You hear this advice everywhere you look when it comes to astro imaging. It’s pretty much true. Dithering is an event that occurs between exposures, where the mount is moved a little bit in a random way to point a few pixels away from where it just was. This is… Continue Reading... "Dither or Die"
I was looking for a way for the scope to park itself after my imaging plan was complete in APT. It turns out this is pretty easy. In the plan editor, you can simply add a line at the end that has one exposure of zero length. Near the bottom,… Continue Reading... "Parking when done in APT"
I’ve had trouble with the meridian flip goto failing my last few nights out. I’d wake up in the morning to the mount being in the position it would be in pre-flip, and, only this last time, did I go out and observe it acting up. The declination axis would… Continue Reading... "Meridian flip woes with APT and EQMOD"
I was previously using a Nikon T-ring adapter from one of the cheap Amazon sellers, such as Astromania or Svbony. I’d recently noticed some aberrations in one corner of my images while using the Baader coma corrector. After playing around a bit, I found that the cheap T-ring adapter didn’t… Continue Reading... "Nikon T-Ring Adapters"
I’ve been fighting a big problem recently with concentric rings of different colors appearing in both my lights and flats. However, the flats do not correct the rings in the lights, and possibly make them worse. Below is a severely stretched stack of over 60 images of M101 that were… Continue Reading... "Concentric coloured rings in images"
Well, I decided to upgrade my equipment. As I have some weird fascination with Newtonians, I got the mountable Quattro 300P. The focal length is a little more useful on it at 1200mm. It also has a better focuser on it than my Dobsonian did. I paired the focuser with… Continue Reading... "New SkyWatcher EQ8-R and Quattro 300P"
As I research and learn more about guiding, the equipment used for guiding compared to the equipment used for imaging seems to be awful important. I recall several anecdotes about how your guiding setup should scale to your imaging setup, with many arbitrary ratios and “golden rules” thrown about. My… Continue Reading... "Guiding scale and settings"
As I begin to take much longer exposures, the need for good flat images has become apparent. Dust specks on the camera lens and vignetting make a noticeable appearance once I start stretching images of extremely dim deep sky objects. To try to improve my flats, I purchased a studio… Continue Reading... "Light softbox for taking flats"
My custom equatorial platform from Tom Osypowski has finally arrived! It is absolutely gorgeous and is extremely strong and rigid. From his advice, I purchased a dual axis aluminum platform. This is the ultimate visual and imaging platform for a Dobsonian. The platform is operable manually with a hand control… Continue Reading... "Automated guiding with a Tom Osypowski equatorial platform"
The thing that has probably blown my mind the most about all of this equipment is the Bahtinov mask. Invented by an amateur astronomer, it completely trivializes focusing. You just place this over the aperture of your telescope, point it at a bright star, and adjust focus until the three… Continue Reading... "Bahtinov Masks"
