Quote:
Originally Posted by Mickoid
Ricky, I'm not up with mono cameras so I can't really comment with what settings you used for these shots. By the amount of noise showing it looks like you've had to stretch these images a fair bit to reveal any detail. Your focus looks fine to me and the marks I can see look like dust spots on your sensor. I have that pitted look in my refractor after it suffered a severe change in temperature from the cold winter air into a warm car. Condensation formed on the glass elements and it took several days to evaporate. I did not clean it and it doesn't seem to have affected the image quality at all. I would not be cleaning the optics.
Do you use flats? Was there any cloud during your exposures? Were you in a light polluted location when taking these shots?. There can be many reasons and variables why these didn't turn out the way they have in the past. Someone with a mono camera may be able to give you more answers.
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Thanks for your reply. I am tending to agree that condensation and dust settling over time has caused that pitted look on the glass. Looking into the tube towards a light globe I can see that it's quite extensive. All of my imaging is done in the same spot in the backyard so nothing has changed in my set up from previous sessions.
There were no clouds and I've never used any flats in the past...
Quote:
Originally Posted by glend
Forget the cleaning for now. Concentrate on getting your exposures and processing right. The LRGB is way over exposed for your apparent location, meaning your showing a lot of skyglow and noise. And frankly 300 sec broadband subs are too long, try stacking many shorter subs. Make sure you shoot Darks and Bias subs as well to build a Master Dark and Master Bias and use them. Forget flats for now, get you basics sorted out.
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Thanks for your reply. Yeah, my processing is sort of hit and miss but generally I am happy with the results. The images were processed using the digital development filter in Maxim DL5 and nothing more but even using this filter in the past has produced reasonable results and only use it to see what data has been captured.
It may work out better using shorter subs and I will need to give it a go but I have always used 300s subs since going mono.
Quote:
Originally Posted by gregbradley
Yeah definitely clean. Flats remove dust spots but that's a huge one. Sometimes they won't if they are not just right.
Its far better to image with a clean camera and clean filters than rely on flats to remove dust spots in my experience.
So get yourself a rocket blower and some Bintel cleaning fluid and some Q tips and microfibre lens cleaning cloth with a bright torch (you need to shine the torch on the glass surfaces to reveal the dust quite often as it can be somewhat invisible otherwise).
That's my policy, cleaniness is senior to post processing flats etc.
Greg
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Thanks for your reply. I wear prescription glasses and can see the remarkable difference when I give them a "proper" clean with lense cloth AND cleaning fluid. Lense cloth alone does an OK job as far as I can see.
I've thought about cleaning the glass myself and have looked at some youtube clips and read about the do's and don'ts but now I'm leaning towards sending the OTA away for professional cleaning... it will cost some dollars but not sure I want to risk doing it myself
