ONIKKINEN

Since i work evenings and wake up no earlier than 13:00 each day, the sun has set permanently for this year many months ago. Doubt i will see the sun at observable altitudes before March! It would be funny if it wasnt somewhat sad, but we have a day for the grayest day of the year: https://www.originallongdrink.com/en/history/2010/the-greyest-day-of-the-year/ By an alcohol company of course, because what else is there to do in November . The celebrations have sadly lasted all of november, and according to the forecast, will be lasting throughout most of December. Astronomy is a terrible choice of a hobby for someone in the nordics.

If you take just one filter then Winjupos derotation will be optional with sensible recording lengths. Its just that if you take 4x 3min recordings it will be necessary as Jupiter will have moved on (3 minutes is a good length for Jupiter). since you have a USB2 camera the framerates will likely be under 100, so you will have smaller files, but still gigabytes per 3 min. Stacking for planetary/lunar/solar is best done with Autostakkert!3 and then processing in Registax6 with wavelet sharpening. Registax6 stacking cant keep up with AS!3, so not recommended for stacking. PIPP preprocessing is not always necessary, like when the recording wasnt jumpy and the target was centered all the time, up to you whether you want to do that or not, i usually dont bother. Orion and Pleiades wll both likely benefit from thr L-Pro under your skies (Orion definitely will) so keep it in. If you try a galaxy like M31/M33 its not so clear whether there is a benefit as they are broad spectrum targets kind of like the white LEDs.

L-Pro for planetary will not be useful, in fact it will hurt quite a bit since it blocks much of the light you need, so definitely dont use it for planetary. Since you have a mono camera to do planetary with you will need 4 filters to get a colour image out in the end, a luminance filter which is basically just blocking UV and IR wavelengths, a red filter, a green filter, and a blue filter. Not sure what the best way to work with this is since i do planetary with an OSC camera that takes all the colours at the same time, but if i have understood it correctly you would be shooting these filters back to back and then derotating them in Winjupos to match eachother as Jupiter (assuming you want to image Jupiter) rotates quite fast and you will definitely have some discrepancy between the last filter to the first one. You could also just shoot luminance and get a mono image out in the end, much simpler but up to you if you like mono images or not. As for data size, that seems very small, like a single short clip. Tens or hundreds of gigabytes per night are easy to come by with planetary and single video clips are often 10+ GB. You should be shooting in RAW 8 with the file format set to .SER so that there is no data compression, also use ROI to limit the frame size to be just barely larger than the planet to limit the file sizes in the end. Still they will be several gigabytes per recording. Here it largely depends on if yours is USB3 or USB2 as framerates will dictate how large a single video file is across a period of time. The 120MM-S is USB3 i believe, and the mini version just named 120MM is USB2 and will have much lower framerates, so also smaller files. As for if the L-Pro is useful for DSO, i would say depends on the target and how much light pollution you have. For galaxies, little effect, maybe a tiny little bit better. For emission targets it will isolate the emission lines a little bit better and block some unwanted light. The L-Pro blocks high pressure sodium type lamps (old yellow ones), but does almost nothing to newer LED type lamps that radiate across the spectrum (so there is no emission line to block). So if you have a lot of the old yellow ones around, it will block some light pollution but not as much of the target = SNR increases, if you have LED lights around, it will block the LED lights as much as the target = SNR does not increase but you will have less signal as some was blocked. If i were in a bortle 6 zone or better i probably would not bother with the L-Pro with galaxies, but would maybe use it for emission nebulae or primarily blue reflection nebulae (pleiades for example, maybe the Iris too).

Here: https://nighttime-imaging.eu/docs/master/site/quickstart/uioverview/

True, but you can use 3-star alignment as a polar alignment method since it will tell you your error after the third star is aligned. I think OP was trying to do that in this case. You have to do that several times to get it anywhere near aligned, but its doable for situations where Polaris is not visible.

