ONIKKINEN

Sure it would work, however there are some hurdles to overcome first. All of the data needs to be more or less the same quality taken with similar scopes and similar star FWHM values. Otherwise the end result is worse than the best single contributor (or at the very least only slightly better). This means ideally everyone would be within a few dozen mm in aperture from each other and in similar bortle zones, and with similar cooled cameras. If we mix bortle 1 and 8 we get a result worse than just the b1 data. Let say all that gets sorted, then there is the issue of stacking. One person would have to stack potentially hundreds of gigabytes or even terabytea. Data sharing could also be an issue. In the past spring i took part in a collaboration (well, shared my data which was the beginning and end of my contribution unhelpful comments not withstanding). We shared calibrated subs in a google drive folder to the person who stacked it all. It took several days of work to stack everything if i recall correctly (but it was a 400h image...). A more modest goal of say a hundred hours and if everyone agreed to only take 5min or longer subs would make it a not so difficult project.

Try with another power supply? Sounds like the motors are skipping steps under load.

It was not a hypothetical question on where you want to point the telescope. I feel like youre pulling my leg here. Youll have to help yourself a little bit here. Have you read the PHD2 instructions through thoroughly? Now is the time if not.

Where in the sky?

Sounds like your mount is one of the newer models with a USB port on the control box. If this is the case, connect that to your PC, and your 120MM directly to the PC too. Ditch the ST4 cable entirely, it is not needed (or wanted). In PHD2 connect to the mount with either the Skywatcher driver or EQMOD. Connect to the camera with the ZWO Ascom driver (you need to install all of the above of course). Then you need to tell us a bit more. Where in the sky are you pointing when calibrating? You need to point to a low declination and close to the meridian for calibration to work. If you tried to calibrate at the home position it would not work as the RA axis moves very little.

Like what species? Dogs? Cats?

L-Pro vs UV/IR would probably depend on the target. For the Pleiades an L-Pro probably has an edge because most of the nebulosity is blue which the L-Pro passes. However the background dusty nebulosity is more broadband than just blue so you get less of that so its not without compromise. For galaxies, at least in theory, a UV/IR filter is the best since it blocks the least amount of light. Another thing to consider is the type of light pollution you have. If you have LED lights then there is no cure other than traveling since those are very broad spectrum and no filter can block that without also blocking all the galaxy light. Stick with the UV/IR for now. Bortle 6 is not too bad yet and you can go for any target you like, provided you get a long enough integration.

Oklop bags, get yourself some of them. This one is quite popular: https://www.firstlightoptics.com/telescope-bags-cases-storage/oklop-padded-bag-for-small-telescopes.html I have an Oklop bag for my newtonian OTA, an old Nike sports equipment bag for an AZ-EQ6, a backpack for various fragile and small items and another shoulder carried bag (not pictured below, the small carrying case and contents of the open bag moved there) and of course the tripod which just goes in hand, no need to worry about the tripod since its just 3 steel tubes so nothing fragile here. Everything carries to my car in 2 trips, although its a bit of a pain to carry. I would recommend you get the multi-purpose Oklop bag and then any sports bags or similar you can find for the rest. Just dont bump them into walls or doorways like a neanderthal (like i have!) and everything will stay intact. Take care in placing the bags in your trunk in a way that they are not allowed to roll around or move. Have never bothered to carry the bulky boxes all the stuff came with.

Welcome to SGL, No planets available on that date and time, except Venus which is very close to the sun and so absolutely not visible. Some bright stars close to the zenith but you would not see these with the naked eye in broad daylight. When you say it did not move what exactly do you mean? Do you mean it stayed on the same spot overhead as in it did move when compared to the sun? Or do you mean it moved with the sun like the stars, planets and the Moon would. And what is "for long as we cared to look". Is it 2 minutes or 5 hours? Whatever the case, it will not be aliens and its fair to assume that the locals thought you were being weird for asking them about a strange light (which explains why you were ignored on that). Both Geosynchronous and Geostationary satellites would appear directly overhead with the low latitude of the location. Its not impossible one of them just so happened to have its solar panels directly aimed towards you and reflecting sunlight. Although seems unlikely if the sun was also high in the sky. Geostationary satellites would appear to not move in the sky, but move in relation to the Sun. Geosynchronous satellites would be a bit of both (depends on the exact orbit). I think you already partially answered the question yourself and this was probably some hush hush navy aircraft, weather balloon, or a spy balloon (like the recent debacles with those being shot down). Balloons meant to fly high in the sky bloat to very large diameters, and are often made of reflective materials, so its not impossible you would catch a glimpse of one of those.

Ah, that makes sense. Would there be a possibility of recharging the battery from wall power while on location? (like an RV campsite or similar) The rivers charge really fast in about an hour from 20% to 100%. If you drain it completely then it takes a while to get the charge going. The Ecoflow rivers can also be charged with a car through a standard cigarette lighter plug. They advertise around 6h charge time to full with the 512wh version. You would probably need to have the car idling for at least a few hours during that so that you dont flatten your car battery but if you're out in the sticks then there is probably no-one around to complain about that. You could shave a few hundred off the purchase by going for the 256wh version and charge that off your car during the day. You could also buy a cheap lead-acid battery and use that solely for the purpose of charging the smart battery during the day. Then there would not be a need to charge off your car and have the engine running.

