Thus Far and No Further!

[Thalestris24]

I believe dss should be able to do that ok. 4Gb is the max possible ram for a 32bit system and shouldn't be a problem. How does it appear to fail? One way to reduce the strain, perhaps, is to stack just one light with your sets of bias and flats. Dss will then create a master bias and master flat so thereafter you only need to use the master bias and master flat plus your set of lights. Don't forget, DSS says that the only valid combinations of calibration files also requires darks for a proper calibration.

Louise

[MARS1960]

Hi Keith,

Great opening post, very eloquent.

Re DSS, are you using the latest version? 3.3.4

[Moonshed]

17 hours ago, Thalestris24 said:

I believe dss should be able to do that ok. 4Gb is the max possible ram for a 32bit system and shouldn't be a problem. How does it appear to fail? One way to reduce the strain, perhaps, is to stack just one light with your sets of bias and flats. Dss will then create a master bias and master flat so thereafter you only need to use the master bias and master flat plus your set of lights. Don't forget, DSS says that the only valid combinations of calibration files also requires darks for a proper calibration.

Louise

Hi Louise,

I have been fiddling around with some of the settings in DSS and cleared out a lot of junk from my hard drive and DSS is now working properly? I must have have screwed up somewhere, either that or there wasn't enough space left on the hard drive, it was mostly full. Anyway it's fine now, I just ran 20 lights with 20 Bias frames and it was okay. I then ran it again with the same lights and just the Master Bias Frame and again it ran just fine. I don't have any Flat frames to test as well because I dumped them all but will take sone tomorrow if it stops raining. What a relief to having it working properly!

Thanks, Keith

Edit: ps. I haven't used Dark Frames because I have been led to understand from other members that when using a Canon it isn't a good idea. Gets complicated doesn't it?

[Moonshed]

17 hours ago, MARS1960 said:

Hi Keith,

Great opening post, very eloquent.

Re DSS, are you using the latest version? 3.3.4

Hi Mark,

Thank you. As you can see from my previous post I now have DSS working properly, and yes it is v.3.3.4. Just need to get some Flat Frames tomorrow for a full check. Cheers, Keith.

[Thalestris24]

34 minutes ago, Moonshed said:

Hi Louise,

I have been fiddling around with some of the settings in DSS and cleared out a lot of junk from my hard drive and DSS is now working properly? I must have have screwed up somewhere, either that or there wasn't enough space left on the hard drive, it was mostly full. Anyway it's fine now, I just ran 20 lights with 20 Bias frames and it was okay. I then ran it again with the same lights and just the Master Bias Frame and again it ran just fine. I don't have any light frames to test as well because I dumped them all but will take sone tomorrow if it stops raining. What a relief to having it working properly!

Thanks, Keith

Edit: ps. I haven't used Dark Frames because I have been led to understand from other members that when using a Canon it isn't a good idea. Gets complicated doesn't it?

For a proper calibration you should really use darks as well as flats and biases - about 30 or so of each. It might not make a huge difference to not use darks but you can make re-usable darks libraries. What you don't want to do is to make a master dark from too few dark frames as that will add noise. Once you have the sets of calibration masters you can delete the individual frames or archive them on to a memory stick if you want to keep them. Glad things seem to be working ok now :).

Louise

[iPeace]

23 hours ago, Moonshed said:

For me nothing beats the pure joy of looking through the eyepiece at the wonders of the night sky.

Indeed.

[Squiddy]

Amazing photos concidering the equipment you have. Not that you have bad equipment, I just think it's mismatched for astrophoto. The scope is way to big for that mount when it comes to astrophoto, and yet, you've achieved som really good results.

The mount isn't bad at all. I've seen people get some stunning photos using that mount. It's just all about how much you load on it. I'm not an expert so you have to take my advice for what it is, just my own humble thoughts. 

- Start with buying a new scope merely for imaging. I've seen some amazing photos done through a Skywatcher 130PDS. It's a small scope and your mount will easily carry that along with a guide scope. Cost less than £200.

- Get a guidescope, cost about £300

And start from there. As your skill improves with your new equipment and you get hungry for more, you can always upgrade with a coma corrector and possibly a new mount later. But I personally think that with your patience and what you've achieved so far, you'll stun us all...

PS. I bought the PoleStar and I'll never regret it 

[Moonshed]

7 hours ago, Squiddy said:

Amazing photos concidering the equipment you have. Not that you have bad equipment, I just think it's mismatched for astrophoto. The scope is way to big for that mount when it comes to astrophoto, and yet, you've achieved som really good results.

The mount isn't bad at all. I've seen people get some stunning photos using that mount. It's just all about how much you load on it. I'm not an expert so you have to take my advice for what it is, just my own humble thoughts. 