Dont worry about tripod leveling, it has 0 impact on any of this, unless you are setting up on a clear incline of 10 degrees or more. And in that case you could still polar align perfectly too, its just a tiny bit more tedious as adjusting altitude will also affect azimuth and vice versa so you have to fiddle. Forget the spirit levels and just eyeball the leveling to be ok. If Polaris was outside the circle it means you were not polar aligned. When aligned Polaris should be on the circle (never in the center) no matter what orientation of RA you are in. I should note that the polar scope must be collimated for it to work since Skywatcher mounts are assembled with little care and they come out of the factory out of collimation. Why the software method didnt work, couldnt tell you. You would need to keep doing the 3 star alignments to find out how much further adjustments are needed. Keep in mind that large amounts of cone error will complicate this step and its possible you are on a wild goose chase. I would advice to do the manual polar alignment through the polar scope instead of the 3-star alignment. Then do 3-star and ignore what the mount thinks your errors are.

Between that and an L-enhance, looks like: High pressure sodium lamp suppression is of little use these days since more and more of them get replaced by broad spectrum LEDs (might even be 50/50 now here). Maybe better to think of the Antlia one as a wider pass narrowband + blue filter instead of a light pollution one.

Could be designed to be folded into a similar sized package as JWST since the individual mirror segments are still very small. More complex no doubt but the current space origami team might feel confident about it since Webb worked out so well.

New(?) filter from Antlia caught my eye when doing some window shopping for kit that i definitely dont need, but maybe could find a use for. Does this have a use or is it dead on arrival? This one: https://www.firstlightoptics.com/antlia-filters/antlia-triband-rgb-ultra-filter.html Bandpass: Here is why i think it could be useful: Wide bandpass so presumably exposure times are still more or less normal and not narrowband length, something that i need to keep in mind with a newtonian under typically at least somewhat windy skies with a hiccup every now and then guaranteed in guiding. With an OSC camera like the one i shoot with i could easily just extract the greens for OIII and the reds for Ha-SII. I dont expect SII to contribute much here, but still its there. Blue would be extracted more or less as normal blue would and this i would just throw in with the rest of my blue data so its not "lost" like maybe with typical dual pass filters its not contributing nearly as much, and since blue in the IMX571 is quite weak its a welcome addition to get more blue data. I would not use this filter entirely, but perhaps try to get 10h of UV/IR and ? hours of this filter (remains to be seen how much would be needed to get some meaningful emission data). The existence of the blue pass here also means its a lot easier to work into a normal real colour image, unlike just OIII and Ha which is guaranteed to not be presentable as real colour, at least thats what the gimmick of this filter seems to be. I would initially use it to shoot OIII and Ha on M33 and M31, maybe M101 later in the season (this list is already 2 full imaging years long..). Dont really plan on shooting emission nebulae so im not all that stressed about the very wide bandpasses that would for sure be less than ideal for some dim supernova remnant hunting. The filter seems like a bit of a gimmick, but an attractive gimmick at that. Maybe a good old L-enhance/Extreme/Ultimate would be better still. Any thoughts?

That sounds like its running on USB2 speeds. Double check that no USB speed limiters are active in the capture software? Even an older HDD will keep up with such a small ROI so dont think that is the issue.

I would not worry about the big pixels for DSO work, in fact they are helpful for almost all setups as big pixels gather more light than small ones so the whole process of imaging goes by faster (in terms of how long a subexposure needs to be and partially how long an exposure is long enough in total). 14MP is still a very high resolution image for astronomy work, and unless you have excellent seeing night after night and a mount that guides your large aperture scope flawlessly, you are going to be oversampled even with that. For comparison i bin x2 to 7.52 micron pixel size or x3 to 11.28 micron pixel size with a 200mm scope guided reasonably well on an AZ-EQ6, so you definitely dont need to worry about 5 micron pixels being too big.

Looking great, maybe these could use a bit more saturation but then again had you not mentioned it i wouldn't have thought that, so maybe not after all. I do wish the clouds on Earth would find somewhere else to go so i could look at the ones on Mars!

All of the tails point roughly to the same direction, which could be thermal issues if its not collimation related. Ask your friend if the scope was well cooled down to ambient before shooting? Needs a minimum of 1hr outdoors to be equalized (or have a chance to be).

Depends on the camera, reducer and scope. Reducers/correctors state what backfocus requirements they have and this can vary slightly depending on the reducer/scope combo. Cameras have different flange distances too. DSLRs often have 44mm, dedicated astro cameras often have 12,5mm or 17,5mm.

