Things for a noob to do on cloudy nights

[TiffsAndAstro]

so i checked my weather forecast and it will be cloudy here for the next 8 months

is there anything a frustrated noob can do on a cloudy evening?

ive recently set up nina on a laptop, perfectly. im 110% certain it will work perfectly the first time i get to try it under clear skies. in about 8 months

is there anything i could do with my nina/setup to practice a bit first? or anything like that?

if anyone had a link to a good intro to nina video it would be much appreciated. im watching Cuiv the lazy geeks nina videos and while they're great, they are a little above my paygrade and assumed a basic working knowledge of nina to start with i think.

 

my gear is a sw gti gem (ish) canon 600d and a variety of quite bad vintage lenses. and nina on a macbook running bootcamp ;(

[adyj1]

(Patriot Astro YouTube channel is another great resource for NINA tutorials. 

[TiffsAndAstro]

25 minutes ago, adyj1 said:

(Patriot Astro YouTube channel is another great resource for NINA tutorials. 

i've watched a couple of his videos will go trawl his entire collection, ty.

ideally though, i'd like a introduction to nina video that starts with "run this shortcut to open nina"  

[Clarkey]

10 hours ago, TiffsAndAstro said:

it will be cloudy here for the next 8 months

Only 8?

You could learn Pixinsight. That should take about 8 months 😄

[TiffsAndAstro]

21 minutes ago, Clarkey said:

Only 8?

You could learn Pixinsight. That should take about 8 months 😄

Siril seems more than enough at the moment but I like dss quality rating thing

[Rallemikken]

25 minutes ago, TiffsAndAstro said:

Siril seems more than enough at the moment but I like dss quality rating thing

Must disagree. The "quality rating thing" in Siril is far better, but it require you to do the stacking in three steps: Preprocessing and registration, quality sorting (throwing out bad frames manually) and finally stacking. Supereasy and not hard to learn once you get the grips of it. As a beginning, take the Siril script "OSC_Preprocessing.ssf" and comment out (or delete) the line beginning with "stack r_pp_light". Save the file as "OSC_Preprocessing_no_stack.ssf" in the same folder. See if you find your way from here!

[Ratlet]

Have a look for others raw data that has been uploaded and practice your processing.  If you've got vintage lenses I could stick some of my data up, though be warned some is pretty bad lol.

I'm currently playing with an online Arduino emulator as I wish to build an autofocusser for my scope.  The instructions are pretty bullet proof but I prefer to understand what's going on in the background.

So far I've made a simulated led flash...

[TiffsAndAstro]

On 12/03/2024 at 21:55, Rallemikken said:

Must disagree. The "quality rating thing" in Siril is far better, but it require you to do the stacking in three steps: Preprocessing and registration, quality sorting (throwing out bad frames manually) and finally stacking. Supereasy and not hard to learn once you get the grips of it. As a beginning, take the Siril script "OSC_Preprocessing.ssf" and comment out (or delete) the line beginning with "stack r_pp_light". Save the file as "OSC_Preprocessing_no_stack.ssf" in the same folder. See if you find your way from here!

Tbh I've only really run provided scripts, but would love this so tyvmuch.

If I ever see stars again I will have a go. Using dss like I do is a pita. 

Seems I'm blind to clouds in subs. Aircraft I can spot

[Vroobel]

As you know the NINA, I highly recommend creating an artificial horizon, if you have one place for your setup. There is a dedicated plugin for that. Once you create the horizon with NINA you can use the data with a Certes du Ciel, Stellarium, the great webapp Telescopius and I don't know where else. You don't need a good weather to do that, just no rain at the day is needed. 

Avoid using a mobile phone method for that, it's not accurate enough. Your horizon will be perfect if you use the plugin with e.g. 5 degrees accuracy. You can use it for starting imaging and stopping it on the exact time when the DSO appears and hides behind the horizon. 

All information and tutorials are available on YT and other websites/forums.