Ags

Dust stops light with a wavelength smaller than the dust grain size. So longer wavelengths pass through dust like it’s not there. I have been meaning to try a NIR filter on a partially transparent dust cloud like the Iris Nebula to see if it can resolve any hidden stars.

I saw a spot diagram for the Mewlon 180 once - off axis performance is unbelievably poor according to Takahashi’s own diagram.

I find Astrosharp provides a fairly good sharpening without introducing artifacts or making noise worse, as long as you don’t overdo it.

I think that is created by the developer of GraXpert, which now features a very powerful noise reduction ability too.

@Vash I am using a script, I got it from here: https://siril.org/tutorials/star-reduction/ I find it works best if the stars are not too bad in the first place. So be careful with initial stretches…

Using Astrosharp for decon and better stretching in Siril. And more data.

Got better (and more) data last night.

This was captured on a 99% Moon night, with strong city light pollution too. I only got an hour between clouds and I am using an uncooled camera so the image is dominated by noise. I am trying to get my stars smaller and get a bit more contrast and detail in the galaxy. My process is currently: 1. Graxpert removes the gradient and denoises the image. 2. Siril removes green noise, does a photometric color balance, and does a first stretch. 3. Astrosharp does the sharpening. 4. Siril does a star reduction. 5. Final tweaks to the histogram in Gimp.

Great capture!

I've been playing with Astrosharp this weekend, and I am quite pleased with the results so far. My test data is very noisy, I am hoping to gather some cleaner data tonight. However, the Astrosharp docs are nonexistent so I am not clear about the finer details of the tool. Which model is best to use - I am assuming Dual PSF for now. There is also an Astro clean model, but that seems to be a fairly potent noise reduction model? Has anyone out together a page describing what the different models do?

Better software and better processing will definitely help, but for now I am focusing on trying to get more data and get the basics of processing right.

Svbony’s sales blurb makes a point about the eyepiece being well suited for “premium refractors” so that makes me think the curvature is matched for those grab and go apos and not a big newt. I can’t say I’ve seen curvature in my 66 or 90 mm refractors. I love this eyepiece, it gives everything from one degree FOV to max magnification in the fracs, so I don’t need any other eyepieces!

Ah no, forgot. I was racing cloud.

I had a bit of clear sky and tried out the mount with its updated handset. No difference in goto accuracy unfortunately. Added 30 minutes to M51 but then the clouds came back!

Downloaded and tried Graxpert for the first time today. The noise reduction and everything else works very well for me (standalone Windows version). Why not add sharpening and star reduction as well? You know you want to 😃

I turned the noise reduction dial of Graxpert 3 to "11".

I was using the hand controller, I just never bothered putting a battery in the hand controller or setting up date/time on it - I thought that would all come from the Air... The air does set some info like location, but not all, it would seem. I object to setting up the hand controller. Having two sources of time and location information is very, very wrong and asking for trouble. But it is what it is.

Now of course I have to babysit the setup through a few meridian flips as by attempting to fix the goto I might have broken the flips.

Thanks for that, I dug out and installed a button battery and set the time and location. The location was already right, the Air must update this somehow as I never configured this and without a battery the handset would not remember anyway. Time zone was also right but time was out by an hour. DST setting was also wrong.

I believe all the electronic stuff for the mount is in the handset… therefore you have to plug the air into the handset. But I’m pretty sure the handset isn’t feeding the Air any info. For example, the Air handles meridian flips perfectly, so it clearly knows where the scope is pointing relative to the ground. I’ll test @vlaiv theory about skipped steps first. If that doesn’t work I will relent and set the handset. 😃

I will try that!

Unless I’m mistaken, the handset is irrelevant, all the thinking is done by the Air? To answer the question, I haven’t set up the handset at all…

One thing that puzzles me is that the gotos require so much correction from plate solving. I am almost perfectly polar aligned, so why doesn’t the goto get close. With a regular go to, you expect the target to be somewhere in the field of a wide eyepiece, but the HEM15 and AIR are not even close. Plate solving papers over the errors, but it is puzzling.

Doing a mini Messier marathon tonight. I’m shooting 15 minuTes on a bunch of targets, just to see what I can get in a short time. With the full moon and a blustery breeze, it’s not the night for anything seriousI a, going for 30 second exposures so there will be more exposures and more benefit from dithering, and binning 2x to compensate for the short exposure time.

Thanks @Elp! Yet again you have set me on the right path. I raised the plate solving exposure for polar alignment and GoTo to 10 seconds and it is working smoothly now.