Canon cameras clean their sensor automatically each time you power off, so there may not be any dust. Not sure i ever saw dust on my 550D actually now that i think about it.

just post the log

If you'll post your guide log it would be much easier to try and figure out what has gone wrong.

Seems outdated by a number of years, and today things are opposite to what you wrote about CCD and CMOS. This is the opposite of truth in today's camera market with low read noise and practically no thermal noise CMOS cameras becoming the norm, whereas CCD cameras have an abundance of both. Here you have ignored all broadband targets, which in my opinion are more common targets than the emission nebulae you meant with that sentence. Broadband targets are the opposite of that, and in fact shine brightest in the green channel. Still, it has truth in it as not every pixel receives useful light from a target and resolution is lost. Just have a gripe with how you have ignored broadband completely. This is also the opposite of truth and frankly not useful at all today. CMOS sensors today have either native 16-bit ADCs or 14-bit ones, 12bit is rare and only sold in planetary camera format today (where this does not matter). Amp glow is also a thing of the past, as is nonlinear pixel sensitivity with the newest DSO cameras reaching 99% linearity. CCD sensors have 3-5x read noise compared to CMOS, so also just plain wrong. Not sure i would recommend any of this to beginner astrophotographers.

An average of 1-2 nights per month between August 25th and April 25th of suitable deep sky-clear type of nights for me too. Maybe one more if i count the really dodgy nights when i might try to get away with some planetary and lunar but i try not to go out if its too risky as that too gets tiring after multiple failures. I do use every single clear night though, unless i am physically unable to. 5/7 nights are week nights so 5/7 imaging nights are also week nights, cant be picking and choosing if the weather is like it is. @Clarkey do you image only when the scheduling works well with the rest of life or whenever possible? We gotta be a little bit crazy and deranged to do this hobby, and sacrificing some work nights just has to happen. Of course i dont live in the UK, but Finnish weather seems quite similar near the southern coast where i live to what i have read of typical UK weather (a bit colder of course but cloudwise).

NINA has a sky atlas where you can set limits on which type, size, brightness of object it shows you. I have found many interesting targets from there. You can set elevation limits too, just input a time and desired elevation. Narrow down the search by inputting minimum and maximum size of object and youll get a list of all the targets that are at your desired elevation at the time you set.

Does the 600d have a "movie crop" video mode that shoots 640x480p uninterpolated video? If it does, you can use that to shoot 50fps video for planets. That mode is compressed however and the resulting stack will have artifacts because of that, but you could use Magic lantern, a 3rd party firmware package for canon cameras, to unlock raw video mode that does not have any compression. Framerates will likely suffer a bit towards the 30-40 range but its still better. I have done that with a 550d and while the captures at the time were not amazing, it did work as a planetary capturing tool. Maybe give that a try if 600d also has the possibility to do that? As for the barlow, you will want to be in the f/17-f/20 range for ideal sampling with the 600d. I would try a 3x barlow, that will probably be more like 3.3-3.5x with a DSLR since the sensor to barlow distance will be quite long with the camera body, T-ring, nosepiece combo eating at least 70mm of backfocus.

I dont think a cable snag alone explains why your mount completely stopped responding to guide impulses. It looks like something mechanical has completely jammed/gotten loose with how all impulses are ignored. Could also be a software issue of course, i had a case when EQMOD had put my mount in some weird slow slew mode for some reason and PHD2 stopped issuing guide commands as it found the mount did not respond to them. Might be worth it to go over all the different software involved and recheck the settings. Other than that check for mechanical things like the tripod sinking as you have about a degree of polar alignment error at the time when the issue begins. Also check your clutch, it can easily be too loose with the EQ6 causing motor slipping which would also appear as the mount not listening to commands. If you can easily move the scope while your clutches are locked, the motors will slip a little bit, and could slip completely.

The improvement to the previous one is really apparent here, great stuff! Some galaxies in this longer integration look clearly like spirals, when on the shorter one they might have been mistaken for ellipticals/lenticulars. Background really faint stuff has also started to come alive.

At these prices they will stay on the shelves. Bizarre to try and sell for this high...

Its on sale for 1799 USD on ZWOs site too. Likely just some global campaign to cash in on this time of year. And this is of course taxless price, so an EU customer would still need to cough up at least 2100€.