NINA lights

[paul mc c]

Hello all just a quick question, I took a couple of hours if lights last night which took me to around 3.00 in the morning, it was clear most of the night but when the session ended it had clouded over. My question is can I check individual light frames to see what ones we're clouded out before I do any processing. 

Paul 

[tomato]

If you run them through any kind of star analysis tool, the numbers will soon tell you which are the poor subs to be discarded.

Alternatively as they are saved in sequential order by NINA,  view the last one and work back in suitable increments until you hit the last of the good ones.

[paul mc c]

6 minutes ago, tomato said:

Alternatively as they are saved in sequential order by NINA,  view the last one and work back in suitable increments until you hit the last of the good ones.

But they are saved as files rather than images,if i could see them as images i could delete the bad ones,i could do this with APT.

[The Lazy Astronomer]

1 hour ago, paul mc c said:

But they are saved as files rather than images,if i could see them as images i could delete the bad ones,i could do this with APT.

What type of file are they saved as? I think NINA's default is FITS, in which case you'll need to download a FITS viewer - plenty of free ones available on the net.

Would be quicker to analyse them with your stacker of choice and delete the bad ones though. 

[ONIKKINEN]

16 minutes ago, The Lazy Astronomer said:

Would be quicker to analyse them with your stacker of choice and delete the bad ones though. 

Ditto on this one.

Going through FITS files one by one and manually inspecting them is very time consuming and not always really possible, for instance when your lights are just barely over the read noise level and show almost nothing but black. You can throw these into DSS and inspect them this way, but its still far from optimal. Also not worth it when you have so many subs (119 i believe?).

But NINA makes it easy to just analyze the images with a glance. What i do with NINA is have the guiding RMS error in arcseconds, star count and star HFR in the file name itself, you can set these in the options. If the RMS is too high, guiding was bad and i throw it out. If star count is too low but HFR is good, probably clouds or something external like accidentally shining a light near the telescope, if HFR is bad then the focus was out. It takes a bit of getting used to from a DSLR user but its just something that i had to accept that i cant actually see the subs myself easily. If you must see the subs you can always view them in NINA as stretched and debayered images, but only before shutting down the session and NINA for that night.

[The Lazy Astronomer]

4 hours ago, ONIKKINEN said:

Ditto on this one.

Going through FITS files one by one and manually inspecting them is very time consuming and not always really possible, for instance when your lights are just barely over the read noise level and show almost nothing but black. You can throw these into DSS and inspect them this way, but its still far from optimal. Also not worth it when you have so many subs (119 i believe?).

But NINA makes it easy to just analyze the images with a glance. What i do with NINA is have the guiding RMS error in arcseconds, star count and star HFR in the file name itself, you can set these in the options. If the RMS is too high, guiding was bad and i throw it out. If star count is too low but HFR is good, probably clouds or something external like accidentally shining a light near the telescope, if HFR is bad then the focus was out. It takes a bit of getting used to from a DSLR user but its just something that i had to accept that i cant actually see the subs myself easily. If you must see the subs you can always view them in NINA as stretched and debayered images, but only before shutting down the session and NINA for that night.

Star count is basically the only criteria I use for sub rejection (or at least further inspection of the sub). Really quick and simple to analyse in DSS and sort by number of stars.

[ONIKKINEN]

14 minutes ago, The Lazy Astronomer said:

Star count is basically the only criteria I use for sub rejection (or at least further inspection of the sub). Really quick and simple to analyse in DSS and sort by number of stars.

I had a problem with DSS reporting bogus numbers with star counts. It had decided that a frame which was obviously failed to my eyes had more than a hundred stars, hence the additional metrics that i also use.

In this case i was close to the meridian and my RA motor was slipping every couple of seconds because of an under performing mount, leading to bunched up star trails. Basically the brightest 10 or so stars trailed intermittently to look like a 100 stars in a tight line to DSS.

[scotty38]

It may not help but if you use PixInsight then you can use Blink