Power Problems Don't Always Look Like Power Problems

[rickwayne]

I  had used my iOptron CEM25P's power adapter to run my Raspberry Pi before, so I thought was fine. Hah! I got problems like:

• The Pi  wouldn't  accept my password
• When it finally did, it plate-solved twice, but never again
• Guiding was completely and literally off the charts

After two hours of fighting random Ghost In The Machine issues, I thought to swap  the wall-wart for my customary battery, and the problems magically evaporated. There was  literally not a single hitch in getting three hours of SHO data on the Cygnus Wall after that. I'm pleased with the result, but imagine how it would have looked like with five hours of data!

[sthow]

That is incredible , love the colours 😀

[rickwayne]

You know, it was so easy to shoot and process I hardly feel as if I can take credit for it! I had been doing bicolor (Ha+OIII) images, and only recently acquired an SII filter, this is only my second target for it. I literally loaded the lights and calibration frames into Astro Pixel Processor and clicked "integrate" -- didn't mess around with selecting the best lights, changing parameters on normalization, nothin'. Then I ran APP's gradient/LP tool on the resulting Ha, OIII, and SII lintegrations and ran the "Combine  RGB" tool.  SHO 1 (Hubble) palette preset, calculate, done. Pick a stretch level, save out a TIFF.

This version represents a little more work on the nonlinear data in Photoshop, just general "make it pop" stuff, but it was more like applying makeup than the reconstructive surgery that I resort to sometimes. A whirl through Topaz Denoise AI with some sharpening, and boo yah.

Edited October 2, 2021 by rickwayne