Quote:
Originally Posted by Poita
The camera is now in Chris's (giant) hands, so we now all await your images Chris  |
Ha, it was great to meet you and your family Peter...and Happy Birthday for today ( I will find the HB thread in a minute)!
I had an "interesting" night last night, VERY tired from 9 hours in the car after the wife decided to give me some errands to do before we got home from the drive, at least Anthony has only 4 hours left of his 120 now, which is good.
After dinner and frustrating driver install/uninstall/install/uninstall......I lost patience and asked here on IIS (D'oh) and got the CCDCAP, EZCAP and Nebulosity all connecting to the camera, so I could try out which one is best for me.
I would have to say, it seems Nebulosity is easiest, then CCDCap followed by EZcap. Trouble is, I wasnt going to buy a licence to save without the jailbars on the image, so I simply didnt use it for capture apart from testing if I was on target.
My alignment was woeful as PHD was constantly correcting, so I spent easily 2 hours playing with it with the assistance of Trevor's (tlgerdes) excellent tutorial on how to use PHD to drift align. YAY for me, I had NO discernable drift at ALL after this, even with sidereal tracking OFF. I know this because I took a test shot of 120 secs, then went back to PHD and went "woops, forgot to guide!".....man.....
Anyway, out from about 10pm right up till about 3am, skies clear all that time, me playing with drifting, camera was humming away, tried every capture program, played with gain and offset, slewing around waiting for M20 to get to the same height as the last DSLR debacle....
In the end, I THINK I captured about 5 x 2 min subs of M20, tried for M104 before the drift correction as it was woeful, didnt get much there as the software and I are from different planets it seems.......
NOW, I am back to where I was before with the data problem of RAW/FITS.......
I have tried stacking with DSS, applying the QHY8 bayer settings and used AHD, bilinear, drizzle et al.....same issue!
It confounds me and also disappoints me somewhat to think this is so difficult for someone like me who is quite techical, works in telecommunications and computers and aint no dummy....
Tutorials are hard to come by.....going by eye/feel seems to be unreproducable and my frustration level climbs with each attempt at getting data/colour/results out of what is essentially a SUPER light bucket camera compared to my hotplate of a DSLR....
I dont know if the next two weeks with Peter's QHY8 are going to have many rain free days, but if initial impressions are anything to go by, it seems that guiding/capturing is OK for me, but then it all turns to a word starting with S and ending in HIT......
The main frustration I have I think is impatience.....here I have a COOLED Astro CCD and when I take say a 2-5 min sub, I expect to SEE something jump out at me on the screen. To simply see a faded blob where M20 should be on the FITS reproduction, that then needs to be stretched, stacked, debayered, calibrated, corrected and then processed before I can determine if all this time and money is worth it.....just seems a little crazy!
Im surely not the only one who has felt hamstrung by this feeling of inadequacy when using moderately good equipment and finding it a minefield of options, black magic and blind faith to be able to get a nice astrophoto produced?????
I may have talked myself into sticking with the DSLR just purely from the simplicity of it all, put it back to JPG capture and take some darks, stack these cruddy 8 bit compressed subs and maybe make a light box and a copper cool box for the camera and perhaps buy a Hutech NDAS LPS filter for it for the skyglow and save myself at least $1000 or more and retain a shred of what sanity is left.....?
Sorry I havent any better news, especially with such a nice camera in my posession, with upcoming rain and it seems an insurmountable roadblock of knowledge peeing me off at the moment, I doubt any good images are pending.....
Apologies for yet another whinge encrusted sobfest of how useless I feel about this all, but it helps somewhat to vent this frustration as the wife just stares at me and says, "fine, I dont want to hear about it anymore"
Anyway, back to surfing the web for "how to process FITS files into COLOUR without having to stand on your head, reach around under your leg and press CTRL - 9 while simultaneously hopping on one foot and then passing it into 46 OTHER programs to tweak 0.00001 percent of a HIDDEN application setting with no real proper help file to output it into a different format to load into another program to start all over again with a washed out pathetic excuse for an image to find I have done it ALL wrong because I forgot to carry the 1 or press a check box on screen 72 of step 1,362!!!!!!!!!"
Jeez Louise!!!!!!!!!
Chris
Edit: Oh, dear...I may have said that all out loud......woops......