1st Complete Image with New EQ5--Lots of Problems

[JohnSadlerAstro]

Sounds like my approach....some things are seen as "wrong" in the community, but they work for me....  

Like using an EQ2 mount for imaging (although using a decent mount these days makes it so much easier).

And as for autoguiding........well yeah, I pretend I have never heard of it.

John

[Gerry Casa Christiana]

Yes I am the same. I have nothing against autoguiding and I do not have it either but my motivation is that I want to learn and get the best I can out of my equipment before I go that route for me it takes the fun out of it.

Im currently trying EQMOD to control the scope as it may help with my issues. I have yet to try it in practice as im in Italy where there is all the snow. 

[JohnSadlerAstro]

Here in the UK it is all the rain and fog.  Which is worse?

101% humidity last night: within 2 minutes the sky literally condensed--the clouds just appeared as the temperature dropped.

No astronomy for a while  

John

[John78]

DSS only clips the data if you move the clip square slider, if all you move is the triangles all you do is stretch - if you apply the stretch and load it into pixinsight or startools they have a real hard time interpreting it as they are expecting linear data.  

With DSS I find the best approach is select the slider triangle with your mouse but then move it one jog at a time with your arrow keys - you'll see the histogram radically change when its in the right place from a single tall peak to real histogram data - then move the rgb levels around to get it the right colour then save it changes applied and edit it in your flavour of editing software.

 

I'd add I get the best results by far using DSS for stack and stretch and then gimp for levels/black point, sharpening etc... I never got anything useable at all from startools, pixinsight looks promising but will have to wait for retirement to get enough time to understand its capabilities fully - so about another 20 years time - I got equivalent results from pixinsight after about a week of learning it, going through tutorials online and reprocessing data - from which would take me 2-3 minutes of using DSS/Gimp.

[JohnSadlerAstro]

Hi,

DSS/GIMP looks like the way I'll be doing it then, to keep it all free.

John