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Thanks very much for the responses.
Flats are an important part of processing and with some setups more important than with others. Some of my refractors barely need flats. The CDK can't live without them. Same with refractors using reducers and large chip cameras.
Looking at the responses it seems I need to:
1. Conquer sky flats and dither between flats.
2. Take a lot more than just 3 and perhaps just one for luminance and one for RGB. I don't know that each individual RGB flat varies that much. Doing 30 for each filter probably would not be practical with dusk flats as the light level falls too quickly.
I tend to clean my filters regularly to avoid dust bunnies but I do get them occassionally. Cleaning is better than using flats.
I wonder if black material would enable doing flats during the daylight hours. I actually got some nice flats once through a desert storm cover I had over my refractor during daylight hours!
The auto dither plugin for CCDsoft is flawed. I installed it a few months ago and my autoguiding went to hell. It took me a couple of weeks to work out why. The autodither was being applied to the autoguider as well as the main CCD. Every guide exposure then of course had a command to shift a couple of pixels and the autoguider was trying to guide that command back out and it was a losing battle. It does not seem to accept only being turned on for the main CCD. I'll try again but I don't think so.
An EL panel sounds good or a large lightbox. Or perhaps just a lot more t-shirt type flats taken and only one for luminance and one for all RGB.
Thanks for the advice.
I haven't found 35,000 ADU flats to work for me so far. They seem too bright and make the dull vignetted corners now too bright after application. 20,000 seems to work.
I think also I need a larger dark/bias library for different temps. This hot spell has meant even the Proline is maxed at -25C. Not bad really when the air temp is close to 30C or more.
Greg.
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