- Start with buying a new scope merely for imaging. I've seen some amazing photos done through a Skywatcher 130PDS. It's a small scope and your mount will easily carry that along with a guide scope. Cost less than £200.

- Get a guidescope, cost about £300

And start from there. As your skill improves with your new equipment and you get hungry for more, you can always upgrade with a coma corrector and possibly a new mount later. But I personally think that with your patience and what you've achieved so far, you'll stun us all...

PS. I bought the PoleStar and I'll never regret it 

Hi Squiddy,

Thanks for the info. I appreciate what you say but I am going to with what I have, The ONLY thing I am tempted to buy is the PoleMaster because of my back problems, it would be nice but with method I use I can manage 90 sec subs anyway. I do the PA through the mount and make any small adjustments necessary. I have made a flat concrete stand just outside my "moonshed" where  I store my scope set up ready to go. I have drilled small shallow holes where the tripod legs go. When I want to use the scope I only have to lift it out of the shed (no counterweight bar and weight, no camera, no ext. tube. No Telrad) and place the tripod legs on the base in the marked holes. It's good enough for 90 secs subs with no star trails without doing a PA. Of course I need to redo th PA every 5 or 6 times of so  but it works well enough. It's just that when I do need to PA it can be a real pain in the back!  I was going to buy  the PoleMaster then had second thoughts. One thing just leads to another as your post clearly shows. I may end up getting it out of necessity, my condition can only worsen unfortunately, but will make do with the images I can achieve with my existing gear.

Cheets, Keith

[Moonshed]

14 hours ago, Thalestris24 said:

For a proper calibration you should really use darks as well as flats and biases - about 30 or so of each. It might not make a huge difference to not use darks but you can make re-usable darks libraries. What you don't want to do is to make a master dark from too few dark frames as that will add noise. Once you have the sets of calibration masters you can delete the individual frames or archive them on to a memory stick if you want to keep them. Glad things seem to be working ok now :).

Louise

Hi Louise,

I am going to take some Bias/Offset Frames and Flat Frames, about 30 of each, just  waiting for the rain to stop. If that works okay I will try adding Darks and see if that helps. From what you say it would seem that you can use just the Master Bias/Offset Frames And Flat Frames in stacking future Lights. Certainly saves a lot of hassle. I did try using just a Master Bias Frame  with my Lights and it did seem to work. Wish I had known this before lol. However, from what I understand, you can only use Master Darks if the temperature is the same as when the Lights were taken?

BTW I have been playing with the star threshold slider in DSS, it was set at 2% for some reason so I moved it to 50 %. How many stars should you be looking to see with that thing? I suppose it depends on the image?

Thanks, Keith.

[Thalestris24]

31 minutes ago, Moonshed said:

Hi Louise,

I am going to take some Bias/Offset Frames and Flat Frames, about 30 of each, just  waiting for the rain to stop. If that works okay I will try adding Darks and see if that helps. From what you say it would seem that you can use just the Master Bias/Offset Frames And Flat Frames in stacking future Lights. Certainly saves a lot of hassle. I did try using just a Master Bias Frame  with my Lights and it did seem to work. Wish I had known this before lol. However, from what I understand, you can only use Master Darks if the temperature is the same as when the Lights were taken?

BTW I have been playing with the star threshold slider in DSS, it was set at 2% for some reason so I moved it to 50 %. How many stars should you be looking to see with that thing? I suppose it depends on the image?

Thanks, Keith.

Yes, darks should be a similar exif temperature to the lights. It doesn't have to be exact, just not 10 deg or more different. You adjust the slider according to your image in order to get sufficient stars for stacking. If you don't have enough and your lights refuse to stack then move the slider to the left. If you have so many stars that it causes weird stacking problems then move the slider to the right. I can't imagine setting it as high as 50% - usually between 2 and 10% is ok but maybe you have darker skies than me and pick up many more stars! It's always worth reading the dss documentation, especially in regards to calibration

Louise

[Moonshed]

38 minutes ago, Thalestris24 said:

Yes, darks should be a similar exif temperature to the lights. It doesn't have to be exact, just not 10 deg or more different. You adjust the slider according to your image in order to get sufficient stars for stacking. If you don't have enough and your lights refuse to stack then move the slider to the left. If you have so many stars that it causes weird stacking problems then move the slider to the right. I can't imagine setting it as high as 50% - usually between 2 and 10% is ok but maybe you have darker skies than me and pick up many more stars! It's always worth reading the dss documentation, especially in regards to calibration

Louise

Hi Louise,

Thank you again. Yes I really do need to read the DSS help section again, I am sure I will pick up a lot of useful info.  Just glad that problem is sorted, I was beginning to despair. Cheers . Keith.

