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ONIKKINEN

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Everything posted by ONIKKINEN

  1. Consider giving SIRIL a try. SIRIL is a free astro processing software that is very simple, effective and easy to learn (as there aren't that many functions). Color balancing with SIRIL is as easy as a couple of clicks with the "normal" mode and will work most of the time much better than manually fiddling with sliders in PS. The photometric color calibration tool however works every single time and makes the colors as real as they can be, since the data is from actual photometric surveys. With photometry the only way colors can turn out wrong (is there such a thing? Maybe not) is with very noisy data that the photometry does not apply well to for some reason. In my opinion pretty much all of the YouTube tutorials about processing entirely in Photoshop are to be avoided because they make no sense at all. Photoshop is a powerful tool after linear processing (backgrounds, colours, stretch) has already been done.
  2. You could also try putting a layer of gorilla tape or other strong but flexible tape on the contact surface. That should nicely plug the gap and be easy to re apply. That is if it bothers you enough to try and fix it. But really this problem is just one of the signs that show the price it was made for, there is a good reason why "premium" mounts are 2-3 times the price of these common mounts.
  3. I have an EQM-35 and while a very different class of mount this also happens and is unavoidable. There are just 2 connections between the mount head and the tripod, the central bolt and the azimuth peg and if the machining tolerances for these are less than perfect (of course they are) you will always have some motion to some direction. In your video you can see that its not actually a rotation around the central bolt axis but a tilting/panning motion to the left. The azimuth peg prevents rotation, but does nothing to prevent the central bolt-mount connection from moving in the hole itself to and from the direction of the azimuth peg even when really tight. The best you can do is just tighten everything as good as can be and leave it be. Shouldn't be a problem in operation since there are no loads being applied to this direction when the mount is slewing/being used.
  4. Just ordered an AZ-EQ6GT which will be arriving within the next, well who knows when new stock arrives? I will be using it for both visual and imaging so probably will be using both modes, but looks like both modes work well with users of both/either here. One question for owners would be how much of a workout is the mount to assemble and carry really? I would be setting up and tearing down every time so it is a bit of a concern for me. Not that it matters since its already on its way but would be interested to hear from owners anyway. I reckon i will try to to put it in some sort of bag to carry it around rather than hug it to and from but it might be too heavy for that. This looks like way too much telescope for the mount but if it works i reckon it will eat my 8 inch newtonian for breakfast 😅.
  5. You still have time this year to observe Jupiter, although it is quite difficult due to the seeing. Good seeing tends to be more likely long after sunset, but Jupiter is also gone long after sunset so its a bit of a gamble whether you get good views anymore or not. Below 15 degrees the views will be increasingly worse very fast with each passing degree of altitude lost. Jupiter is at 15 degrees at best for me now and its been a long time since the views were good and usually its just a shimmering mess with no real detail to observe. Collimation issues also possible but since the moon looks great i wager its just the atmosphere in the way.
  6. I don't know about the halo, but i would suspect reflections somewhere between any of the lenses in your comacorrector(?), filter, sensor window and the sensor surface itself. The brighter the object the more likely these should be and many pictures of this area have such halos. The split diffraction spikes are caused by a twisted/unsymmetrical spider and can be difficult to fix. Straightening out the spider veins is a huge pain and its not that easy to see visually which way you need to bend and what when you're fixing it. I had this issue with my VX8 and fixed this by just replacing the very thin but also weak spider with a sturdier one. The new sturdy spider doesn't buckle under tension to any direction and certainly doesn't deform easily. I still found it difficult to do the final adjustments by eye, so i took some pictures with my phone and overlaid some lines drawn in MS paint to make it more visually clear what is bent and to what direction. Much easier to see the direction of the bend at a glance like this! Do note that centering the spider symmetrically can take it out from under your focuser if the borehole has been drilled incorrectly. I fixed this by shimming the focuser (tilting it basically) so that it faces the newly positioned spider head on.
