ONIKKINEN

Is it this thing? https://www.firstlightoptics.com/sky-watcher-mount-accessories/sky-watcher-synscan-usb-adapter.html You dont need this to connect the mount to a computer, like it says on the page: Note: Sky-Watcher mounts with a built-in USB port do not require this dongle The eqdir cable you have ordered will surely work, and is the most common method for connecting a mount to a computer, but i am not at all sure you can make that work in alt-az as i am pretty sure the EQMOD software is for equatorial operation only. What you could do, and what i assumed you to be doing in the first place, is to bridge the hand controller to your PC with a USB cable. The connection goes like this: Hand controller to the handcontroller port on the mount, and then a USB printer cable to the bottom of the hand controller and the other end to your PC - this way you can control the mount from both the handset and the PC so you should have full functionality. You can also skip the hand controller with this kind of printer cable, if you just plug the cable to the mount itself (hand controller can not be used in this case - also not sure about alt-az functionality as it needs to be set up by the handset).

What kind of dongle do you mean? You only need a USB printer type cable to bridge the hand controller to your laptop

Tricky target in that case, if both are of similar brightness so difficult to say where the M63 tidal parts end and the IFN begins.

Legacy sky survey browser: https://www.legacysurvey.org/viewer#m 63 Click the "more surveys" button and select the SFD dust map. There are loads of different surveys to pick from there as well.

I'll wait for the livestream of when black holes start to evaporate due to Hawking radiation. Betelgeuse is an odd one, it often comes up in discussion from non astronomy folk i meet when i mention that im in the hobby. It seems to me that most people think that it will go bang any time now, no doubt due to clickbait articles that translate "perhaps in the next 100 000 years" to "next tuesday".

SFD dust map is quite weak around M63: For comparison, here is the dust map around M81/M82 with much stronger signal: I think there could be a tiny bit of IFN around M63, but unlikely to be shown in significant amount due to its weakness.

My tube spent around 6 months on its way from purchase to delivery. There was some brief e-mail discussion a few times during the first couple of months because he originally quoted 'a few weeks' for delivery so i asked if there was any progress. He did mention that the painter, which is another person, was ill and so tubes were delayed for a few months so i left it at that, this was also during Covid so very understandable. One day it arrived and it was well worth the wait, i just kind of wish he would give a realistic estimate in the initial discussion, and wouldn't mind at all if he just said "sometime next year" or similar. Its like a gift from past me to future me that way 😁. He is probably overworked, since he also supplies tubes for the TS ONTC newtonians, which are somewhat popular and those tubes take a while to build. Would be a real shame if he decides to retire as the tubes are immaculate and exactly the dimensions you order them (and actually not too expensive for what you get), but obviously understandable if there is just too much work for one person.

What software are you trying to connect it to? But anyway regardless of software, you need to install some drivers for it to be discoverable as a COM port. Try the ASCOM driver for the hand controller here: https://skywatcher.com/download/software/ascom-driver/ Just to make things more difficult, i will say that these drivers here did not work for my AZ-EQ6, which came out of the factory in early 2022. I see that the drivers on the Skywatcher site are still dated 2018, so there is a chance they will not work for you either. In that case you can try the "check chip version" tool from Prolific, download here: https://www.prolific.com.tw/US/ShowProduct.aspx?p_id=225&pcid=41 You should find out which exact version of the chipset is in your handset with that tool, and then be better equipped with info on what exact driver to find.

Some quick tips, might have been already mentioned: Place samples manually in empty spots, not on stars. Not too many samples either, Elp suggested 20, which sounds good to me but you dont always need even that many. The dither option can work, but using it is not ideal as it tends to produce more noise (no theory to support this, just what i found in practice). Have seen this effect a few times with 8 bit stretched or 16 bit stretched or not images, but never for 32 bit stacks. You should consider producing a 32-bit stack for Siril processing. And flats, definitely take flats. And forgot to mention smoothing, try increasing the value.

Seems that way looking at my scripts too. Anyway, i did 16-bit stacking once a while ago and used a script for that. Editing the script like below will make all processing happen at 16-bit: So the very first line in the script as "set16bits" forces 16-bit processing.

Good call, it definitely is worth it here with very short subs that probably dont need 32-bit precision. The line to change, or add, in the preprocessing script is in the beginning and says "set 32bit", which if changed to 16bit will export all the calibrated subs in 16bit so half the size.

My AZ-EQ6 has been largely without drama and "just works" even down to -20 or below. Guiding is at best 0.5" in good seeing and towards the zenith, but usually between 0.7"- 1" under typical conditions. If its windy, its a lot worse but thats just how it is. Mine has a rough worm gear in both the RA and DEC axis resulting in some backlash and requiring me to use the predictive pec algorithm in PHD2, but these are no deal breaker. I think my unit is a bit worse than the average AZ-EQ6 based on what i read from others, so your mileage may vary. Still a good mount i will say.

