AstroViking
08-11-2022, 07:42 PM
Hi all,
Still coming to terms with the OSC and what settings I need for shooting in light-polluted suburban skies. I think I over-cooked the exposure time as there was a lot of blue to the subs. A lot of blue.
I suspect I also need better flats, for the corners of the stacked image turned out to be very vignetted and I had to crop the image a lot to get something that looked good. (Although with such a wide FoV, I need to crop a lot anyway...)
This was also my first meridian flip, too. I was watching Ekos count down to 'Launch!' only have a 'NASA moment' and the initial flip failed for some unlogged reason. The second attempt went without a hitch and I happily watched the mount do it's stuff.
Only for Ekos to decide that it wasn't going to carry on with the sequence - the re-alignment seemed to go OK, then the guiding packed in (probably because the moonlight was now hitting the side of the guide scope and somehow bouncing back to the guide camera). At this point Ekos crashed, so I gave up and packed everything away.
Prior to the meridian flip it was guiding consistently below 0.8 RMS, sometimes dipping down to 0.6 or lower.
As always, feedback and suggestions welcome!
Cheers,
V
Technical details:
SW EvoStar 72ED + 0.85 Flattener / ZWO 183MC-Pro / HEQ5-Pro / SV305CC + SV165 / Ekos
Gain: 25
Offset: 10
Temperature: 0 degrees C
Exposure: 20 seconds
Lights: 154
Darks: 30
Flats: 38 (Recycled from another imaging session with the same optical train, although different gain+offset)
Bias: 44
Stacked and pre-proc'd in SiriL, finished in Affinity Photo
Still coming to terms with the OSC and what settings I need for shooting in light-polluted suburban skies. I think I over-cooked the exposure time as there was a lot of blue to the subs. A lot of blue.
I suspect I also need better flats, for the corners of the stacked image turned out to be very vignetted and I had to crop the image a lot to get something that looked good. (Although with such a wide FoV, I need to crop a lot anyway...)
This was also my first meridian flip, too. I was watching Ekos count down to 'Launch!' only have a 'NASA moment' and the initial flip failed for some unlogged reason. The second attempt went without a hitch and I happily watched the mount do it's stuff.
Only for Ekos to decide that it wasn't going to carry on with the sequence - the re-alignment seemed to go OK, then the guiding packed in (probably because the moonlight was now hitting the side of the guide scope and somehow bouncing back to the guide camera). At this point Ekos crashed, so I gave up and packed everything away.
Prior to the meridian flip it was guiding consistently below 0.8 RMS, sometimes dipping down to 0.6 or lower.
As always, feedback and suggestions welcome!
Cheers,
V
Technical details:
SW EvoStar 72ED + 0.85 Flattener / ZWO 183MC-Pro / HEQ5-Pro / SV305CC + SV165 / Ekos
Gain: 25
Offset: 10
Temperature: 0 degrees C
Exposure: 20 seconds
Lights: 154
Darks: 30
Flats: 38 (Recycled from another imaging session with the same optical train, although different gain+offset)
Bias: 44
Stacked and pre-proc'd in SiriL, finished in Affinity Photo