Not including the laptop you are looking at a 300wh power station at minimum, and you need to control your dew bands so that they only eat the minimum amount of power and not full strength all the time. Even then its going to be close. I have an Ecoflow river 300 (no longer sold) which is a 288wh power station. The shortest amount of time it has lasted was 8 hours, but it was around -15c at the time. I am running a cooled camera, AZ-EQ6, guide camera, Mini-pc with a mini wifi router. In warmer nights judging from how much charge was left after i was done power should last for 10-12 hours. However the dew bands will probably take at least 5-10w of extra power for you, and the laptop will probably take at least 10w throughout the whole night. So you are probably looking at a 600wh power station here. So something like this: https://eu.ecoflow.com/products/river-2-max-portable-power-station Or this: https://eu.ecoflow.com/products/river-2-pro-portable-power-station Getting expensive quite fast here. I would recommend you ditch the laptop entirely as its not really needed at all and will just eat power while doing nothing but showing you the remote desktop view of the mini-pc. Instead go for a tablet which while will still need to be charged will eat significantly less power and can be charged with a cheap pocket power bank. You can remote desktop to the mini-pc with the remote desktop app for android (no clue about apple, never used one and never will). Without the laptop i think the 512wh version will do you nicely. Maybe even the cheaper 256wh version if you run the dew bands on a separate "dumb" pack like a talentcell 12v power pack. Another question, why the need for more than 12 hours of runtime? Night lasts for 12 hours only in December, and even then how likely is it that you will actually have 12 hours of clear sky? Seems like an unnecessarily long time to want the gear to be running.

I work permanently in an evening shift schedule (15:00-23:00 + or - an hour or so) and so have a very lucky situation when it comes to managing time for astronomy. I dont wake up in a normal time, and only wake up right before my shift as if i was a normal morning person - so my day-night schedule is just pushed back around 8 hours. There was a time when i worked mixed shifts and i was miserable and had terrible sleep ( maybe 0-5h average 💀). Stabilizing to an evening only schedule helped immensely (although not completely). I think a good portion of people who say they need a cup of coffee to get going or that they dislike mornings are actually just evening people who are forced to comply with the norm of a 9-5 job, which has done great harm to overall health of workers. Not too many professions have an option to work out of that schedule, so most of these people are out of luck and just have to live their lives in an impossible (to them) schedule. I urge anyone who thinks this might be the case to try and find a way to live in a schedule that fits them personally! So i didn't adapt my schedule to astronomy, i just found astronomy as a hobby because of my already existing schedule. I can go out and image on a weekday and not lose any sleep, or at least not lose a lot of it. If i stay out until 6am and get home by 7 then yeah i will have to shave a couple of hours off sleep but its still manageable. If i were to only go out with the scope on weekends i would probably have only 5 usable nights a year and most likely would just abandon the hobby. Not sure how anyone manages to juggle sleep and astronomy with a normal schedule to be honest.

Binning is in Geometry-> binning. It wasn't always there, i am using 1.2.0-rc1 and it is. I think it was in the previous version too but not sure if much further back than that so you may need to update if you are on 1.0 still. Below is an example of the samplers i placed (or something similar) They are a bit difficult to see but i just placed them on the areas that looked least worst in terms of nebulosity. Most of them are on dark nebulosity but in this case since those are the darkest spots in the image they can be used as a sample for a background. Images like this are very difficult to work with for this step because realistically there is no background in this field of view and it is corner to corner nebulosity (and basically all forms of gradient removal also tack onto and remove some nebulosity, just a matter of getting the best compromise). Not very good at this yet myself but i think in these cases its better to have fewer rather than more samplers.

Bit late to the party, but here is what i got out of the stack: Processed in Siril and Photoshop with the following steps: Siril first: Bin x2, background extraction with just a handful of samplers around the edges, Asinh stretch at 1000, histogram transformation by just moving the black and white point. Export as 16-bit TIFF for Photoshop. Photoshop: StarXterminator first. Stretched the starless layer a little bit more and applied a boatload of noiseXterminator to fight the noisy nebulosity. Some saturation and manual colourbalance work and a little bit of curves and contrast (this "fiddling" part takes often most of the processing time, no guide for that im afraid). Left the stars rather bright, at least for a typical nebula image. I think the stars being at the forefront can act as distractions from the nebulosity behind which could use some more integration. Only mild work for the stars-only layer including: Smart sharpen, saturation. Added the starless back to the stars-only layer with the Linear dodge blend mode. Its not bad data, just could use more of it.

I did something like this to remove a very thin adapter, not unlike the issue you have here. What i did was thread a sacrificial extender to the available thread and then squeeze that tightly to the inner thread using guide scope rings as makeshift 3-point pliers. I first destroyed the nylon tips of course so that there is a good bite. The 3 adjustment screws can then bite into the sacrificial extender and so prevent the sacfificial extender from unthreading out of the inner threads. The sacrificial item is completely mangled now but i got the original problem solved.

