ONIKKINEN

Really like this feature in NINA too. Here is what my files look like: YYYY-MM-DD - Time - exposure - number in sequence - Guide error in RMS arcseconds during the exposure - Target name - HFR in pixels - number of stars Its easy to remove clearly outlying subs from hundreds by just glancing at the file names. Saves a lot of time in the end when picking and choosing the best quality subs for a stack.

Thanks, i do too. I am always curious as to what the smallest craterlet is in a lunar image but these ones are much smaller than what stellarium has info on, so have no clue really.

Nice shot! I was also imaging this among other things last night under some soupy skies, well see how it turns out after processing (after work, cant be bothered to sift through 160gb of .SER now).

HCG mode on and gain 100 with the native driver is the same as ZWO gain 100. Full well around 16k and a gain factor of 0.25e/ADU. Note that the ascom driver has a different scale, from 0-100 where as the native is 100-10 000. But minimum gain with HCG mode with either is ZWO 100 equivalent. I recommend 700 offset at least, at least my unit would have 0 value pixels if its much lower. If yours has 768 by default like mine was, just leave it at that.

Sharpcap 4.something (newest version) with the ascom driver and NINA with both native and ASCOM. I run native driver with NINA.

Indeed, it is vignetting and flats are the cure.

Simply amazing! 100 hours, man thats a lot of work! but it has sure paid off with this image. The deep narrowband shots are especially impressive, not seen a shot as deep as this thats for sure.

Similar exit pupils for both between a bit less than 1mm down to 0.6mm, vastly different magnifications with the difference in instrument size of course. The exit pupils with the frac are a little bit smaller though as im using the same eyepieces and barlow but it is f/5.5 instead of the f/4.4 newtonian without paracorr or f/5 with. Sometimes they bother me sometimes they dont, but generally as my eye gets more strained during the night the more it starts bothering me. With low magnification wider field stuff with large exit pupils i cant see them, or at least i dont notice them.

Im seeing the same amount of squiggly floaters on both my 8'' newton with 30%+ linear obstruction and a 90mm frac with no obstruction. But my floaters are i think maybe a bit more pronounced than "normal" floaters as they are from many stupid things as a teenager like welding without goggles, careless playing with lasers and the like. Nothing major but some burnt spots in my retina for sure so maybe there are also some extra floaters.

You could try if it fits, but i assume that is what the hole is for. You could also ask Rising cam if that is the case, but im pretty sure they would tell you to keep it sealed.

Its just glued to the telescope facing side of the camera body, 5 minute effort at best and completely reversible should you want to remove it. I have one, but have not needed to use it yet. By the way you dont want to open up the camera body, that may saturate the dessicant that is integrated into the sensor chamber. There is a screw that says "DO NOT OPEN" (that i opened, of course) on the side of the camera that opens up the sensor chamber. You could put a screwed in dessicant tube there if you manage to saturate the integrated ones but im not aware of a case where that happened, but the option exists. The Omegon version of the ToupTek 571 comes with a dessicant tube btw where as the Rising Cam does not.

I can think of one real world difference between the touptek one and others, the touptek one has a weak sensor window heater that will fog up if the cooler is used too much in very humid conditions. Solution to this problem is to cool down less, like to -10 only even if the cooler could do better, or buy a ZWO sensor window heater that is glued to the camera body itself around the flange and so fix the problem that way. You could buy 30 of the tack-on sensor window heaters for the price difference still, so hardly a game changer in terms of pros and cons. As for the Gain and offset confusion, this is in my opinion a complete non issue and there doesn't need to be confusion about it. Set the camera to high conversion gain mode and its lowest gain to use the camera in a similar way as ZWO users would use at their gain 100. Offset in mine was 768 by default and i have just left it at that. No reason to change it really. The 300 offset mentioned above is too low for my camera and i will get 0 value pixels in bias frames every time, but there may be differences in cameras here. This is not a hill to die on however and you could set the offset to 1000 if you want to and not notice anything in your images, since the camera has the full 16-bit range of ADUs to play with (65536). TLDR: no worries, good camera.

best 400 frames out of 5000: Best 300 frames out of 15k: Both with 8'' f/4.4 newtonian and ASI678MC. The wider shot through paracorr at 1025mm fl, the closeup of Pythagoras and Anaximander through paracorr+2.5x barlow at somewhere around 2300mm fl. Both resized to 75% of capture resolution. Soft seeing, Moon at 30 degrees. Not terrible, could have turned out a lot worse from what i thought the captures looked like.

