ONIKKINEN

Well that i dont believe, there will always be starcores visible in any kind of condiitons. I image mostly from B6-8 type skies (depending on Moon, transparency, direction of imaging etc) exclusively with 30s subs and there are always stars. Also imaging with an 8 inch F4.2 newtonian and an OSC camera. Also, i have an in progress project where i try to image IFN from the afore mentioned conditions. At 5 hours in i can separate the IFN from the background but it is obviously very noisy and requires at least double or triple the exposure to reach a decent result. You can do the math yourself how long that would take for a hard Bortle 8 location and figure out why people dont do that. But not impossible. Honestly i think you're trolling here. You have been given evidence left and right and it just seems that you want to move the goalposts so outrageously to your favour that nobody can actually prove their point to you. I mean you can see extremely faint signal in your own profile picture (assuming you took it yourself) that would be impossible from your arguments.

Why dont you try taking a picture like that yourself? Nothing impossible about that, just takes very long to get the SNR of the faint IFN to produce a nice looking image.

Narrowband filters dont really work on galaxies, unless youre trying to capture H-alpha and mix that with normal OSC/RGB data in the end. You cannot colourbalance a galaxy to look natural with most of the spectrum missing. I would suggest using the duoband filter for its intended targets (emission nebulae) and shooting galaxies with no filter or just a UV/IR filter.

Had a quick look at the 93% Moon with my new Pentax XW10 tonight. Nicely fills most of the field of view and is very sharp everywhere. Really center to edge good stuff 👍. Works well with my VX8 reduced to F4.2. Unfortunately, also saw my secondary mirror. I guess its really not that surprising on a blindingly bright almost full Moon. Not terrible but maybe slightly annoying at first. Maybe try a ND Moon filter next time?

Doing a bit of imaging at the moment and the extra spike is missing as it usually is. Nothing has changed since the last time in terms of optics, i have in fact not even collimated since then. Well i did shuffle a few spacers around but not important IMO. Very similar conditions too, around -14, but this time the entire setup was cooled to ambient well before starting as i had my gear at work in my car ready to go if the forecast was true. Could be temperature related? Not enough info yet.

1: linear as in corner to corner straight simple gradient 2: more complex, maybe from 2 different directions (moon left LP down for example) 3 and 4: LP in several different directions, maybe light leaks etc. All my work takes level 3 or 4. I find its really dependant on the sampler placement. If the gradient is very nuked you may have to treat the lit corner as "signal" and not sample as background. Sometimes i cant make it work fully and finish with GradientXterminator in PS though.

I have 9 sessions and 16 hours of exposure since late April. Takes a special kind of crazy to do astronomy in Finland it seems. But you guys might have it worse still so ill take what i can 😀

Would that lead to balance issues? But then again if the scope is so light as to be unbalanceable i doubt the mount cares since its so light.

Matching darks are necessary, if you plan on using darks at all so a set of darks for every different exposure time. Bias, flats and darkflats are ISO/gain/temperature dependent so you can use them with all the different exposure times. In Deepskystacker you can use the "groups" function at the bottom to separate the different exposures into their own groups. Drop set1 of frames to group 0, set 2 to group1 etc. This is also used for projects spanning several nights, each night in its own group. DSS stacks all of them together in the final image. Different stacking combination methods for the lights can also have an effect. You can try using the entropy weighted method if the exposure times were very different, like 2s x300 + 120s x 100. But generally stack as you normally would, with median kappa-sigma. In Siril with using Sirilic you can also create a project with multiple sessions and drop the different sets into those.

Actually here is the 2600MC, with the IMX571 from ZWOs website (cant believe i missed this somehow):

From FLO, on the ZWO 533MC product page: Not the same sensor at all, but this smaller sensor is suspiciously similar in specs to the bigger 2600MC (which has the IMX571) so it might not be such a wild guess to say it would be similar. Could very well be that the 533 is just a smaller size version of the 571 with similar tech behind the curtains.

Have you adjusted tilt on the camera? Actually not sure if the 2600MC has a tiltplate so might not apply... But if you have and it has the same tiltplate i bought to use in another camera, you will have a gap that lets in light to the sensor. Might be just a few photons but thats enough to skew calibration frames out of whack. Did you take darks in a completely dark room?

The EQ3 and 5 models of mount differ in design quite a bit, including motors. The EQM35 is basically an EQ3 with a slightly different RA axis and a removable DEC head, but the motors and transmission are the same. Rickety rackety gear sounds since day 1 👍.

