the arctic circle, and will not have dark skies untill september. That gives me a lot of time to restack and finetune postprocessing skills. Somewhere there is a line you should not cross, regarding the altering of data. Looks like we share the same attitude. To bring out the genuine data in a picture is one thing, to alter the data to make it something you think it should look like (or think others will like) is another. Thats why I use a DSLR. True, consistent and honest colors (and an affordable price). I am learning to use Siril, and have relied on the usual workflow: Stacking with the recommended settings, color calibration (or fotometric color calibration), background extraction, removing of green noise, asinh stretching and finally export as tiff. The rest has been done in Gimp. Lately I've spend more time restacking with different settings, and found big differences in the resulting fits. Not always consistent, each motiv have one optimum. And I have found out that using Gimp instead of the half-automated image-prosessing in Siril often preserves more details. This soon turns out as a maze......

Not sure, but I think Ekos is fetching some profile info and settings from the units on initiation. So things can be inconsistent. But I think you best solve this by using the opportunity to save and load sequencies under the camera tab. Give them meaningful names, and reuse them. In this way you can capture with setting you know works, and have used before.

This is exactly what happened when I used the wrong drivers. I use Kstars/Ekos/INDI, and there are several drivers to choose from when it comes to SkyWatcher EQ's. Not obvious which to choose. Caused me some headaches.