ONIKKINEN

You are missing nothing, certain brands carry a price premium for many reasons. ZWO has a price premium i suspect because their moneymaker product, the Asiair, locks people to ZWO cameras only so they get away with it. They are also the most popular brand so the name carries weight (think apple and samsung selling kit for 30% more than an equal product for no reason).

ASTAP (free) has a binning tool which works with colour images that you can use after capture. Easiest way is to stack unbinned and bin the stack before making any adjustments. You can also batch bin your subs and then stack them, same result either way (almost).

On top of keeping all the raw data i also keep calibrated subs of work-in-progress targets where i will need several nights worth of data to get it done. Makes it faster to stack everything to test something new or test how an extra night will affect the stack. The only raw data i dont keep is planetary/lunar since it would mean buying a new hard drive every 5 sessions. Have only kept some that are either exceptionally good or exceptionally bad so that i have some references for future.

On the topic of dubious articles, just google "best telescope 2022". Guarantee that you will not find a useful article (nor is the question answerable, but you will not find this information either). This here is the best telescope in the world apparently: https://www.digitalcameraworld.com/buying-guides/best-telescopes-for-astrophotography If you read the incredible work of fiction a little bit you will come up with this: and Anyone who has been within 10m of an astromaster 130 and especially the mount it comes on will be able to tell you that this is complete nonsense.

You forgot about latitude here a little bit. The Moon is often at 10-20 degrees of elevation here at 60N so you could image almost to the opposite side and with a reasonable elevation. Had there been a choice i would have answered more like 120-150 degrees or better said just "as far away as possible without compromise in elevation".

Bias frames can be used as darkflats to calibrate your flats, provided they are roughly in the same temperature and exactly the same offset. I would take a set of darkflats of roughly the same exposure as the flats instead of bias. For lights you will need to take actual darks to properly calibrate out your offset and the (extremely) little dark signal the camera produces. If you are very lazy you could also use bias/darkflat frames as dark frames for short exposures, have done that and not sure there were any issues. But hardly any reason to skip darks as you take them once and forget about it. So im short, darks to calibrate lights and darkflats(or bias) to calibrate flats.

Agree, tilt is excellent. Trying to fix that tilt will make it worse for sure.

I try to image a target that is the most efficient for a given night, so under a significant Moon that means imaging the Moon itself, or one of the bright planets that dont care about the Moon. If the Moon is too low to image and planets are not available (or the seeing is bad) then i will bite the bullet and image something to the far north.

Here is one of my darks taken with a RisingCam IMX571 (same manufacturer as yours), 60x 60s debayered stretched and screenshot in Siril: Looks not too different to yours. The important thing to note here is that it is VERY stretched and the actual differences in intensity are not that big. Sensors are not perfect and you will inevitably have some kind of difference in intensity of different coloured pixels (and possibly a gradient like these) so i wouldn't worry about it. Of course if you have light leaks then retake the darks. You should have the camera off the scope and completely plugged from light in a dark room when taking darks. If you have the camera on the scope the darks will be ruined in most cases unless you have basically perfect darkness at your site. I believe you might have some light leaks as you have a full 1 ADU difference in median pixel values in the green channel between the left and right edges (mine has 0.3ADU). It may also be just that i am comparing a stack to a single frame so might be nothing after all. But, an issue you should fix and it may actually have something to do with this is your offset which is way too low which results in 0 value pixels that carry no value and cannot be used for proper calibration. You should increase offset until no pixel values are at 0 in a bias frame. My camera had a default offset off 768 which is just fine and there was never a reason to touch it. I recommend increasing your offset to at least 500.

GPU doesnt need to be great, basically any modern-ish model should do the trick. I have an aging GTX1080 and its working along nicely, looking at newer models the RTX3050 looks like about the same in benchmark performance and doesn't cost that much so i would go for that. Should you do any gaming it would still be pretty good for that so its certainly not compromise type purhcase. CPU and RAM is where you should try to spend most of the budget. Decent ram, but doesn't need to be some gaming spec with RGB lighting to do the trick. At least 16gb, preferably more. CPUs, too many to choose from at the moment but AMD seems to be making better general purpose CPUs at the moment. Dont underestimate storage needs, you will rack up terabytes much faster than you thought, especially if you have many unfinished work-in-progress projects where you have calibrated data saved on top of the raw stuff. I would go for an M.2 SSD for drive C, another (terabyte or two, not that expensive these days) SSD as a processing folder and maybe a conventional HDD for bulk deep storage of stuff you dont need to access all the time - like data from previous seasons that you may one day use again. HDDs go for quite cheap too, you could get something silly like an 8Tb drive for a couple hunded. Storage is also upgrade-able almost infinitely, so maybe not necessary to splurge on all the different disks at once. Invest in the core parts that stay in the PC like the CPU/RAM/Motherboard at first if budget demands it.

