Epox75

Here's the image after some post processing I did with pixinsight following a tutorial. I still have 30x2min UHC exposures, and 15x2min on R,G,B to process and as far as I understood is better to stack them all first and then process the different channels all together with pixinsight, expecially for cropping before combining them into LRGB. I just hope the other exposures will be decent enough to get a nice color image but i doubt because of the full Moon that rose yesterday night. Anyway it's going to be a lot of work.. good for cloudy days!

Sorry was editing my post with the infos: it's f/6.3, Lumicon Deepsky Filter, 30x2min exposure at unity gain (139 gain 21 offset - it's one of the 3 default exposures of the camera). 20 flats, 20 darks, 50 bias integrated.

The 1st raw untouched, just stretched histogram. I also had to take a screenshot because I cannot manage to save the image like this

Thanks for the tip! Unfortunately in the corrector's box there was nothing but the corrector (this one btw: http://www.robtics.nl/product_info.php?cPath=30_184_255&products_id=132&pID=132&language=en ). The filter wheel was all the way in inside the visual back, next time i'll try with a couple mm distance and see if it get worse or better

2 hours and a half into autoguiding.. how does it look btw?

No Worries, some clouds will be incoming later tonight .. just to spoil my fun. Anyway incredibly I didn't encounter big problems and the mount is already guiding like a charm, without anti-backlash or PEC. I'm a bit upset for the fisheye effect my reducer is causing at the edge (but not so edge) of the image.... I guess I'm going to bother my vendor for a replacement with a better one

The last stuff arrived! And amazingly I'll have to chance to test the autoguiding right away.. no clouds tonight!

Two more Moon pictures from the 5th of May. These are taken with a 0.63x focal reducer (1760mm focal lenght)

That's bad, mine has two and i have to use calipers to turn it just a bit tighter of what i'm able to reach with my bare hands. Have you tried to put something inside the focuser to simulate the pressure that other screws may do on the other side? I would probably try something like a little piece of tape with gripping/anti-slide material.

Why crappy, It doesn't hold the focus? I also have a crappy standard focuser on my C11 but I have managed to use the histogram as reference when focusing and that saved a lot of paranoia (focused objects are brighter so when the histogram reaches its peaks it mean that the best focus has been reached). A bahtinov mask for my c11 is incoming and that should make things even easier. I've also head about people wedging or gluing larger plastic wheels (like toy car wheels, pudding stamps) on their focuser in order to achieve more precision.

An apo it is something I will buy for sure but anyway there's no point in buying it until i get some confidence with the camera and processing.The C11 can take a lot of light compared to apos and I live under a light polluted sky because of an industrial site, completely illuminated with mercury-vapor lamps, not far from my home. Fortunately within a year they will replace the lightning system with shielded LED lamps and it will be also an automated system that will keep the lights off if they are not necessary. This will improve drastically the quality of the sky here since I don't live in a big city. That will be probably the moment I will buy an apo, for now I'll save some money waiting for the day And when I will have the apo I will do something like this:

No problem seen the prices anyway is something out of my league even second hand http://www.te-les-koop.nl/index.html?BekijkAdvertentie.php&key=24428 But actually this second hand dutch market is not bad at all, this one looks very interesting for instance: http://www.te-les-koop.nl/index.html?BekijkAdvertentie.php&key=24498. 600 euros, triplet with fpl53 glass, very good conditions... yummy.

What i did is looking for doublet on astrobin and started browsing the pictures i liked the most. I've seen very nice images taken with WILLIAM OPTICS Megrez 90mm Doublet Apochromatic, with Long Perng 100mm f/6 doublet and with the SkyWatcher 80ED APO Doublet FPL-53 (https://www.astrobin.com/gear/24678/skywatcher-80ed-apo-doublet-fpl-53/) and considering the price comparison and the money I've already spent so far on my equipment I would go for the cheaper solution. I'm not sure thou about mounting the doublet over my c11, I know it looks cool and whatsoever but still my mount has cogs and cogs deteriorate overtime, especially if lifting heavy weights. My mount is CGEM DX and it's a mount that can take also a C14 but I am actually terrified thinking about leaving it even if just for repair. I think the less weight i'll put on it, the longer it will survive And talking about used I've just seen this guy here in the netherlands selling this: http://www.te-les-koop.nl/index.html?BekijkAdvertentie.php&key=23942 Basically it say: almost new, rarely used, with microfocuser and an eq mount not motorized but who cares.. do you think I should go for it? (Edit: I don't think is the ED series so no matter)

I didn't use the adjective "relatively" randomly

It would be the same for me speaking about apo C11, as it is, is not very good for Deep-Sky because of the F/10 and the curvature of the main mirror. So there are on sale specific reducer flattener for SC. I bought a cheap unbranded reducer with flattener. When I use it I get some vignetting and fish eye effect at the side of the picture. Still the FOV gain is great compared to the native Focal ratio. At this very moment i'm drooling at the idea of having an apo, i'm thinking about getting a Skywatcher 80-ED soon or later. It's relatively cheap and I really like the pictures taken with it.

