ONIKKINEN

Tracing light panels sold at bookstores will do the trick just fine and dont cost all that much. Amazon has a lot to offer here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/s?k=tracing+panel&crid=2D0C94AYPYRAE&sprefix=tracing+panel%2Caps%2C104&ref=nb_sb_noss_1 I bought one cheap A4 panel from amazon and while it feels like a cheap plastic toy it has worked well enough for taking flats. The usb connection in mine is a bit spotty though and only works reliably if i have the cable taped down, but it only has to work for 10 seconds at a time so no big deal for me, but just know you get what you pay for.

Just left out in the rain? Damn that sucks as a service...

Some urban planetary work with saturn in view. Seeing is not half bad visually. Lets see if that translates to an image...

The image is looking pretty good! Tutorial on gradient removal with Siril: https://siril.org/tutorials/gradient/ I would also recommend using Siril for general processing too, not just the gradients. an easy 4 step processing workflow to get an image 90% done would be: crop out all artifacts from stacking (funny edges and such) remove gradients with the background extraction tool. Take your time with this step, how well it goes dictates how much you can stretch the image before the background gets deepfried. Photometric colour calibration if the image is more or less a broadband image (no filter or generic light pollution filter). If not, like narrowband imaging, youll need to use the manual colour calibration tool. Stretch the image using Asinh transformation, histogram transformation or the hyperbolic doodad (or a mix of all). Easiest would be to just click the autostretch button in histogram transformation and walk back the stretch a bit (its IMO too aggressive). Try not to clip blacks more than a couple of %, it will make the image look much noisier. All of that takes a few minutes and will get you an image that is almost finished. After that you can do finishing touches with Photoshop however you like with maybe touching up saturation, sharpening and denoising. Plenty of folks do use photoshop for all of their processing, so its not like it cant be done, but i found it infinitely easier to work with Siril and photoshop than just photoshop when first starting processing images. But its worth it to learn at least the gradient removal tool with it anyway.

I did see this in an extreme example i did a while back. I was curious if i get any cosmic ray hits on the chip with very long subs, so i took in total 27x 3600s subs at -10 with the camera fully plugged so no chance of stray light anywhere. Everything in the image is either some kind of external hit (like a cosmic ray or nearby radiation source) or something in the camera = ampglow. 9x 3600s stacked with maximum combination and autostretched: 27x 3600s with maximum combination and autostretched: I doubt it would show up in any meaningful way with more reasonable exposures though. I also noticed that the glow creeping up from the top edge increased as the night went on. I had left the camera running overnight and the later exposures had more glow visible, possibly some kind of thermal leak in the camera itself when its left running at 80%+ cooling power in ambient temperatures for very long times.

Actually, there is a difference even within the Rising Cam camera itself, depending on which driver and capture software was used. The native driver has a 1:1 offset value to ADU scale, so 30 offset would be 30 ADUs. With the ASCOM driver there is an arbitrary offset slider between 0 and 31. I am guessing the ratio here is around 100:1 ADUs per offset value so here i might use an offset of 7 to get it up to 700. I wish it were simpler and everyone just agreed to use only 1:1 offset to ADU ratio in their driver implementation, its just unnecessarily convoluted with the same values meaning different things in different software... Also, gain used for imaging must be taken into context for appropriate offset. The default value of 768 is enough to keep images taken with a gain less than 500 (between 100-10 000) from having any 0 value pixels in my camera. I guess this value was chosen because it is unlikely anyone will be using higher gain than this for deep sky imaging where the smallest issues in calibration due to clipped pixels will be apparent, this gain is already IMO too high for any DSO work. The highest i would go for is gain 251 with 0.1e/ADU but still a decent 6.6k full well. Could be used for narrowband under very dark skies for example where read noise should be minimised to the extreme. For planetary and lunar with much higher gain than this, the clipped pixels are not nearly as relevant so the compromise of 768 offset will do just fine.

Are you talking about the rising cam or some other model of IMX571 camera here? There is absolutely no chance an offset of 30 is enough.

