Anne S

I've got an Altair Wave 102 with the 3 inch Planostar 0.79 reducer that was designed for this scope together with a 694 and 36mm Astronomik filters. There's hardly any vignetting. I've had a quick look at Altair's website and they don't mention this reducer. I had an issue with 1 1/4 filters. It was a lot worse than yours. The distance for the ccd chip needs to be 57mm with my reducer, not sure about yours. Most reducers are 55 mm but it depends on the telescope. Have you tried flats? They will normally get rid of uneven illumination. Have you tried it at night yet? Using an image taken in daylight will be much worse than nighttime images as everything's much darker. Also you might try taking some flats as that will show how bad the issue is. It will only show if you stretch the flat. I can post one of my flats if you want but they're on another laptop.

There's a possibility the toilet blocks won't be open. Boris hasn't confirmed yet. We prefer facilities. We just moved our booking to next spring. it's all getting very tedious.

Here's my version. Processed in Pixinsight. DBE applied to Ha image. Pixelmath used to reduce stars and the nebulosity around the galaxy and to leave the small ha regions around the galaxy. RGB masters combined then colour calibrated and DBE Split channels and combined the red channel with the modified Ha image before recombining and making the final image nonlinear. Colour saturation enhanced. Luminance had DBE applied and then converted to nonlinear. HDR applied to bring out the detail in the galaxy, then combined with the HaRGB image using LRGB combination. Slight noise reduction and then stars slightly reduced to empasise the galaxy. SNCR to remove a slight green tinge. Final application of curves to increase contrast. (If I remember rightly!) Lovely data.

I managed four targets by November but I'm not inclined to do long integration times. The only one I had to wait several weeks to finish was my North American Nebula amd then I also imaged the Pelican nebula the same night. Since then I've imaged the Orion and Running Man nebulae which I've not done for a very long time. I managed narrowband and RGB which I combined as below. Llast night I managed to get some ha until the high cloud came over. Hopefully I'll get the RGB early on tonight and then move on to the Ha for the Flaming Star. Thank goodness Pixinsight is so good at noise reduction

Here are 2 images from a couple of nights ago. 15x2 minute subs in RGB, 8x5 minutes in Ha, O3 and S2. First image is HaRGB. Ha added to the red channel using NBRGB in Pixinsight. The second image is Hubble palate but without removing the green, I also inverted it to run SNCR as the stars were purple. I like the bright colours and the gas surrounding the nebula shows well in the image. It's been a long time since I did any imaging, about 10 weeks!

Here's my efforts. I imaged this at home last winter but ran out of clear nights. Once it was clear it was too low to the north and behind the trees. Two versions processed in PI, one in Hubble palatte which I think suits it as it's ghostly. The other HaS2O3 which after background neutralization ended with warmer colours. Also this version shows more detail in the nebulosity. Thank you for the lovely data.

I used to have a 8SE which was eventually moved onto a 2nd hand CG5 mount. It worked fine on that, much better than on the SE mount. You don't need to polar align for visual, just set it up with the axis pointing north using a compass. Once you've done the star alignment that will ensure the goto gets very close to each target. If you did need a more accurate polar alignment later, the Celestron and Skywatcher mounts have a polar alignment routing which consists of doing gotos to 2 different stars and then the mount moves to where the second star would be and you have to use the slow motion controls to centre it in the eyepiece. Then redo the star alignment. Not really difficult. Celestron have replaced the CG5 mount with, I think, the AVX mount. Equivalent to a EQ5 with more objects in the handset to find, 42000, I think. Setting up is as the previous post.

I've my 70mm refractor mounted with the focuser upside down. It means the scope can be mounted further forward on the dovetail. I bought a long vixen dovetail and counterweight on a clamp to counterbalance at the objective end. The smaller the scope the more of an issue with balance. The glass isn't big enough!

I've a Cem60. I checked with Altair Astro. The fix is to remove the screw that prevents movement. You should unscrew the Dec saddle and rotate in 90 degrees. Just be careful of the internal wiring. I haven't done it yet as I'm still testing the telescopes that will be dual mounted. Just as well, I'm having an issue is the auto focuser bracket. It's moving sufficiently to upset autofocus. Even my ieq30 pro had limited rotation but no wiring!

I moved my 8SE to a Celestron CG5 mount. A big difference and no issues with needing to worry about banging the diagonal on the original SE mount. As to the original mount, I always used vibration suppression pads, they help particularly on hard surfaces. I only changed from the 8SE because I started wanting to image and the focal length is too long for deepsky imaging.

Here is my version. I found it quite difficult to get a colour scheme I liked. My first attempt at using Starnet++ in Pixinsight. Usual ABE DBE then stretch after which I removed the stars from each channel. I had to redo the O3 as the larger stars weren't removed properly. I found out it better not to stretch too far. Channel combined into S2HaO3 and then colour balanced. I decided I wanted the green to be quite strong. Noise reduction. Stars replaced after morphological transformation because of the different star sizes. Levels and curves to remove a strong red cast. Background neutralisation made it too green because there wasn't much background to neutralise, I ended up adjusting it in histogram transform to balance colours. Luminance channel extracted and HDR used on it. Then saturated the original colour image and combined the luminance. A little unsharp mask in PI and then further unsharp mask in PS as I find it easier to control there. Finished with a final small crop. Thank you FLO for the data. No clear skies here for ages.

