Yeehaa! Guiding working HH update

[MartinB]

After months of trials and tribulations tweaking the mount and sussing the software I am now guiding with the Super Polaris. One of the great moments when the 5 min sub came out with pinpoint stars. No point going longer owing to moonshine even with the HA filter. Think I need a 6nm filter as well as the 13nm. Unfortunately the NS8 wont responding to guiding commands in one axis at the mo so that's a blow.

Here's the combine of all my subs acquired so far with the ZS66 and 0.67 reducer - 12 5min subs guided and 50 mins worth of 3+5min unguided. More needed then some G and B.

Here is a comparison of 50 mins combination of 5 and 3 min unguided exposures on a moonless night with 1 hour of guided at near full moon. The stars are significantly smaller but the moon has led to some loss of contrast and detail.

Unguided

Guided

[anthony]

Congratualtions on the guiding and an exceelent shot.

Have you tried going longer on the guiding yet? I was managing 10 min subs despite the moon last night. I guess I could be losing contrast.

Anyhow, you have got yourself a really smooth image there, a superb FOV, and loads of detail for a 66mm scope.

Anthony

[geppetto]

Yummy...

Congrats Martin on getting it all working

Great stars and detail 8)

[MartinB]

Thank - you Philip and Ant. Ant, I could have gone on for ever but after 5 mins my background sky reading was nearly 3000 AU so didn't seem much point going beyond this.

[anthony]

after 5 mins my background sky reading was nearly 3000 AU

How does this work then? This refers to your darkest pixels I presume. Do you have an idea then what your average is on a moonless night, due to just skyglow, LP? How do you find out what the average is?

Cheers

Anthony

[MartinB]

It's advice from Ron Wodski's book. Basically I move the cursor ove the darkest parts of the image and get the readout of the brightness level in the info box in Maxim. Ron reckons that read noise isn't an issue when the background brightness exceeds 2500-3000 so there is no point in extending the sub length beyond this. Can't remember for certain but I think my 5 min reading on a moonless night with the Ha was around 1600. Course it gets messed up a bit if the nebulosity extends across the whole of the image.

Theres a very complex analysis on Cloudy Nights that suggests this method isn't reliable and goes into some complicated maths but that's all to much for me at the mo :insects1:

[Greg]

Superb Martin,

Fantastic image.

[anthony]

Cheers

[CELESCOPE]

well done on finally getting the guiding sorted Martin, you have worked hard at achieving that , lovely horse as well , like you i found the moon washed outa lot of detail on the horse last night , so never bothered to process mine any further ,

great stuff

Rog

[Kaptain Klevtsov]

That's magnificent. I really really need to get this guiding thing sorted. Your image has been my holy grail since I started this imaging thing. Wish I could do that.

Captain Chaos

[Jamie]

Nice one Martin.

Great to see you got it all working together now.

Now lets see some more.....Please.

[Martin 2]

Nice image Martin, looking forward to some more stunners now

M2