  7. My experience so far in astronomy is either climbing up or falling down Mt. Stupid. Every day i learn something i did not know how little i understood of. Hearsay and myths are easy to circulate but facts are not so much, especially if the facts are difficult to understand and a convenient myth explains it in a simple (false) sentence.
  8. Looks great, i always like seeing less common galaxies. Is the galaxy cluster at the bottom left of IC 1727? Looks like there is something very faint.
  9. I was thinking about this a bit more, do i really need the 24mm? I would get a magnification of 35x, compared to the 44x that i get from my existing 19mm that i think is too bright in terms of background. Most often i am observing from Bortle 6-ish or if im up for a quick view at home it would be a typical city sky hellscape of B8+ so a brighter background is not what i really want most of the time. Also, the 63mm secondary mirror giving a 30% obstruction might make an appearance at this low of a power. I think i can see a shadow of sorts with daytime use with the 19mm, so i would assume the effect gets more noticeable at even lower powers. I could live without having a wider fov as i can see pleiades with the 19mm fully already, so perhaps the panoptic will have to wait. But what i am missing is something between 44x and 93x which is quite a jump. Also, the 9mm that gives 93x doesn't see much use without a barlow as its mostly a Lunar/planetary eyepiece for me. The TeleVue Delite 11mm or 13mm would be right around the missing ranges and from what i can gather vacuuming up from a million threads here and at CN they do work for faster scopes. Also, they are quite a bit cheaper than some of the other televues. 62 degrees sounds just fine, perfectly viewable comfortably and not too low. I should also note that the 0.95x maxfield corrector is not perfect to the edges, so wider fields might not even be that desirable. Choices, choices... I dont mind the lower FOV at all with planetary and Lunar close ups, so i might just grab one of the Vixens for a high power eyepiece since they are quite affordable. The last bit is what i am a tiny bit afraid of, since its happened on other equipment already but i think this is just how this hobby goes 😁.
  10. I personally have not noticed fogging of the sensor window in very humid weather. Apparently this is one of the things where your mileage may vary.
  11. That's a lot of stars in one picture. Almost tempted to test if DSS has a stroke trying to count the stars with 5% detection threshold 😃. Curious black spots on an otherwise very busy image, dust lanes and molecular clouds in the plane of the milky way i assume?
  12. Like most things in the hobby, the wallet and the wallet holder disagree on whats best 😁. I would hate to make a "just fine" decision and have to stick with it so ill probably avoid the more affordable ones for now. As i was already considering the Hyperion zoom + maybe one other affordable eyepiece i realize the TV panoptic 24mm would be "just a bit more" (i will pretend its close in cost, although quite a bit more). That would be ideal for me, well made and the widest 1.25 inch eyepiece there is. I hated the idea of buying TeleVue at first, but perhaps that's the direction ill be going anyway... Thanks for the insight!
  13. I would take the filter out, as it works against you pretty severely in this case. The l-enhance cuts out almost all of the visible spectrum, except for the common emission lines of H-alpha beta Oxygen something something etc. The IFN is reflected starlight from the integrated flux (hence the name) of the stars of our entire galaxy, and since starlight is mostly white and falls to the area that your filter cuts off you really are sawing almost all of the nebulosity off. Just shoot without the filter and take normal RASA length subs and i think you would already have the IFN visible quite well.
  14. 12V for appliances is just a naming scheme, the voltage ideally would be close to 14V in many cases, so no you cannot damage your stuff with that! 13.8V is pretty much ideal for 12V electronics 👍. You would probably not want to go much over 14V though, and definitely not close to 15V as this could start damaging sensitive electronics although still quite unlikely for short periods of time. If a car battery reads 12V with the engine running you should change it immediately as it will die very soon, car batteries with the engine running are right around 13.8V with a good condition battery in warm conditions. Like car batteries and other appliances with "12V" in mind a voltage of over 13V would be desirable. In this way the 12V naming scheme really means "do not go under 12V".