[Thalestris24]

http://deepskystacker.free.fr/english/theory.htm

http://deepskystacker.free.fr/english/technical.htm

[Moonshed]

5 hours ago, Thalestris24 said:

http://deepskystacker.free.fr/english/theory.htm

http://deepskystacker.free.fr/english/technical.htm

Thanks for those links, I have had a good read of them and they are more informative than the links I found. I found it interesting that it is essential to use the calibration frames in a certain combination otherwise it will result in poor images. Also how many frames should be taken of each, it recommended 50 to a 100 which seems rather a lot, but apparently too few can actually make the image worse!  Also surprised that Darks MUST BE USED in any of the preferred combinations. I have opted for 30 Lights as per my usual and will try to form Master Files with 100 frames of each. I have decided to make each Master seperatly with just a few Lights. If it crashes I will just reduce the number of frames, try say 75 next time, and so on. This way I hope to build up my my three Master Frames which will be Darks, Bias and Flats, as that is an acceptable working combination. When I have my three Masters it will be much easier when stacking to take my say 30 Lights and add on my 3 Masters. Hopefully my laptop should cope with this, no drizzle of course, and produce a decent final  image. Weather permitting, rubbish today, I will take all three X 100 calibration frames tomorrow. I will let you know how it goes.

When I said Ihad got DSS working okay, I should have explained that I meant it didn't crash when I used Bias Frames. The actual stacked image was actually worse than a single Light but that did not bother me at that stage. I only had 10 Bias frames at hand to use and to make a Master Bias. I was just glad that it worked and that on the following test it worked using just the Master Bias. It makes sense now that the image was degrade as 10 bias frames is nowhere near enough. So much stuff to learn! 

Cheers, Keith

[Thalestris24]

30-50 calibration frames of each type is usually sufficient, 100 is a bit ott, imho. 15+ lights is good as that allows you to use kappa-sigma stacking though, generally speaking, the more lights the merrier, so to speak. Don't select the dss options to align the colour channels. It's best to use dss just for stacking, and PS or Pixinsight for post-processing. Alternately the v2.9 dev version of Gimp is ok for basic processing (I've not checked the gimp site for a while but 2.9 was the version that enabled 16bit processing).

Louise

[Squiddy]

18 hours ago, Moonshed said:

Hi Squiddy,

Thanks for the info. I appreciate what you say but I am going to with what I have, The ONLY thing I am tempted to buy is the PoleMaster because of my back problems, it would be nice but with method I use I can manage 90 sec subs anyway. I do the PA through the mount and make any small adjustments necessary. I have made a flat concrete stand just outside my "moonshed" where  I store my scope set up ready to go. I have drilled small shallow holes where the tripod legs go. When I want to use the scope I only have to lift it out of the shed (no counterweight bar and weight, no camera, no ext. tube. No Telrad) and place the tripod legs on the base in the marked holes. It's good enough for 90 secs subs with no star trails without doing a PA. Of course I need to redo th PA every 5 or 6 times of so  but it works well enough. It's just that when I do need to PA it can be a real pain in the back!  I was going to buy  the PoleMaster then had second thoughts. One thing just leads to another as your post clearly shows. I may end up getting it out of necessity, my condition can only worsen unfortunately, but will make do with the images I can achieve with my existing gear.

Cheets, Keith

If you can do 90 sec subs you're happy with, I have to say you should get an autoguider instead. Then you should be able to reach 300 sec subs. The problem is you're beyond the capability of your mount with that scope, and surtainly with a guidescope on top. 

With that said, I also understand why you're looking towards the PoleMaster (did I wrote PoleStar...). I have my mount on a pier, securely fastened on a concrete block 1 meter under ground, and I've used the polemaster only once. But it was worth every penny as it was soooo easy, and lightning fast. I tihnk I didn't paid for the polar alignment itself, I paid for not having to think about it with anxiety and fear, and only be able to enjoy the hobby.

[PeterCPC]

+1 for Polemaster - so easy and no contortions required.

Peter

[Moonshed]

1 hour ago, Squiddy said:

If you can do 90 sec subs you're happy with, I have to say you should get an autoguider instead. Then you should be able to reach 300 sec subs. The problem is you're beyond the capability of your mount with that scope, and surtainly with a guidescope on top. 

With that said, I also understand why you're looking towards the PoleMaster (did I wrote PoleStar...). I have my mount on a pier, securely fastened on a concrete block 1 meter under ground, and I've used the polemaster only once. But it was worth every penny as it was soooo easy, and lightning fast. I tihnk I didn't paid for the polar alignment itself, I paid for not having to think about it with anxiety and fear, and only be able to enjoy the hobby.

