Freddie

The edge “choppiness” is normal and is a consequence of image drift during capture. What did you use to sharpen the image after stacking?

AS!2 should be set to surface not planet. Also best not to sharpen in AS but in a specialist sharpening prog. such as Registax or ImPPG

It will definitely track without aligning. There is no doubt about that.

Yes it should. That’s the same as I do, though I select solar rate, when I do my solar imaging. How is your PA?

The combo does not have the internal Barlow.

Depends what you want to use it for. Visual or imaging and which type of object?

It’s probably odds on that you will need a tilt adaptor as Newton rings are a strong possibility if using your ZWO ASI cams.

This is for the actual rocket not the ISS.

It will be on this path and mag 0

We are right down in the SE corner on the coast so should be ok here as it is reasonably dark by 10pm. Will probably get clouded out instead though!!!!

Should be visible over the U.K. 20 mins after launch.

Plenty of us Brits on Solar Chat.

Thanks for your comments guys.

You can use photo merge in PS if you have it or Microsoft ICE (free download) is also good.

Although there were no active regions to image, the surface always has something interesting to show so I captured this with my WL setup just after lunch last Saturday.

Nice looking images. There have been a couple of questions about tone curve/histo and adaptive in ImPPG so I will try and help and build on what Michael has said. Adaptive: This basically allows you to control the amount of sharpening applied to dark (low signal) and bright (high signal) parts of the image. This is because if you apply the same amount of sharpening across an image, the sharpening will be fine in the bright parts but will introduce noise to the darker parts or will be fine in the darker parts but the brighter parts would take more sharpening. ImPPG controls this by allowing you to adjust “amount min” the amount of sharpening in the dark parts and “amount max” the amount of sharpening in the bright parts. The thing that defines what is dark and what is bright is “threshold” so adjusting “threshold” will change the brightness level where the transition from amount min and max occurs. The “transition” setting basically allows you to set a band of brightness over which the change from amount min and max occur so it isn’t a sudden change. The best way to get into this is probably fire up an image, apply a lot of sharpening and set amount max really high ~15 (a lot of sharpening) and min to say 0.6 (a bit of blurring) Now just look at the dark sky background of the image and adjust the “threshold” and keep looking at the dark part of the image, as you adjust it you will see the background become noisier as sharpening is applied to the dark region, now just adjust the other way and eventually you will see the background go nice and noise free as the background changes from being sharpened to blurred. Adaptive!!!! Interestingly the person in the video has this exact problem as he didn’t like the sharpening as he said it added to much noise to a dark part by the prom so he dialled back the sharpening a touch. He made no mention of adaptive and didn’t have it set so I guess he wasn’t aware of how to use it. Tone curve/histo: Best thing to do is ignore moving points up, down, left or right and just think about what the point/curve actually means. An unchanged image will show pure black on the left and pure white on the right and all shades of grey in between. The tone curve is the line between all these points. The brightness of any point on the curve can be adjusted by moving the curve from its original diagonal position. Obviously pure black can’t be made any darker so the far left can’t be lowered and pure white can’t be brightened so can’t be raised. Any point in between can however be adjusted. Again best way to do this is by looking at an image. Look at the dark background, put a point on the left part of the curve, move it up and the dark part gets brighter but notice, it’s not just the very dark point you picked that has got brighter the dark grey parts of the image have also become brighter. Look at the curve though and you will see that the by dragging up a single point has created a nice curve in what was once a straight line so any parts that are above where they were on that original line will have also become brighter, not just the point you dragged up. Now look at why you sometime get some odd things happening when you have a couple of points selected on the curve. Fire up an image again and start with an unchanged tone curve i.e. a nice diagonal line. Just put a point in the middle of the curve don’t change the shape of the curve, leave it as a straight diagonal line. Now go to the left side of the curve and as you did before, drag a point up to brighten the dark parts of the image. The dark parts brighten but strange things also happen to the lighter parts. Look at the curve, the point you put in half way along has acted like a pivot and the curve to the right of it has now gone down and we know from before that as the curve there is now below it’s starting position those points have now become darker. This is why you need to be careful when you have multiple points on a curve as an adjustment to one point on a curve can have unexpected consequences to another part of the curve unless you keep an eye on how that curve is changing. If a part of the curve has moved that you didn’t want, just drag it back into place or put a point on the curve which will prevent that particular point from moving. Hope all of that is of some help.

You may be better off with a 2x Barlow if you have one. With either a 3x or 2x though you will be fine with 3 mins on Jup and 5 on Sat with the image scale you will be at.

Depends on your image scale so we will need to know what setup you are using for the captures.

Putting a camera on a telescope does not change the scopes focal length. All putting different cams on the scope will do is allow more or less of the image to fit onto the cams chip.

A Quark is about $1,200 and you will also need an ERF so you are not going to be able to image in Ha for your new constrained budget unless you look at secondhand.

As you say price is no constraint, on top of the 32,000 Euro you will be spending on the filter, you will also want to change your colour cam for a mono one.

Thanks Pete. Conditions were not great so was happy with the detail I managed to capture. Now working on some WL I captured today.

Sounds like you still have some experiments to perform to narrow down the cause as it is obviously not just temperature related. Have you tried swapping cables and reinstalling drivers? I have been using my 174 and 120 for solar (and planetary) for years without problems so it is not a fundamental fault with the cams.

Thanks Stu. Here's another

You shouldn't be getting any heat through the scope so just take the cam off the scope, leave it in the sun and cap it to take the darks. The darks should just be used to help determine where the problem is and not be used as standard during processing so it is a bit of a one off testing thing really. Although noise reduction may help, it isn't getting to the root cause of the problem as your cam should not be that noisy so best to sort that rather than try and work round a problem that shouldn't be there.