I wouldn't worry about it. All of this happens on a brand new model. Either the previous owner didn't properly attach the motor assembly or this model won (lost?) the Skywatcher quality assurance lottery and was assembled by a monkey. Note that a lot of these mounts are assembled by monkeys. This is also the DEC axis, which is not under constant motion and stress when in use so even less to worry about. When you do end up guiding this mount you may find that there is no way to guide DEC normally and you have to use one directional guide impulses or no guiding in DEC at all, so the DEC backlash issues are either fixed or mitigated. Note that this is not the main source of backlash with the model, the main source is the meshing between the worm gear and the worm drive itself and this you cannot completely adjust to perfection anyway. The weak DEC axis is why the EQ3 class of mounts is usually not recommended for astrophotography, and these issues would be part of the why. But everything in the videos so far has been "normal" for the model, if a bit louder than mine though.

You have some really faint stuff to the left of NGC255, great stuff! Wonder what a longer integration brings out when its already looking pretty good 👍. Looks a lot like an Abell cluster, but i couldn't find one at the expected coordinates browsing through the catalogue, wonder if this even has a name other than some weird telephone number of a name?. But looks like it is somewhere around 2 billion lightyears away.

The left one, which would be the RAW16 capture if im not mistaken. Did these in Photoshop: Curves - > options -> Find dark and light colors with 0% clipping for color balance. This is the same option as "auto color" but auto color clips 0,10% of darks and lights so this way you can do the same but without the clipping. Im sure someone whos better at Lunar processing has a rock-solid method for colorbalancing, but i always struggle with a subjective approach with sliders, so just use the Find dark and light colors method. Then just saturation and vibrance until happy. If you try to saturation boost first without colorbalance you just get a monobrown looking Moon that you might think has no colour. Also some sharpening with TopazDenoise etc, but unrelated to colours at this point. It did take a lot more saturating than what i have taken with my scope so not sure if there was some problems with capture, but then again i have shot the moon with a 200mm F4.2 newtonian, so plenty of signal left and right in even 1ms exposures. Could be just the aperture difference really.

Plenty of colour (too much in this one). Took a lot of vibrance and saturation boosts though but it is there.

Just loosen the screw a bit and wiggle the motor around, you'll see how it moves then. Press the motor assembly tightly against the other gear so that they are both leveled and do not have any extra play between them. As it is now they are clearly at an angle, which makes the gears bite improperly and have play between them. Then just tighten the screw again once good.

Its clearly not set properly. Loosen the screws holding the motor to the mount body, set it properly and retighten. Since this is the DEC axis motor, there is only 1 screw holding it to the mount body which is the allen screw visible in your first video.

That sounds like backlash noises, quite similar in my EQM35 (very similar mount). The sound is from the gears in the transmission being slightly loose and racketing between themselves, ideally there would be no such sound but i cant completely get rid of mine without binding, although this sounds unnecessarily loud. You can adjust this and its not that difficult. Pop out the motor covers with a philipshead screw driver and watch out for the tiny concrete soluble screw when pulling it out, if you drop it you'll never see it again. Loosen some of the allen head screws and try to bring the gears tighter together and then retighten the allen screws. Maybe not the best explanation but youll understand once you pop out the covers and see for yourself. You can put the hand controller to a low speed like 3 which makes it very easy to see the backlash, adjust it so that there is a minimum amount of it left. If you overtighten things you can get binding, which makes a horrible grinding noise and the motors stall. Dont sweat it though, stepper motors are not damaged from stalling and it only sounds bad. You should probably adjust this even if the noise is not an issue since you will have inaccurate Go-tos with backlash that is so noticeable.

Could be that longer subs work as well as 5min ones, because the worm period is probably somewhere around 8 minutes. This means 5min subs already go through almost all of the periodic error, so polar alignment limited basically. And best of luck with the big evil C!

I would assume a mount as good as yours to be extremely rare. Maybe try running PHD2 guiding assistant on it to measure the PE curve? If youre getting away with 5min subs unguided it should be very shallow and even since the stars in your final image are a-ok. I would assume this is the norm, unguided mounts really are not a thing below the 3k (whatever currency) mark. My Skywatcher junkpile of a mount (EQM35) gets about 50% success rate with 30s subs on a good day unguided, and towards northern declinations. 0% success rate towards lower declinations guided or unguided. The periodic error also has sharp cliffs that guarantee a failed sub at least once per every worm period even with guiding, as this is too quick for any guide corrections to correct in time. So i think in the china category of mounts (Skywatcher, Celestron, Ioptron) you really cant know for sure what you're going to get. Also i get periodic error in declination (dont ask). Treasure that mount, its probably a one of a kind!

Than you. Mine is unsupported it seems, hence the inability to turn hotspot on.

This doesnt work by the way, which is why i use the travel router. Really dont understand why you would say it does.

I dont think my mini-PC has bluetooth, but just a dongle would fix this. Just to be sure, can you actually toggle this connection on without having local access to the mini-pc?