M33 is an easy target to process, once you get enough data to get a meaningful amount of stuff in it. That is the harder part because while the numbers suggest its a bright target it is actually quite diffuse because it occupies such a large area in the sky and so you will need to invest a few hours to get a decent image out of it. But from a processing perspective its quite easy as there is no obvious extreme brightness difference as you have with M31/M42 so you could just simply stretch it and be done with it. M81 and M82 on the same field of view is another great beginner target that is not that difficult to capture or process. Should become shootable in the coming months for most imagers in northern europe. Another one later on in spring would be M101 which is kind of like M33 in terms of imaging difficulty but maybe requiring a little bit more time to finish. Think at least 5h rather than a couple and the more the merrier.

Sea of stars, love to see it. Star clusters and starfields are underrated in the imaging world imo.

Not seeing square stars, but i guess your star shapes can look a bit square-ish with the aberrations around them. Took your .PNG of the stack and turned sharpening to 11 to show starshapes better: Lots of things could be to blame, like collimation if its way off, obstructions to the light path, something in the way causing diffraction (tree branches, powerlines), pinched optics and so on.

All sensors have a maximum capacity of electrons a single pixel can hold, once that limit is reached the pixel is saturated to full white and all further information to that pixel is lost. Increasing ISO will lower full well capacity and read noise. There is a point in which read noise no longer decreases significantly but FWC does, before that point is the right place for the ISO to be (the tables seem to make sense here and yours should probably be used in the recommended range). Dynamic range is the difference between read noise and FWC by the way. But dynamic range of a single exposure is not very important in AP as we stack hundreds of exposures to increase the effective dynamic range so the 1 sub dynamic range is mostly a pointless stat.

First time trying PI yesterday. Hate it so far, but i will cave in and get it just for BlurX to work. I will probably not be doing anything else with PI as its just so unbearably slow at doing anything simple whereas Siril will register, normalize, and stack 2000 subs faster than PI does star analysis on the same set of subs. BlurX flat out improved any linear stack i found on my HDD without any negatives that i found. It makes all the images i tried it on look like they were taken on a bigger scope under stable skies and great guiding (none are true in normal conditions). The future is now and AI is here to stay.

It depends on the sensor used where the ideal range of ISOs is. Sensors usually have a point where increasing ISO decreases full well capacity significantly but no longer reduces read noise as much. At that point its pointless to increase ISO as it will just saturate stars earlier but offer no benefit of significant value. There is also this misconception that DSLR images should have a specific looking histogram or that the subs themselves should look good and show the target clearly. That is not necessary, the only thing deciding whether a sub is long enough is the amount of electrons in it, not the ADUs or histogram shape and placement. You get a brighter image by increasing ISO past the optimal point but it will still have more or less the same SNR as an exposure of the same length with one setting lower of an ISO.

Without a specific budget its difficult to advice. If you can, get an EQ6 and the best scope you can afford after that. If youre writing a website with scope advice it should also be bracketed into budget categories as no one scope can fit all purposes on all budgets. Beginners reading that article should walk away from reading it with the knowledge of mount 1st, mount 2nd, mount 3rd and then maybe start thinking whats left to buy a scope. You can always upgrade a cheap initial beginner doublet for a better scope but a bad mount will be bad forever and only a waste of time and money in the long run. But my 2 cents on a scope that does a bit of everything would be an 8 inch newtonian on an EQ6. Aperture to cost ratio is very good, unlike apochromat refractors (but there is a catch, of course). Will require plenty of elbow grease and/or further investment into upgrades to bring a factory standard newtonian up to demanding imaging spec, but its not something you necessarily have to do right away. For example i have spent maybe 1800€ on upgrading my VX8 with a carbon tube, focuser, secondary spider, corrector, rings and plate, to bring it to astrograph standard. At this price point its comparable in price to triplet apochromats with half the aperture. You could substitute half of what i spent with DIY if needed so the deal only gets better.

Excellent, love seeing these kinds of images even if they dont have the visual awe of a shiny nebula or a nearby galaxy. Some real sense of scale with the giant galaxy cluster appearing as a small faint grouping of fuzzies, truly unthinkable distances here. Regarding StarX accidentally removing the faint fuzzies, you could manually add them back to the starless layer and include those in a further stretch to lift them up behind the much brighter stars. I tried that with an image of the coma cluster i took last spring, took a couple of hours to sift through the hundreds of galaxies and manually erase them from the star-layer to add that back in to the starless layer (with some subtract and screen etc, you get the idea). "fixed" starless layer of my experiment below: 90% of these are removed with StarX and appear in the stars-only layer. Never processed it fully and just did it as a proof of concept, looks like your faint fuzzies could benefit a little from the same treatment.