Its interesting hearing so many good things from UPS from around the world. I wouldn't give them a single cent more. Here in Finland they are only marginally a better choice than having the parcel be catapulted to your home and never the first choice for anyone. Their entire consumer business model is based on not offrering any option other than home delivery but with a twist: not even attempting delivery to the address and claiming "we tried to deliver but excuse#1, excuse#2, etc etc". This works because most people dont order that many things from abroad and UPS is the cheapest choice so not much chance to get disappointed often. I have used UPS 4 times now and the only time the item was actually delivered to my door was when for a previous package i called their customer service and said that i saw your truck right outside my home, got a text message saying that i wasn't home, and then saw the truck drive off and deliver it to a drop off location where i could only access it the next day. The drop off location is this weird small asian foodstuff market open at obscure hours and in an inconvenient location. When i went there the only employee present asked "how big is the box" because there was just a literal PILE of boxes in the corner with no organization or seemingly any care to how the boxes are treated. It was presumably the entire delivery route from the UPS driver of the previous day. The customer service rep on the phone sounded so tired and empty inside that i reckon its not the first time she heard this kind of experience, actually i think it might be the only experience she has had in the job, in the end she apologized and apologized and promised that they will see to deliveries to be, you know, delivered here on out. The next package, which was actually just part 2 of the earlier package was actually delivered to my door. The delivery guy looked like i had murdered a puppy and was clearly not even slightly interested in actually doing the job of a delivery man, he just stared at me coldly and went heres your package and went off. The box was scruffy as hell, but thankfully all astro purhcases are double boxed into UPS idiot proof packages.

Would love to help if possible, so ill share some stacks. All of these stacks are flawed in some way, but that might be useful to test the algorithms on. OSC bayer split green stack: NGC4236-Green.fit OSC bayer split and recomposited RGB stack: Leotriplet.fit OSC bayer split and recomposited RGB stack (quite cursed background in this one): Comacluster.fit Mixed DSLR and OSC astro camera bayer split green stack. Lets see your algorithm try and sort out this mess 🤣: M101-hotmess-green.fit

Do you have a specific budget in mind? No such thing as too much mount for astrophotography, so suggestions will be based on how much you will be spending. Also how likely do you think it is that you will be buying a telescope bigger than your current camera kit somewhere down the line? Having a good mount for that already is wise in that case. Remote computer control of a mount is fairly straightforward and involves just a mini-pc as the scopeside computer and a computer indoors controlling that via remote desktop using the same network. Additionally you will want to have an autoguider in a small guidescope to accurately drive the mount for the best possible images. The myth of unguided astrophotography persists, but in reality there are hardly any mounts (under lets say 3000€) that will actually do that so autoguiding is more of a must than a nice option, but thankfully a simple small guidescope+ guidecamera combo is quite cheap and will work just fine.

Just set the offset to at least 700 and dont touch it again. 200 sounds way too low and you will still regularly get plenty of 0 value pixels which will ruin your flats calibration. Noise is not constant and while you did get min values of 40 now, you will definitely get a min value of 0 some time later. Testing with my own camera i found that offset values below 500 are guaranteed to have 0 pixels at some point and at some gain levels, so just leave it at the default value of 768 and call it a day. Does Kstars have a way to set default offset that is applied in case no particular offset was ordered by the image sequence? NINA does and unless i go out of my way to change the offset value it will stay at 768, so no confusion possible.

Doesn't look like the data was debayered. Take a look at a closeup of the image with what looks like the bayer matrix still in place: Dont know how to help with that in PixInsight though.

Shot with 8'' F/4.4 newtonian with paracorr type 2, so around 1000mm focal length, and the new ZWO ASI678MC. The Moon was low in the sky at 13 degrees of altitude just barely clearing some rooftops in the distance, which is why both images are downsampled to 50% of the original size (to about 0.8'' per pixel). Still worked out to be pretty good. 6 panel Mosaic composited in microsoft ICE. Mono: And the saturated version:

I had a chance to try the new 678MC last night for some lunar and planetary, but unfortunately i took the wrong adapter train with me and so couldnt find focus without a paracorr due to not enough inward travel. With paracorr and barlow there appears to be some glare/reflection/softness issue and the recordings are just wasted gigabytes. But the camera works great at least. Wish it maybe had a bigger memory buffer to make shooting in full resolution 4K a bit less painful.