Not sure about the green line tbh, have not paid attention to it usually. Siril documentation has this to say: Green curve: sorted values by order of decreasing quality So some kind of quick representation of the loaded dataset.

The plot here shows your measured star fwhm in pixels in the vertical direction and the frame number in the horizontal direction. Brutal honesty next: Your first night sucks compared to the second, no way to tippytoe around that. Either seeing was terrible or you were out of focus, or both. Your second night is actually pretty stable. You can see that the general trend of the night was worsening with the occasional anomaly (the sharp spikes, investigate these to learn the reason. Could be wind or guide hiccups). The general worsening of the data can be explained by either focus drift or the target getting lower in the sky which will considerably start to hurt under 35-40 degreed. You can learn a lot from these plots and take that information to the next outing. For instance it looks like you could use more frequent refocusing, and/or shoot the target while its higher in the sky. The relative difference between the first and the second night is too high in my opinion and the first night might need to be scrapped. First i would try to stack with the wFWHM weighting option ticked and see what happens. That will give the bad subs a very low weight but at least the data is used even if only in spirit. You can see the wFWHM plot if you change the Y axis selection. As for what is a good value depends on a lot of things like your scope, camera and typical seeing conditions. Giving a number value for a good target is difficult and youll only learn your average sharpness by repetition. Convert the values to arcseconds (you need to know your pixel scale) to have a more useful metric than pixels. But for stacking purposes you want to have some limits to the relative difference between subs and i think even a 2x difference is a bit too high. Weigthed stacking helps but if i were you i would reject everything above 5px in this graph and stack the rest with weighting set to either wFWHM or number of stars. On the flipside if you keep imaging the same target for more nights then it more or less evens out to an average of all the good and bad subs. Personally i think a fwhm of around 3 pixels or less is a decent target. If considerably more, consider binning x2 after stacking.

Care to elaborate how this would work on a non-pro windows version? Using a mini-PC myself with windows 10 Pro and last i checked pro was still necessary. Mine is not the best in terms of performance so will likely upgrade one day and would like to know if pro really is needed or not.

Nice details on galaxies so small. You often go for these smaller ones and seem to pull of a great deal of detail, do you know what sort of fwhm seeing you typically experience when imaging these?

Not heard of the Atik base before, but looks like the kind of thing meant to compete with the Asiair - a small scopeside computer. I see it mentioned in one article that it is based on the Stellarmate, which would be another option. There are also raspberry pi based options, or a windows mini-PC. Personally i think the windows mini-PC has most to offer since you can run a full version of any normal desktop windows application on it, so really there is no chance that it could not be made to work with any combination of kit.

In PixInsight you could combine the images with the NBRGB combination tool (stack both as separate images first and extract RGB from the duo narrowband to use as Ha/O3). The results vary and it takes some effort to try with different settings but i think this might be the easiest way. I would use the stars from the LP filter image and starless mixed from both the LP and duoband one with the NBRGB tool. Probably not very scientific, but should work to make a nice looking combined image. Alternatively you could try combining with pixel math using the max operator, but this has potential to go wrong if the 2 datasets vary greatly in SNR. Takes more work to get a nice result IMO. Third option would be combining in Photoshop with the lighten blend mode to get the best parts of the narrowband image added to where you want.

Have cleaned my mirror twice now, the first time because there was some oily looking rainbow coloured residue on it (not sure where from, possibly from my car exhaust as the scope was nearby) and the second because i had my mirror out of the scope for other reasons. The second cleaning wasnt really necessary, but might as well since the mirror was already out. Generally speaking i think its best to not clean it unless there is something on the mirror that could damage the coating and if you're unsure then id say dont clean it.

Superb, just love deep fields like this.

If you have a very busy image like this one you shouldn't use the automatic grid thing since it will definitely place some samplers where you wouldn't want to put them. You will want to manually place some samplers on the least worst places around the image. Realistically all of the samplers in this case will be on nebulosity since all of the image is nebulosity, so some will probably be removed. Experiment with the smoothing function and see what works best. As an example i might place samplers like below (although it would be easier to tell the best positions from raw data): You might not need this many samplers either. Really it takes a bit of trial and error to get the best out of.

Thing is, very small amounts of tilt like shown here are very difficult to iron out. You would first have to figure out which part of the system the tilt comes from - The lens cell, the focuser, the adapters, or the sensor. Very likely a mix of many or all of those, and its not straight forward at all to figure out which of those is the issue. Very easy to go on a wild goose chase and introduce more issues. There was someone here who built a laser alignment-thingy-doodad-device that determined tilt on a sensor, but cant find the thread now since the forum has some search function issues. The thread was most likely in the DIY section so some manual searching would probably uncover it. Trying different camera orientations will also give more clues on where the tilt originates from. If you rotate the imaging train and the tilt stays on the right side, then it is somewhere in the imaging train, if it moves corners then the tilt probably originates from before the imaging train. All a bit of guesswork to be honest, i would be very pleased with what you already have although i am used to some really cursed stars from a newtonian.