Yes a C11. Why rub your chin?

Thank you! Yes is definitely a coma, very noticeable in full res, I still do polar alignment without the polar scope that I'm waiting together with the autoguiding equipment. So I decided for a somewhat shot exposure. I really didn't expect much taking this picture since it was a mere test.The focal ratio is 6.3 (F/10 with a flat field/reducer 6.3x)

So this is my first ever picture of a deep sky object, the Bode Galaxy. Yesterday I captured the light (10x30sec exposures with a Lumicon Deep-Sky Filter). And today I did darks, bias and flats. The picture was taken without autoguiding, with the over 70% Moon high in the sky which is also very light polluted and with a decent but not perfect polar alignment. I am very happy, premises are very good and this is an achievement... I made my fist picture of an object that is million light years far from us

Actually this is a shot i thought I was going to trash. I used the ASI1600MM and a 0,63 focal reducer, hoping to get the full Moon. I was (am) very tired and didn't realize that the firecapture window, at 4k resolution, was in full screen. So I didn't realize that I was actually able to get the full disc of the moon in one recording. So, a bit disappointed, i started recording what I thought was a normal close up of the Moon's surface, while instead I was recording almost 3/4 of disc. Anyway hold your breath and watch it in full screen, download it if you see cross artifacts the image is huge and I can only view it at its best with any image viewing program (the right part of the picture has less frames compared to the left side, tracking wasn't perfect and I used the expand function in Autostakkert)

You mean k-lite codec pack? Is not a conversion program, it just needs to be installed. Basically it allows any player / video editing program on your computer to read any video file format. Just install that not caring much of its options, choose profile 5 (the most complete) when asked and the other options are good as they are. This is the download page https://www.codecguide.com/download_k-lite_codec_pack_mega.htm it also has a great media player based on the old windows media player. After the installation restart your computer and see if autostakkert reads the files that wasn't reading before. If that doesn't work you can uninstall the codec pack or keep it, it might be of use for something else and I consider it a must have to support video players and video editing programs on my pc

Consider that there are compressed AVIs (DIVX/XVID algorithm) and uncompressed ones. Autostakkert is meant to work with uncompressed raw video files mostly. Yet your problem might be a codec one. You can try to install a codec pack (K-Lite is my favourite https://www.codecguide.com/download_k-lite_codec_pack_mega.htm - i suggest you to download the mega version of the pack and do the profile 5 installation: playback and encoding ) and see if Autostakkert starts accepting the files.

It looks like I have finally understood how to derotate long videos of Jupiter This is another picture from the other night taken with the ASI1600MM. I recorded 5 minutes per channel and derotated the AVI files with Winjupos. Seeing was bad, Jupiter low, so I stacked 6000 frames overall out of 56000. The picture shows more details compared to the other one. Unfortunately the raw video files were too large so I had to crop it.

Autostakkert doens't like compressed video files. If you have an mp4 or mpg, etc. they must be converted to uncompressed raw avi

I've never seen it so clearly either For Jupiter i usually record 90 sec per channel due to its rotation (R, G, B, rarely IR.. .i don't like it on Jupiter). I keep the histogram around 52% (Approx 128). Then I process the videos on Autostakkert using Laplace value at 5 or 6 and very big alignment points (i rarely go over 10 AP for any image i stack) and normalizing the image to a 70 to 80%. I usually stack the 30% of frames if bad/average seeing and 50% or more if good seeing. After that I deconvolve the images using DStation Deconvolution Software: https://www.cloudynights.com/topic/412940-dstation-deconvolution-software/ . This is a very nice software, very easy to use once you understand the few options it has. Then i use an old version of MaximDL (4.5) to combine the Red, Green and Blue. Then I use registax for a fine RGB allignment (warning: dont' do "DO ALL" when saving, if will undo the fine alignment) Then MaximDL again for white and color balance. And in the end Photoshop CC for its custom denoise. The process may change a little depending on the target.

Since i'm still waiting for the auto-guiding equipment, tonight I have tried my ASI1600MM-Cool on Jupiter. I like the camera on planetary: it has a decent resolution and a great field of view, very nice for shots at my native focal lenght. But you can see its limits when you put on a barlow. I had to discard the images taken with the barlow due to an extreme lack of fine details but anyway I will give the camera a second chance, Jupiter is low on the horizon and maybe the seeing was not soo good. Anyway here's the 1st picture ( I have a second picture to process to test Winjupos derotation but I will do it tomorrow because it's about 50gb of video in total ):