  15. Did you follow the StarXterminator page instructions to create the starless-just stars-original layers? Goes like this: If you want to create a layer with just the stars so they can be processed separately and added back in later, do the following: Duplicate the target layer twice Process the top-most layer with StarXTerminator Duplicate this layer, then make it invisible Select the first starless layer and set its blending mode to "Subtract" Merge this layer with the one below – this is now the layer with just the stars Move this layer to the top and set its blending mode to "Linear Dodge (add)" Make the remaining starless layer visible again You should now have three layers: the original photograph, the starless photograph, and the stars themselves After this, hide the background layer (not needed anymore, but keep it for now to compare), set the blending mode of the starless layer to be "screen" (starless layer is the topmost layer if you followed the instructions). Then unhide both the starless and stars layer to have both visible at the same time. It should look the same as the background layer as it is created from that. The just stars- layer does not have any background at all, it is set to 0 by StarXterminator. The only signal there is the stars and possible bloat around the stars if any remained after running the filter. You must use the starless layer to set the background to the level you like. I personally dont think the background should be 0, or even that close to 0 but it depends on the target. Galaxies have no defined "edge" in reality so a grey-ish background will look nice as the galaxy edges just sort of blend to the background. Play around with the black end of the levels to set it where you want, but i think values between 20-30 are typically the nicest. A bahtinov mask is better than nothing to find focus IMO but its not the optimal way. Looking at HFR values on a computer/mobile device is a much better way to reach critical focus. Since you run unguided i don't think that's possible for you right now? But it might actually be better to eyeball focus with the camera screen on whatever is the max zoom mode on a barely noticeable star than do a bahtinov mask focus, although when i did DSLR shooting i found it way too fiddly and just accepted whatever focus the bahtinov mask reached.
  16. If technical details interest you, have a look at this site: https://www.photonstophotos.net/. You can filter the cameras you want to compare in the various tests done there. But generally Canon cameras are quite weak from a raw sensor specs standpoint and Nikon cameras are better. Sony cameras are also good but here you have whats called a "star eater problem" where there is noise removal in the raw frame that can remove small stars from the image. That feature cannot be removed so some research should take place before buying a sony camera. Also, have to agree with Olly above. Dedicated astro cameras are MUCH better than DSLRs and the price differences are getting smaller by the day. I would say that get the DSLR if its less than 500e (preferably much less) but otherwise dont bother and jump straight to the dedicated astro camera train.
  17. Looks like all of the good ones are quite expensive, some food for thought... Perhaps i should say that a compromise of "good enough" should be noted and perfect correction to the edge not being necessary. I wonder if the other APM ultra flat models also work well as i would ideally avoid 2 inch barrel sizes just for simplicity's sake? I would say that my 19mm flat field (an apm clone) works at least decently well to a point where it doesn't bother me.
  18. Love it, what a simple way to save a hefty sum of money.
  19. I don't think I've seen it at all. Suppose it would be visible from Bortle 6 through the VX8? Its a 20-30min drive away so not that difficult to do.
  20. I keep reading about this notion that fast telescopes require some sort of different types of eyepiece to work well, for instance the explore scientific 68 degree ones say they work well at f5 and above, which my scope is not. Actually my scope is more like f4.2 with the TS maxfield 0.95 coma corrector so worse for this case. Are some eyepieces really so picky about this? I would assume if i pay more than plössl-type money for an eyepiece it would work with mine, but i could be wrong. I have 3 eyepieces at the moment, all Omegon branded. Omegon Cronus 7 and 9mm (i think 60 degree) and an Omegon flatfield 19mm 65 degree. I think the flatfield is like any other "apm clone" out there as it looks identical to many others from other brands. I also have a good quality 2.5x barlow to extend the range. What i know i am missing is the extremes and something in the middle. Maybe a 5mm for planets and close ups of the Moon and a 25-30mm wider field eyepiece for rich fields and making it easier to find stuff? Also what i could get is the hyperion zoom eyepiece which sounds very convenient, but lacks the wide fields because of the narrower field of view in the lower power range. Also i keep reading of this "fixed focal length eyepieces are better" type of thing compared to zoom eyepieces. I am woefully under educated on visual stuff because for some reason visual always had a backseat for my telescopes. Last night i had a great time at the eyepiece with no cameras involved so i am looking to complement that with kit that seems missing from my setup. The budget would be somewhere around the price of the hyperion zoom plus or minus a bit since its not an exact number. I realize i could get just 1 great eyepiece, 1 zoom eyepiece or a few decent ones but i have no idea which ones are the best bang for my buck.