One way to reduce file sizes is to reduce the size of your images. Figure out what image dimensions you would like to have, for example 1920x1080 pixels and make your reference frame this size. First crop the image to the framing you want the final image to be in and then do the resampling. Import this new tweaked reference frame as the first image into the 'conversion' tab to force Siril to take that as the reference frame. Then run global star alignment and every image is automatically cropped and resized to the reference image, so 1920x1080 pixels. You would only need a small fraction of the hard drive space that way as most of the file size requirements come from the registered images. There is a hard coded cap to the number images though, and that is 2048. If you have more than that number then you have to make a Fits cube, which is a single fits file with as many layers as there were images. This eats a lot of space no matter how you go about doing this, so try to stay under 2048 images in total.

If you would like to try manual stacking with Siril i could walk you through it. Its a bit more involved than the very easy to use scripts (or Deep Sky Stacker) but once you get the workflow its not too difficult. I use a script of my own to calibrate my data, and then stack manually. The main upside of this is that you can stack any number of nights worth of data to one image instead of just one night with the script. And you get to use the best feature in Siril, the plot drawing function, which allows you to easily analyze your data and make sub rejection calls at a glance which is something the scripts skip.

PBS space time video on the topic: Terraforming is pure science fiction, and will remain that way for most likely thousands of years. But given enough time and money maybe some future descendants of modern humans could make that happen. I still think it would be easier to re-terraform Earth in the case of a disaster. Even just staying underground in bunkers for a few hundred years after a catastrophic dinosaur killer type asteroid hit is easier than a complete martian overhaul.

OSC cameras, such as your 533MC produce a green tinted image because the camera is most sensitive to light at the green wavelengths and on top of that there are twice as many green pixels as there are blue and red ones. You will need to colour calibrate the image to make the colours what they are meant to be.

The new-ish 220MM is very good. I use mine at 1018mm focal length f/5 with an OAG and it just works, even through a semi-narrowband filter (Antlia triband RGB - 3x 30-40nm passes). Guide star SNR is usually in the hundreds, sometimes in the thousands so there is plenty of SNR to spare for slower scopes. Highly recommended, much better than my previous 120MM.

I like my Nikon Aculon 7x50 binoculars, can recommend them. Not too heavy for handheld use, at least for me.

Beware, its a slippery slope if you get the imaging bug. Slippery slope might be an understatement, i think its more like being kicked off a cliff and there is no bottom to reach. Here is my first image of the Andromeda galaxy: You'll have to take my word on it, since it isn't exactly recognizable as M31 😁. Still, i remember the moment and how excited and proud i was to see anything resembling a deep sky object.

You can use Starnet++ with any processing software because it is an external app. You just feed the input image to starnet and it spits out a starless image, which you can then open in Gimp as a layer to the source image (and create a stars only layer which can then later be combined to the starless when processing has finished). You can get it here: https://www.starnetastro.com/ Although the site appears to be down at the moment, at least it wont open on any of my devices.

Thats a really photogenic spiral galaxy. Not impossibly small either, may have to try to get some time on this myself.

Thanks, try it out on some dodgy Moonlit night where the loss of a night is not so big a deal. 2-panel mosaics are pretty straightforward in PI or APP, and you could bin x2 to make up for the less time per panel problem, which would still result in an appreciable image size in the end. Thank you, I have looked into NSG for PI, but have not bought it yet. My current strategy is to shoot an even number of subs of all the panels per night, so the gradients dont get to be significantly different from panel to panel as they were taken under very similar conditions- for example for this one i did 5x60s per panel and ran the sequence 3 full times. I am hoping that does the trick, but i expect to need NSG sooner or later since a night could easily be cut short by inaccurate forecasts or a dozen other reasons why plans dont always work.

Absolutely, not at all a waste of time.

Mosaic of 6 panels, 15x60s each to a total of 1h30 taken on Thursday night under a full Moon with my 8'' newtonian and the Antlia Triband filter. Not the best image of the Heart nebula ever taken, but its an image nonetheless. Have planned on imaging this for a while now, just have not had the right opportunity to start. Sacrificing a full Moon night to find out how much work there is in mosaicing 6 panels of a region with very little actual dark background seemed like a decent idea, since the full Moon will not allow good data to be taken anyway. Was a bit of a chore, but PixInsight and the Photometric mosaic script worked just fine so now I'm far more confident to move on with this whenever a decent night arises (next autumn, maybe, who knows). -Oskari

Did you run it through SPCC? You can input the filter bandpasses in it and get as close to right as possible. I think it should result in a deeper red, could be wrong of course as i dont have this filter.