Freddie

No problem. As long as you don’t have lots of noise in the individual frames to get rid of by stacking lots (reducing gain will help that), I think by stacking lots of frames you are not making sure you are including good data as suggested, you are actually making sure the stack is worse by including many poor quality frames. However good the seeing is, with daytime seeing you are only ever going to get a tiny percentage of the time during the capture where there is truly good seeing. Keeping the number of frames in the stack to the minimum required to control the noise therefore ensures only the best frames go into the stack. I would determine how many frames you need to stack to control the noise from any given gain and then just stick to that number regardless of how long the AVI is. I always stack a set number, not a percentage. I would never stack more than 150 even from a ~3,000 frame AVI and try to keep it nearer 100 as said above. I should probably get my captures from earlier processed and posted so that you can look and decide if I know what I’m talking about!!

That’s quite a lot of gain, I never have my 174 over 100 and more often than not much lower than that. You are right though that it is a balance between gain and exposure. Looking at that Sharpcap image I would definitely back the gain off a bit. A good guide is to back it off until you just start to see some darkening of the disc and some surface detail but only just. You can process out and slight surface detail if you still want to present the final image with a full white disc. I would imagine with that amount of noise you are having to stack quite a few images to control it which then means you are including a high number of lower quality frames which will have the effect of blurring the detail. Lowering the gain means you can stack fewer frames. I rarely stack more than 100.

Glad you managed to get out Dave even if seeing was poor. I too was a bit late out after the once a week excitement of going to the shop for some food!!

Nice. Is that a composite (surface plus proms) or from a single capture?

Nice work. I would be careful with gain/exposure as they are a little blown out particularly at the base of the proms and you will have probably lost a little detail.

Good to see you back “out” again Charl. Nice job.

Great images but may be better off in the planetary section rather than this solar section!!

Thanks. This is about 5m FL.

Some random surface detail captured at 11.30 yesterday

Something that can handle USB 3 and with a decent sized SSD.

Nice start. No need to go hunting for proms as you will not see them in white light.

Test underway in back garden!

You could try “planetary system stacker” https://github.com/Rolf-Hempel/PlanetarySystemStacker/blob/prototype/Documentation/PlanetarySystemStacker_User-Guide.pdf

What type of imaging are you planning to get into in the future? This will have a big impact on the type of mount and scope that would be appropriate.

Enjoyed that. Thanks for the heads up.

When you say “1 x 3.17ms” is that literally one frame at 3.17ms exposure? If so, you will get better results by stacking a % of frames from an AVI captured over a number of seconds.

Over exposure with L of the actual target would be important to avoid, less so with just the surrounding stars.

You need to go to gong2.nso.edu to see the latest images. I think they stopped updating on their old site.

Put a bit of red tape or something on one of the spokes and it will make counting even easier.

Give it a go, you may be surprised.

Have a look into drift aligning.

Interesting. A Ha filter can help to control poor seeing but what were you trying to achieve by combining with OIII?

The original units didn’t have the level, this was a later addition for newer units.

Looks like there are big problems with Astrobin. Anyone lost any images?

I would swap to a new target if I were you. A galaxy is not a narrow band target.