Since the backfocus distance of the sensor itself (2600MC i presume) is 17.5mm i would also say that its the sensor window. Nothing else in that range of the sensor really and the filters are much further away.

I did deep sky imaging after planetary/lunar and found that the seeing was nothing special, not too much in either direction of average and not nearly as bad as i felt it was just minutes ago with the lucky imaging so this makes sense now. Thanks for the useful explanations as always!

With 8'' f/4.4 newtonian, 678MC + paracorr and 2.5x barlow, resized to 75% of capture size. 3 minute capture with best 5% of almost 35k frames stacked in AS!3: Jupiter appeared soft, but no jumpiness in the recording. Just poor seeing or a jetstream in the way i think and due to that focusing was challenging and im not sure it was ideal. There was a wide range of focuser positions where i could not tell the difference if i made it better or worse. Meteoblue claimed a 1'' fwhm seeing overhead, but a seeing index of 1 (the worst), so not sure how to interpret that as the fwhm value and seeing index are in contradiction. It was a bit misty on ground level too, which may have had a local effect.

10s exposure makes it look like daylight under the full moon. Hope the mist stays over the fields or i think it may be game over.

Beautiful shot! This seems technically quite challenging what with the difficulty of reaching polaris with an EQ mount and all. Did you have to make sure you have no cone error at all to remove the field rotation that would ruin the shot otherwise?

I have an AZ-EQ6 which struggles to guide better than 0.6'' RMS even after rebuilding and relubricating it (twice, to make sure i didn't make it worse). There may be a bit of a lottery with these cheap mass produced mounts where some units perform much better than others.

I have not noticed this in normal exposure situations, but have actually noticed that if i shine a bright light down the tube when the camera is not exposing but still connected, such as when checking if the mirrors are dewed up mid session, the next exposure will be either completely white or have half the screen white, or some other fully saturated banding. Only happens when i blast the scope with light though. I am guessing the pixels somehow remain saturated even though the camera was not exposing and this is not purged for some reason (the blink you mentioned?). So far has not happened with actual exposures and i definitely cant see any ghosting between pre and post dithers.

Under dark skies (on a work night😬) with the 90mm and some binoculars, M31 is the best i have seen it so far with any scope. Extends much farther than usual so must be pretty good transparency right now. Very nice framing with the 90mm f/5.5 and an APM UFF 24mm. Only had time for M31, M33, Pleiades and some poking in Cygnus until dew killed the views, its a very humid night here. Surprised that the astrophotpgraphy rig is ticking free of dew when everything else is like its been dumped in a pool.

I wonder if the coordinates are marked correctly, none of the sky surveys and catalogues i checked seem to have anything in the area. There is some IFN visible a bit of a ways off to the side in some of the surveys so its reasonable to think that the exposures are deep. Maybe sacrifice a couple of hours for curiosity? Doubt there are many if any images of the thing really so could be interesting.

Superb detail!

Post the raw stack without any adjustments made for people to have a look, difficult to tell what is going on otherwise. In case you dont want to i will still have a guess: there is colour but its tricky to get out. Andromeda is not a very vibrant target and you kinda have to work to get any colour out of it. Even then only the outer parts of the galaxy will have a little bit of blue mixed in with the neutral tones that are in the core and elsewhere. If you have not colour calibrated the image well it can easily look overpoweringly green/red/brown/whatever unexpected colour. Im guessing something like that could be going on if you got colour out of M45 with the same setup and settings.

There is another option, which is superior in every way except convenience of use but this is a very minor point in my opinion and only the toolest of tools will not be able to figure it out. The better option is to have the best of both worlds, a small mini-pc running windows and whatever software you want to use for capturing. This way you will not need to babysit a laptop which can be cumbersome in the field, you will also not need to figure out a desk/chair situation to use the laptop. You will need a mobile device to control the mini-pc though, and a tablet is preferable here since phones have tiny screens and you will hate the process squinting at the little display. The mini-pc will be cheaper than the asiair, will not be locked behind ZWO products (Asiair will never accept another brand of camera!) and you have ultimate freedom of software to use. Will not be a gaming machine for you though.