You could try stopping down the lens to try and curb the aberrations of your stars, but not much to do about them after they have already been captured. You could also crop a bit inwards to hide the worst effected edges of course, but short of that an aberrated star is an aberrated star.(BlurXterminator, an AI tool just released, which may fix this but its a more advanced topic requiring PixInsight to work). For Photometric Colour Calibration you need to know a few things. Below a screenshot to illustrate a few things. In the search bar you can search the object of your image and it will fill in the Right Ascension and Declination coordinates correctly. You need to have this object be near the center of the image which i think your M31 is not, at least not close enough since its a very wide field image. You may need to manually input the coordinates or choose a star close to the center of the image as the reference (you need to browse Stellarium and find out an HD-something-something number of a star and search that for example). You also need to know the focal length and the pixel size used for capturing. The stated focal lengths and pixel sizes are rarely exact and these values need to be pretty close, so try a bit under and over the focal length you thought you captured at, so for example maybe try 70, 75, 85, 90 and see if those work. Note that if you have resized the image before doing this step these variables have changed and you need to change pixel size/focal length accordingly. Here with this image you may run into a problem, Siril PCC expects a telescope sized image and may not work for very wide fields where it has trouble picking up stars used for the calibration. So it may be possible that it will just not work for your image. If you get an error that it didn't work, try with another Photometric Star Catalogue, if still doesn't work then maybe it just wont work for this image. You might want to try more with this lens before investing into more gear. What you have here is basically a snapshot, a very short peek into what the skies will give you, try gathering at least a few hours on some target and work with that. You may be surprised how much you can get out of a cheap lens if you accept the limitations in sharpness/stop down the lens and accept the limitations that come with that.

Warranty repairs are very much possible and the customer service rep (Eddy if i recall) is active and reachable through AliExpress messages or Whatsapp. Of course you'll have to ship it to China which will cost something and probably take a while to get sorted. That is the obvious downside and why i linked the 2 versions available from TS in Germany where you can assume to have effortless warranty repairs if needed as its much closer to home and a shop many have dealt with dozens of times. Regarding VAT, here is what the site tells to me when i VPN to the UK (or just change the location in the toolbar above) My shown price with VAT included (to Finland): Price shown to me as if i was a UK shopper: Comparing the prices it does look like UK customers will pay VAT when it is imported since it does not mention anything about VAT and the price is cheaper.

You can save an enormous pile of money by getting the Rising Cam branded IMX571 chipped OSC camera: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4001359313736.html?spm=a2g0o.productlist.0.0.6f047164JGhOx6&algo_pvid=88c7fc7f-59b2-4b58-9bdc-a75b08237944&algo_exp_id=88c7fc7f-59b2-4b58-9bdc-a75b08237944-0 Performance is the same (actually a bit better with lower read noise) than the 2600MC. No Asiair with this camera, but with the price difference between the RisingCam and the ZWO 2600MC you could fit a mini-pc and still be left with pocket change in the end. This camera has many happy users around the world and the paying/shipping process is painless so no need to worry about it being an AliExpress thing. The manufacturer is ToupTek, which makes all Altair cameras for example, but just without the Altair price. You can expect a high quality product and not some knock-off cheap chinese copy. If AliExpress is not your thing, you can find the same camera (with extra price) here: https://www.teleskop-express.de/shop/product_info.php/info/p14967_TS-Optics-Color-Astro-Camera-2600CP-Sony-IMX571-Sensor-D-28-3-mm.html Or here: https://www.teleskop-express.de/shop/product_info.php/info/p13286_Omegon-Camera-veTEC-571-C-Color-cooled--Sensor-D-28-3-mm.html Even if you already had an Asiair (not sure if the case) you would still be saving money with these compared to the 2600MC. 294 is a sensor to avoid in my opinion. Seen too many threads about calibration issues with that one.

Looks like the same mount as the one in an Astromaster 130, so i am afraid completely useless and not much you can do to make the wobbles go away short of mounting the scope on something else.

This is so crazy how much it improved the original that i thought was already pretty good. Not only is the improvement but also i cant see any negatives from the tool. Doesn't look quite as detailed as a planetary image with this aperture in excellent conditions so i wager there is still ways to go before we get into the realm of too much detail for the aperture. Gotta jump on the PI gravy train now.

If you have a multimeter you may want to check the voltage after its been in use in the cold for a while. Its likely it only supplied 11-12v at the end of the night even if it still had most of ita charge left which would affect tracking rates. Cold does that to unregulated batteries, no way around it. Li-ion and other more expensive types are a bit better but still only half a solution. For optimal use you want the voltage to remain between 13-14v, below 12v you run into issues and below 11v your stepper motors will start to slip completely and so it looks like guiding is failing when in reality the guide impulse was never completed by the motors.

Its getting really difficult to resist getting PI based on the results so far. Looks like a TopazAI but built for AP from the ground up so fixes the "Topazed" look of that tool.