Observed the Moon, Saturn, Jupiter and Mars with the 8'' newtonian. Full moon and low in the sky at 13 degrees, so not a lot of interesting detail to be seen, but some goodies around the shadow side of the limb could be seen. Saturn was not great, too low in the sky for more than fleeting moments of clarity with maybe a glimpse of the cassini division, but that might go into the averted imagination category for this night. Blink and you miss it, quite literally. Jupiter was a treat, as always. GRS staring me in the eye and great detail in the bands to be seen, i am quite liking Jupiter when it gets to 25 degrees and above, quite excited to see if it keeps improving further in the year when it can be seen higher in the sky. Mars, with a Celestron Mars filter, showed me some kind of dark band horizontally in the east-west direction across the disk, not much more than that but still its something. Still surprised that Mars can be observed at its current tiny size of less than 9 arc seconds.

Do you have the newest AI of StarXterminator installed? It has a bit better performance with remaining artifacts from big stars, but some will still be weird. Second one does look better👍.

Picture #2 is the best IMO. First is green, the 3rd one is too aggressive in purples and blues. The second one is a bit too red still and could use white balancing, but i like it the best out of the 3.

Your stars look a bit weird, star removal artifacts?

Looks like some mixed coma/astigmatism at the edge of a field when out of collimation, but could also be pinching. But its difficult to say what and why without seeing the whole image, post one for folks to have a look? If your optics are pinched you would get some funny shapes when slightly inside or outside focus giving a clue on what is causing it. Most commonly this is in the form of a triangle shaped star out of focus because of the mirror clips being too tight, but since you got rid of them there could be some other shape.

Portable, acceptable short exposure unguided performance, affordable, decent payload. Let me know when you find one, ill be getting one too! But in all seriousness, this mount does not exist yet. But maybe if the new harmonic mount drives take over the traditional german equatorial mount designs we will get cheaper options after a few years of cost reductions (hopefully) due to markets of scale. If the affordable part gets dropped out then there are a lot of options. But all cost an arm and a leg... Take this new Avalon mount for example: https://www.teleskop-express.de/shop/product_info.php/info/p15180_Avalon-EVO-zero-GoTo-Mount.html Pretty much exactly fits the bill of portability, performance and convenience of both AZ and EQ use, but you could buy 10 new AZ-GTIs for the price...

The EQM-35 is an EQ-3 with extra marketing and cost. If you really want a cheap wobbly EQ mount then go for the EQ3 as its pretty much the same thing mechanically but much cheaper. Maybe just a good old EQ5? Doesn't break the bank and is a step in the right direction from the AZ-GTi. I would wait for Skywatcher and ioptron to iron out the kinks of this first generations of products out before buying either one of them. Reading the CN threads doesn't paint a picture of a properly finished product.

Magnificent set of images, especially the Jupiter animation from the 10th. This is a lot of work, must have been a terabyte of recordings!

Crazy detail for such a small disk! Is that a polar icecap barely peeking around the limb to the north or am i imagining it?

No, doesnt matter all that much. Plenty of folks still imaging with the 1600MM which is a 12-bit camera. Only difference i could think of is a higher fullwell depth on the 16-bit ADC vs the 14, but i cant think of a target where that really matters.

Loosen the 3 philips head screws at the bottom of the mount a tiny bit and see if it rotates easier? I use my AZ5 with almost 5kg of scope on it with a steel tripod and its just fine with the shakes and wobbles after touching the slow-mos taking about a second. I think i could put a couple of kilos more on it and it would still be fine. Are you balanced well with the 150P on it? Seems like a big scope for the mount, how much does it weigh?