  21. Just tested under the stars and found the same to still be true. 50mm and thereabouts works fine. Coma is still present at the edges but im not sure whether thats the eyepiece or the corrector or both. Also worth mentioning that looking at the Maxfield 0.95x spot sizes you can see that there just is residual coma that is not corrected. Still i think this nicely frees up the inner 50-70% of the view to be visually coma free at a glance. Curiously i found that i could put a barlow in the eyepiece holder and the barlowed eyepiece was also much better than the barlow without a comacorrector, coincidence perhaps? For whatever reason i had thought that comacorrector + barlow is a big no no.
  22. Ended up bagging a lot of the aforementioned targets this night! M36/37/38 were actually pretty nice. Lots of faint stars nicely filling the view at 93x and at this power the background no longer looks all that light polluted. Almost looks like cobwebs at a lower power of 44x? Perhaps its because a lot of the stars are averted vision and are coming in and out of view. Double cluster was very pleasant to view, a really photogenic open cluster! First time viewing M42 this year and of course it deserves the name "great" orion nebula. Lots of nebulosity surrounding the trapezium, and some semblance of shap even. I opened your PDF thinking there is like a handful of these. Turns out there there is an awful lot of double stars since you wrote a 250 page guide on them 😅. Im going to have to take this in chunks, maybe per constellation? Anyway thanks for the link, im definitely looking my next sessions targets ahead of time instead of trying to browse it on my phone at -8 and windy! I ended up taking a go-to to Almach, since it was in the synscan list and high enough up to see. Nice and clear separation at 93x, perhaps was even visible at 44x but im not confident enough on that to say it was separated. Polaris B was very surprising. I kept looking and changing between 44x-93x-120x and i was sure i cant see it but then i noticed the little companion! It was there all the time, maybe i just thought it was a speck of dust or a reflection? Once i had seen it once i could spot it easily at 93x. Very nice difference in brightness. I also think i saw M51 flicker in and out of view. No shape and nebulosity but the cores of M51 and the companion of the tail were roughly where i would imagine them being so perhaps it was M51? Did a go-to to M81 but at this point synscan decided that M81 was in fact on the ground next to me 🙄. Never did return to try this after troubleshooting that experience. Also never figured out why this happened, but it went away after redoing star alignment from park. Lyra was getting a bit low in the sky at this time and was very milky. Wasn't able to see much of anything in there, but i will check again one day. But the highlight was obviously the Moon tonight. The atmosphere got very stable and clear for a while there and i was able to observe at 300x without really any noticeable downsides. The PV 1/10 VX8 has never let me down with knife-sharp views of the Lunar terminator! I probably could have gone deeper but i ran out of eyepieces and barlows to do that. Also after having mostly done astrophotography i find it very freeing to not have to deal with 40 gigabytes of files on a memory card after the session. The session is done and that's that, i think i could get used to this 🤔.
  23. Sleeping can be done also when cloudy, unlike observing.
  24. Appreciate the comments! At the moment going through some cursed mount diagnostics as the mount does not go to the correct coordinates. It goes to sonewhere random and says its there... Maybe i need a manual alt az with 2 moving parts 🤣. Ill try to slew manually and find some of these.
  25. 3 months owned one. No critical issues yet. Only slight nuisance with drivers is that sharpcap runs at very low framerates = 0.2fps even. Irrelevant for deep sky and other software like nina are as youd expect from any imx571. Other than that no issues with sofrware.
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