Here are a couple of versions, top one with Ha-red, S2-green and O3-blue. I also used a superluminance (all three channels added with Pixelmath) and used HDR to bring out the structure in the brighter sections of the nebula. 2nd version is Hubble palate which accentuates the nebulosity in different places. Also uses the superluminance. I need more data to process and then I'll get better. I've not imaged since mid September! Still need to finish my North America Nebula.

I had to upgrade Ascom to 6.5 a week or so ago. l also upgraded Sgpro to the latest version. No problem with reverting to trial version. The only time I had that was before I copied my licence key in. I've not had a chance to try it with my observatory equipment yet but everything worked with my a travel set up, at least in the house.

If you do buy a mains supply I would suggest getting it from First Light Optics if you don't have an astronomy dealer near you. As to tip size it is 5.5/2.1, the same as most other brands such as Skywatcher. Don't use a Meade psu as they are the wrong size tip. I owned a Nexstar 8se for several years. Incidentally, my battery compartment stopped working in the end. The soldering isn't good! I only used it to stop power cutting out when the mains connect disconnected. You will need to make sure the cable is wrapped around an arm to reduce the weight pulling on the connector,

We"ll be on our usual yellow 149 in a white motorhome. It'll be nice to see other astronomers. Socially distanced or course!

If you're planning on using a SX universal filterwheel, you can change the m42 attachment to a m48 version. Don't know if Atik make something similar.

Here is my version of the Crescent nebula. The soap bubble can be seen in the top right corner. I decided to process the Ha and O3 as a bicolour image as I felt it showed the O3 sections around the Crescent strongly and I like the colours produced. Colour channels stacked as HAO3O3. I tried a superluminance but ended up abandoning that version. Slight noise reduction and reduced star sizes. I then used unsharp to bring more details out from the Crescent and make the soap bubble more prominent, thought it remains faint. Checked background neutralisation and tweaked curves to increase contrast. All processing in Pixinsight. Thank you for providing such lovely data.

On their forum Jared says the subscription doesn't start till v4. It also says the following on the buy page: Note that after purchase of SGPro, a subscription is NOT required in order to continue using it. The subscription entitles you to future updates and premium support, but, even if you decide let your subscription lapse, you will always be able to use some version of SGPro (specifically, you will be entitled to install and use the most recent version of SGPro that existed during you subscription's "active" period). I read it that you buy the software and get updates up to the launch of v4. It's not clear what happens if you buy v3 a week before they launch v4! It may well be worth reading through the forum posts on the subject.

There's been a post on the Sgpro forum about this. Someone who only bought Sgpro 10 months ago was asking about the remaining two months of updates promised when he bought it. Jared answered saying the subscription wouldn't be necessary until v4 was released. Its in the support thread under licensing issues, I think. To get future updates you have to download the 3.2 version though as 3.1 won't show any more updates. I'm in the same situation. I therefore won't be subscribing at present. It wasn't clear in the email sent to all owners. I started the thread and had a couple of fairly prompt replies given the time difference.

The thing that annoys me the most is the timing of it, why not do it mid summer? We get few enough imaging nights as it is without potentially losing some due to developers mucking around with their software. Also I've only had SGPro for 10 months and I wasn't expecting to have to pay them another $59 dollars yet. In any case it's showing $63 on my account. I've posted in the forum querying this. I couldn't get the licensing issues email to work. It is good though, even though I haven't yet managed to get my Focuscube autofocusing properly on my refractor. The LakesideAstro one was easy to set up last year.

That was what I was planning to do too, the weather at home is usually totally cloudy this time of year. Most of the attendees, especially for the extended period are of a sensible age with a healthy respect for COVID. In fact we're planning on staying longer if the weather is OK. If Wales insists on locking the whole country down in around 7 weeks, as they've threatened, we may even be staying in Norfolk even longer as we're booked in for Winterfest too.

I've had problems with mount updates with several Ioptron mounts. The hand control is easy, the mount boards almost impossible. It's all to do with timing. I've made sure both of them work with the same version of Ioptron Commander and then never update again unless I can't avoid it! Even AltairAstro admit it's problematic. My CEM60ec is running the 2017 software and my IEQ30Pro uses the last one produced for that mount. Both work well.

The Facebook page says it's 2022 because the venue is still closed for 2021.

Very nice, there's almost a 3D effect around the Pillars of Creation.

I've had another play with the data, this time concentrating on the Pillars of Creation. I also mirrored the image after mapping to RGB as online versions were like that. Once non-linear I extracted a luminance layer on which I used HDR to bring out the Pillars. Once recombined I used a strong application of Morphological Transformation and then unsharp mask. Checked colour balance then applied unsharp mask once more and checked black point. All done in Pixinsight. I hope I'm improving slowly. I hope this is sufficiently different to my first version.