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Best settings for sharpcap, asi224 and the moon ?


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Hi chaps, I thought I'd try my first OTA (SW 102mm mak) tonight on the moon while the 300pds gathers more Ha from M82.

It's been a whiite since I tried lunar caps and would rather not waste the night, so looking for some help on best settings for my asi224 with ir filter.

I'm thinking high gain (350?), and as it's so high gain no point in RAW16, so use RAW8 mode ? no debayering - just save as ser ? ensure histogram about 1/2 way or a bit less.

take maybe 5000 images, then move to next bit, another 5000 ? I want to try for a full mosaic, but as it's all manually moving around doubt I'll get it right.

I've never had any luck with the focus helpers on sharpcap - so I'll do the usual of trying to work out the range where it seems to sometimes be in focus, and pick the middle of that.

that all sound sensible ?

https://astronomy.tools/calculators/field_of_view/?fov[]=1945||266||1|1|0&solar_system=moon

What I always find a pain is finding the thing in the first place. asiair won't platesolve when all it can see is a white blob.  The best I can do, is get one of my guiders and fit it onto a finder style adjustable mount, and try to align it before the night to point at same things as the skymax.. and then set asiair up to use that as the main camera - hopefully getting me in the rough area with a bigger fov to give me a chance at finding the thing - it still won't plate solve with moon in frame as it will just blow out everything.

I suppose the alternative is.. shaking... visual alignment - and use a number of increasing eye pieces on the 102 to get it centred. a faff though if I lose it at any point as I have to take the camera off, eyepeices back on, then faffing with the 30 off turns of focuser to try to get it focused again... yada yada. sigh.

so pipe up if I've missed an obvious better way of doing it. As I've no use for guiding on it, I suppose keeping it visual might be the easiest.. I'll rake out an actual finder and fit it just now.. and see if I can get an eyepiece working with the 102 and align em.

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As you've outlined, making a mosaic with such a small FOV is going to be challenging.

The moon is a big bright target,  wouldn't you get as good results using the 6D or ASU2600 ?

Fast exposures, and stack the best.

Michael

Edited by michael8554
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