ONIKKINEN

You can put the dewed up eyepiece in your pocket to warm up for a few minutes and use another eyepiece in the meanwhile, shouldn't take too long if you do the swap as soon as dew starts to form. For the scope lens you will need a long dew shield or a heating strip around the lens cell, or both if its really humid.

I think you misunderstood my point, either purposefully to make further fun of it or unintentionally because my idea didn't come across so well in text. Either way i dont think i should reply, but i am petty. I dont think you, or some other purely visual observer is likely to turn into an astrophotographer. What i meant is going forward those who pick up the hobby and buy their very first scope are likely to be more interested in imaging vs observing, at least compared to those who started the hobby 30 years ago. And this part i didn't want to write because its a bit morbid, but those who started the hobby 30 years ago are probably not around for as long as those who started the hobby today so in time this is the "evolution" of the average astronomy userbase where the purely visual observer is less common than it is today or was 30 years ago. I thought that was fairly obvious to read as my point between the lines. Its funny to me how you got so defensive, when my comment was not at all meant or written as an attack. The idea that imaging is somehow "superior" in general to visual was not at all what i said, it is what you wanted to interpret from it because you clearly think observing is superior. You say "To me visual observing is actually experiencing the night sky, while imaging is time spent obtaining a picture of it," . So from this i can gather that imagers just spend their time and not enjoy it, and the superior observer actually experiences the night sky which is apparently not what imagers do.

You managed to nicely deconstruct the entire comment. I'm sure you got my point, which is that over time i think imaging will keep getting more popular for a lot of reasons while observing less so. My point for arguing that imaging is a better use of my time (not someone else's) was easy to understand, yet you managed to make this about yourself and twist my words to something i did not mean to say.

I think that visual astronomy, or at least the purely visual crowd will keep becoming more and more unpopular as time goes on because of what has been mentioned many times over in the thread already: Light pollution, and generally technology progressing to the point where most people have a pretty good camera in their pockets at all times and the whole ordeal generally getting easier and easier as time goes on. What i dont believe for a second is that the crowd will disappear completely, there is a certain charm to visual observing which I'm sure will always have its fans. There is also the fact that those who started the hobby a few decades ago had no option to take images with their scopes, or at least not in the very easy way we do today with digital imaging. These veterans of the hobby are likely to keep doing what they have enjoyed for decades already, so probably feel no rush or allure to do astrophotography (as mentioned many times by several people in these threads). But those who start the hobby fresh today do have that option and i would argue most have a wish to take images of some kind through the telescope because they learned of the hobby by seeing an image posted somewhere in the internet. So in time the crowd will likely naturally evolve to be more astrophotography than visual (i will argue that it already is, even including the "silent observer" that does not post or talk about their adventures at the eyepiece online). I am not purely imaging, however i am mostly so at maybe 90-95% of my efforts under the stars are imaging related. I personally find it significantly easier to enjoy the hobby through imaging, and significantly more time efficient too. That last part sounds odd to most of you (probably), but hear me out. Imaging takes research before going out, planning the night, setting up the gear, babysitting the setup while it works its magic and also a small portion of EEVA as i watch the images come in. Then the work does not end after the clouds reappear and the night ends, i get to process the image however long i want so in effect the 5 hours under the stars can turn into dozens of hours of time that i still equate to astronomy time. Then at the end of all that there is an image that i can look at whenever i want to and where ever i am. With visual, the initial hurdle is a lot smaller in that i can simply put my telescope on an alt-az mount and be observing in a few minutes. But also the gains are much smaller in my opinion in that most objects are really just a puff of smoke in the eyepiece that takes some imagination and a certain type of mind to enjoy, which i do have and appreciate the views when considering that puff of smoke in the eyepiece spent potentially millions of years to reach my eye. My most used visual instrument would be my Nikon Aculons, which are 7x50 binoculars. No setup time and couldn't be easier to use, so really no reason not to while the imaging rig is ticking. Personally i am very interested in seeing nightvision hopefully become more affordable as time goes on. My idea of a perfect visual instrument would probably be some kind of image stabilized binocular system with night vision capabilities to make the best out of observing time.

The images show a moon and skyglow filter, which could improve contrast on the horsehead if it acts like a broad spectrum light pollution filter like the Baader moon and skyglow. I think this one is just mislabeled as a moon filter instead of a moonlight and skyglow filter.

Obviously the scope needs to be balanced in both axis for there to be any chance of using it with any stability. Did you buy the scope and mount as a package deal from a reputable seller? If so, the included counterweight(s) should absolutely be enough to balance the scope. If not, you definitely need more weights but its weird you didn't have them to begin with. If you bought the mount and scope separately, then yeah i suppose its not enough to have just that one small (3.4kg?) weight for the scope.

