My first attempt at EEA

[Jimbo64]

After a wee while of camera ownership (ASI585mc) followed by having to renew a broken rig and then all sorts of hardware and software issues, I managed to get first light proper last night and captured the Orion Nebula, breaking my EEA virginity and capturing the Orion Nebula as my first DSO.

I'm delighted with this as my first snapshot, 24 x 4 second frames at Gain 378 through my 200PDS on an HEQ5pro.

Feedback and any hints and tips appreciated, my only complaint is that my plate solving (using ASTAP) was very patchy, but that's a minor issue.  Getting SharpCap/ Stellarium/ ASCOM/ EQMOD all talking the same language was an achievement for me as was getting good tracking after thinking my new mount was a duffer, but the culprit was a poor (old) power supply.

1st astro - Orion nebula

[StevieDvd]

I could only open the .fit file in Gimp, Siril, PixInsight & my Fits viewer had issues. I would question the gain used as a little too high, the 'sweet spot' for the camera is 252 (see here for details) so a slightly longer exposure say 10 secs may be better. M42 is tricky as the core is easy to over expose.

The ASI585MC is the camera I have been using with good results.  See this thread for my examples, and I'm not a imager with great experience.

This is a the display of an image being taken by my Asiair (I was indoors so there are reflections from the room lights and my own shadow) - this was a later run to get further data so I took 30 x 30secs to try to get more nebulosity. But the preview mode is more apt for EAA and looked similar.

 

So the camera shoud be good for EAA as far as I can say, though I have not personally tried it with Sharpcap.

 

 

[PeterC65]

I also couldn't open the file you attached.

I use the Player One equivalent of the ASI585 (Uranus-C) for EAA and after much experimentation have settled on x400 gain and 4s exposures for DSOs. If I'm using the reducer in the refractor (F3.6) the faster scope needs less gain (x300) for a bright DSO like M42 otherwise the Trapezium blows out.

I don't do AP, just EAA.

I'm using an AZ mount so long exposures just lead to blurred images, but I think if you're doing EAA you want to see results quickly and even 15s exposures feel like I'm waiting around for the frames to arrive. I typically capture between 20 and 100 frames using SharpCap live stacking. Surprisingly I find that SharpCap does a better job of stacking than I manage to do with Deep Sky Stacker the following day! I always capture snapshots of the live stacks on the night and sometimes improve these the following day using Affinity Photo and Topaz DeNoise.

Here is my best snapshot of M42 taken on the 20th January using a 72mm refractor (no reducer, so F6.0) with an Astronomik L2 (visual) filter. Gain is x400, exposure 4s, and about 190 frames (unusual for me).

[Jimbo64]

Sorry about the formatting on my post, does this work?

 

[PeterC65]

36 minutes ago, Jimbo64 said:

Sorry about the formatting on my post, does this work?

It's a very small image so hard to tell much, but the focus looks a little suspect as does the colour balance.

You need to be really well focussed for EAA. I use a Bahtinov mask with a bright star. I usually just need to do this once at the start of the session if I've left the scope to cool down for 30 minute, sometimes twice if I've been a little hasty the first time. Changing filters can change the focus so I use all Astronomik filters (including a clear one) and mostly seem to get away with it (filter from the same manufacturer are usually parfocal).

For the colour balance, try getting SharpCap to adjust it automatically in the live stacking histogram. This mostly works but sometime I need to adjust the slider manually.

24 frames at 4s should be enough to get a good image of M42, but more will be better, and you will need more for fainter objects.

 

[Jimbo64]

Grand, thanks for that.  On the picture, is there a format that works best on here for sharing, I thought I'd used PNG first time (but might have changed that when transferring from my astro-laptop) and JPEG the second time?

[M40]

17 hours ago, Jimbo64 said:

Sorry about the formatting on my post, does this work?

 

About a 1000 times better than my first shot of orion 👌 I also started off with all the software you mention, but then I decided to go super simple and took the laptop to the mount and just used the asistudio stuff and the mount handset. All the best. 

[PeterC65]

2 hours ago, Jimbo64 said:

Grand, thanks for that.  On the picture, is there a format that works best on here for sharing, I thought I'd used PNG first time (but might have changed that when transferring from my astro-laptop) and JPEG the second time?

I use the SharpCap live stacking 'Save' then 'Save exactly as seen' feature to save what I call a snapshot of the live stack and I save in PNG format which I believe is lossless (JPG is not). The image I posted above was captured that way and if you double click on it and save the image locally you will recover the exact same 3856 x 2180 PNG image that I uploaded.