Hi Squiddy, Thanks for the advice, but you are suggesting I need 1) A new mount. 2) An auto guider, 3) A guidescope , and of course the one under consideration, 4) A PoleMaster.

I can only refer you to my opening post ?

Cheers,  Keith

[Moonshed]

8 hours ago, Thalestris24 said:

30-50 calibration frames of each type is usually sufficient, 100 is a bit ott, imho. 15+ lights is good as that allows you to use kappa-sigma stacking though, generally speaking, the more lights the merrier, so to speak. Don't select the dss options to align the colour channels. It's best to use dss just for stacking, and PS or Pixinsight for post-processing. Alternately the v2.9 dev version of Gimp is ok for basic processing (I've not checked the gimp site for a while but 2.9 was the version that enabled 16bit processing).

Louise

Hi Louise, I also thought that 100 calibration frames was a bit OTT but what do I know? Anyway, I am going to take your advice and settle for 50.  Once DSS has produced a finished image I don't do a thing to it, just as you suggest, and instead load it into PS for post-processing.

BTW I Lived in Scotland for 20 years, 3 of them in Glasgow. I found the weather, re observing, very challenging! 

Cheers, Keith

[Thalestris24]

1 hour ago, Moonshed said:

Hi Louise, I also thought that 100 calibration frames was a bit OTT but what do I know? Anyway, I am going to take your advice and settle for 50.  Once DSS has produced a finished image I don't do a thing to it, just as you suggest, and instead load it into PS for post-processing.

BTW I Lived in Scotland for 20 years, 3 of them in Glasgow. I found the weather, re observing, very challenging! 

Cheers, Keith

Hi

The weather and lp is miserable here  I don't do any observing but trying to image via the lp and moisture-laden skies is very testing!

Louise

[RayD]

1 minute ago, Thalestris24 said:

The weather and lp is miserable here

I think you could be describing any single part of the UK at the moment there Louise, truly miserable.

[Thalestris24]

1 minute ago, RayD said:

I think you could be describing any single part of the UK at the moment there Louise, truly miserable.

It's particular awful here  Also, being near the city centre, and being close to streetlights, the lp is limiting

[iapa]

On 06/01/2017 at 16:51, Moonshed said:

Iapa.    4 hours to set up! Good grief, that is taking it to an extreme lol. ? Now that's what I call dedication! I think you may be beyond help now, but you never know, therapy may bring you back from the brink ?

 

It was just one of those nights - mostly self inflicted.

Devices kept disconnecting, I'd forgotten to turn on the PSU to one of the hubs. Grub screw on a focus motor was loose, then I was trying to adjust the Crayford focuser - without loosening the locking screw AND I'd adjusted the focus knob on the SCT for some damn fool reason.

Oh, and I had the wrong location set in Stellarium (I had been been planning targets for my holidays in April).

And I'm one of those people who has a check list

 

[Squiddy]

2 hours ago, Moonshed said:

Hi Squiddy, Thanks for the advice, but you are suggesting I need 1) A new mount. 2) An auto guider, 3) A guidescope , and of course the one under consideration, 4) A PoleMaster.

I can only refer you to my opening post ?

Cheers,  Keith

And I can only refer you to my previous post:

On 2017-01-07 at 07:19, Squiddy said:

...

So my conclutions boils down to this as the less expensive way to go further:

New scope and an autoguider (with autoguider I meen both the guide scope and the camera. You need a computer to this setup though). Total investment of around £500. Maybe someone has another opinion about this, but this is my two cents. Try this first before getting the polemaster if it doesn't fit your budget. You can always buy one later...

[Moonshed]

1 hour ago, iapa said:

It was just one of those nights - mostly self inflicted.

Devices kept disconnecting, I'd forgotten to turn on the PSU to one of the hubs. Grub screw on a focus motor was loose, then I was trying to adjust the Crayford focuser - without loosening the locking screw AND I'd adjusted the focus knob on the SCT for some damn fool reason.

Oh, and I had the wrong location set in Stellarium (I had been been planning targets for my holidays in April).

And I'm one of those people who has a check list

 

Yes, those sort of nights can, and do, happen. I can top that though. Years ago I was using film camera for astrophotography. Over a period of 4 weeks I had used up all 36 exposures on the film roll taking all manner of DSO, only to discover that I didn't have a film in the camera! It took me a long time to recover from the trauma.

[Moonshed]

2 hours ago, Thalestris24 said:

Hi

The weather and lp is miserable here  I don't do any observing but trying to image via the lp and moisture-laden skies is very testing!

Louise

I lived on the south side in Shawlands and the LP was horrendous. When I moved out  to Beith in Ayrshire I still had the problem of the weather. Never seen so much rain in my life! So frustrating. After 20 years in Scotland got so fed up with it moved to Spain. I feel your pain.