For a tripod, everything and anything on it consumes the supported weight. For just the mount head counterweights are excluded from the payload. But you should ignore whatever the manufacturer claims about the load. The claimed payload limits are not very helpful. For astrophotography you can typically cut in half the claimed number and youre pretty close.

I echo the advice regarding the tripod, if it is the aluminium one that is. Something must be done to stabilize that, or even replace with a steel tripod. Other than that, your best bet with imaging using this scope/mount combo is to go for northern targets at high declinations. The higher the better, because closer to the celestial poles the sky will move slower, and so be easier on a weak mount. It will not solve any issues with the mount, but will hide some of the symptoms in your images and you will have an easier time getting pleasing results.

Thank you Peter! New OSC cameras are pretty good, but i do wonder how different the image would be with mono. Surprising amount of Ha here even with just 1/4th of the pixels active for that. Thank you! 2-panel mosaicing is fairly straight forward with for example AstroPixelProcessor as long as there was enough overlap in the panels. You stack the images to their own panels and then let the mosaicing software figure out how to stitch them. Like you suspected the panels will look out of place if conditions changed significantly between them though, which is why i used the at the moment probably best tool - photometric mosaic script in PixInsight because there were changing sky brightness conditions for this night. There is a bit of user input required with the PI method (and you have to read the instructions to make sense of it all), but its not too difficult for a 2 panel image where you only have to make sure the one overlap area is sound.

Thank you Neil, i take it that my efforts to hide some issues with the stars were effective then because the data was far from ideal. The panels dont quite flow into each other in one area and some stars are cut off half way/maybe even missing, but im not sure it was noticeable unless you know exactly where the joint is.

Thank you! Preserving star colour is a strong point of the filter, it passes Ha-SII in red, O3 in green and an extra pass in blue centered around nothing specific in terms of nebulae. That extra blue makes working with stars easy since its not a pure bi-colour image.

Restart of the imaging season after the summer break in astro darkness. Still no astro darkness, but close enough it seems with around 3 hours of pretty good darkness to the south. 20x240s per panel for a total of 2h40min with the Antlia Triband RGB Ultra semi-narrowband filter: Stacked and prepared for mosaicing in Siril and mosaiced with the Photometric mosaic script in PixInsight. SPCC and BlurXT applied in PI, stretched in Siril with Asinh and histogram transformation and finalized in Photoshop with StarXterminator amongst other tools. Feedback is very welcome, not a proficient nebula imager myself with only a handful of targets from that category so far so likely could be improved in some area. -Oskari

Never ceases to amaze me just how much accidental nebula the RASA seems to scoop up everywhere one is pointed. Nice one!

On a decently calibrated computer monitor it looks a bit green but does have a lot more life in it. Might not be noticeable on every display though but it is on both of mine. Try "green noise removal" after the first Asinh stretch? You can also try before, or at any other point after colour calibration.

Actually i might take a page out of your book tonight. Still 2 weeks from astro darkness here but it looks like a clear night. Might be able to squeeze 2 or 3 hours while the sun is at a (hopefully) tolerable -12 to -14 degrees below the horizon. Probably still better than bortle 8 from which some people happily image anyway so might as well try. Now that i wrote this comment i am sure the clouds will appear in the next 3 hours 😬.

Its a very nice M31, would comment on the Siril colour thing further. That cloudy nights thread is frankly full of people who comment on the "issue" without understanding what it is that Siril does when stacking. Personally would not recommend reading through that thread without a few pints, and even then would not take any advice from it. Or more importantly, what it does not do. Siril does not apply any type of pre-stretch to any of the channels when calibrating which is something that some other software do. This is typically useful for daylight photography but for astrophotography it should not be applied because you want to have the data as linear as it could possibly be after stacking. So you can extract anything you want from the fully linear Siril stack, but you cant "unbake the cake" if the daylight colour transformation gamma nonsense is applied. This kind of colour transformation makes the data non-linear and certain processes like a photometric colour calibration will fail because fully linear data is expected. Now a helpful tip: Start processing with a crop, a background extraction, colour calibration and a stretch (in that order). To stretch the colours, or maybe better to say stretch the image while also better preserving colour you can start stretching with the Asinh transformation tool. I typically apply it at the full 1000 power, but sometimes that could be too much and you could go for something like 300. If the colours look deepfried at 1000, dial it back to maybe 300 and see what you get. Its also possible that the 1000 power stretch is still a bit dull, for which you could apply Asinh again at a small value like 20-50 (experiment on this) After this you can stretch with the simple histogram transformation tool to finish the stretch. You will see that the colours start to appear and they were not lost in the process somewhere. Below some examples from one of my own M31 images. First, only an autostretch in which the colours appear "muted": Then an Asinh stretch at 1000, followed by 25 and finally a closer dial in with the histogram transformation tool (manually, autostretch is way too much): For the second one i paid very little attention to colour calibration so it looks a bit off but i think you'll agree the colours are there to see and further adjust however you like. No extra saturation applied. This is also a mosaic image where the panels dont quite blend in properly so there are extra complications. For a simple one panel image it is much more straight forward. There is also another thing, M31 doesn't actually have a lot of the vibrant blues and purples you sometimes see in processed M31 images, so what you see in the simple stretch version (and your versions) is closer to "reality" than those blue/purple ones. Wouldn't claim that one is objectively better than another of course, i think the subject of colours is highly subjective anyway.

Great image, even in just mono! Will make an epic bicolour shot one day for sure.

The EQ6-r pro still shares the same flawed design of the altitude bolt, so no luck im afraid. However the AZ-EQ6 has a much better altitude adjustment system which i believe is similar to the modded rail kit. No issues using this at 60N for me.

Could be tilt/collimation related as the backfocus looks pretty good. If i were you i would leave it as it is and not introduce any other aberrations by trying to fix something that is really not a big deal. In a stacked image these small corner issues will be very difficult to notice, if not impossible. If you have BlurXterminator then this gets completely fixed for sure.

For the 2022-2023 season i had the pleasure of using my kit for deep sky on 28 nights (most on weekdays), and i think that's a great number. Would be content with half of that, or even less maybe. The last session was on the 23rd of april, and the next one will be no sooner than 2-3 weeks.. For northern humid climate dwellers this is the worst hobby imaginable, but since we (astrophotographers) are a little bit deranged it is no big problem. I actually think that in some twisted way the rarity of clear skies adds to the hobby because every time that happens its a long awaited gift from the heavens. Doesn't get old really and so far never had to think twice about going out if the clouds part.

Both look very good to me, but more importantly you should probably not focus on how the flats look when it comes to collimation, at least not make any hasty conclusions from them. The real issues make themselves known when you take actual images (and measure star sizes and so on). You could be in perfect collimation but still have an off-center fully illuminated circle because of tiny issues somewhere along the way (such as secondary not perfectly under the focuser, the mirror not exactly at the center of the tube, the focuser being slightly skewed and so on, list is endless and not very helpful). So my mantra is to not worry about funny looking flats if the images themselves are all ok, Having said that, you have a relatively small sensor camera so slight collimation issues will be more difficult to notice and if you're lucky you cant notice them at all. With larger sensors even very small adjustments can completely ruin one of the image corners but i think you will have a relatively easy time here.

This version seems to have done the trick with more familiar numbers for e-/adu and full well. Not seen a full well test go over 16.7k on mine yet, and usually gain 100 reports closer to 0.25 but this is pretty close to what i assumed to see. Ran it cooler this time, but i dont think this would affect the measurements greatly when dark current is still fractions of an electron per minute. Just because i was curious, i ran the test with my 678MC too and it worked well without anything special to note. As general feedback i do like how you have allowed testing only specific gain values, like what i did here to get a more accurate readout around the point where the camera goes into HCG mode (i believe 182). Interesting to see that the random telegraph noise is almost absent with this one.

My secondary is undersized so vignettes maybe 20% at 1x, but actually the paracorr makes this much better with its 1.15x barlow so there is less vignetting than native (reducers vignette more, extenders less). Just some food for thought. The paracorr is more expensive though so always a compromise around the corner.

The DEC drift here is due to just that. But its not a real issue as it seems very slow here. Realistically even with a 1 arcsecond polar alignment you will still have that drift because there is probably some cone error in the setup. Long story short a polar alignment of a few arc minutes is as good as it needs to be when guiding. No harm in going for more accurate one but also likely no gain either.

This video shows your RA periodic error in left-right movement and slight DEC drift in vertical movement. This is definitely not fixable without guiding, balanced or not. I would try to seek an answer as to why guiding had not solved the issue. So are the basics in check with guiding? Focal length and pixel size correct, calibration at the right place in the sky and so on? Also is backlash adjusted to be tolerable and the mount in good shape otherwise? Simple RA guiding should not be too difficult if the gear is set up properly so there might be something you have overlooked.