Stub Mandrel

Yesterday I was checking the settings in Windows Defender before I gave my old computer to my dad. It turned out that it had found a 'crypto miner' exploit, that's one of those nasty programs that hogs system resources to 'mine' bitcoin or similar. The reason I post this here is that it appears to have been picked up when visiting a small astronomy sites - the sort people set up on a larger hosting platform. Unfortunately, the process of clearing it our deleted the name of the website, but it was 'astro-something'. Touchwood this is the only such problem I've picked up,

Outstanding result on an incredibly difficult target. That's one of the most spectacular OSC images I've seen. Where are you and what sort of skies were you imaging under?

Excellent job, I hope it sounds and plays half as good as it looks!

Is that a 'hog house' in the background 🙂 I once met a hog on Skye, in the daylight. It seemed OK. I kept an eye on it until it had found its way off the road.

+1, a 30mm Plossl will be dirt cheap and be a big step up if you look for star clusters and, say, the Andromeda Galaxy. Also, search for "23mm aspheric eyepiece" and "10mm aspheric eyepiece". These are stupidly cheap* and remarkably good. The 4mm version is less good, apparently. *This has obviously been noticed, I found the 23mm at over £20, it cost me less than a tenner to buy both. Though they are not as good as £100 eyepieces they seem better than most £30 ones.

That's great, thanks! Just out of curiosity, my mentioning the income from the book was followed by a sarcastic email from someone. If they are reading this I'd just like to assure her that welcome though £1,500 is, it isn't life-changing.

Hi! The rules state: "Moderators, and anyone deriving an income from amateur astronomy cannot join. " I make a small but useful part of my income from writing books, a few astro related ones on Amazon have brought in a couple of dozen pounds so they never occurred to me as a disqualification. I have a proper book on astronomy projects coming out soon that has a four-figure advance. I assume this rule disqualifies me in future? What about anyone who occasionally sells their images or has sponsored astronomy videos on YouTube, for example? Their income m

All very good, I hate to decide. Main thing is you kept a gentle gradation between blue and yellow/brown, too many images end up with a sudden change but there is no abrupt transition in the object.

The curse of too little Sii and Oiii data. Not helped by telling Sharpcap to rotate my images, I didn't realise this would mean my darks and flats would be the wrong way around...

In this case that would defeat the benefits of excluding the relatively poor quality Oiii and Sii data. I can see the benefit of doing that where all three layers are good quality (and where there are areas of O or S that would be blank or poor in Ha). In the image the colour layer is binned 2x2 to reduce noise (with limited success, especially on the Sii data) then resampled to match the Ha for the final version.

My recent image of the Tadpoles nebula got a lot of positive comment. I think this was due to the extraordinary nature of the target rather than my skill with imaging, as poor Sii data (in particular) gave a very noisy background and rather poor detail. I tweaked the colour yesterday, but for some reason it only struck me this morning that I could add the Ha layer as luminance and bring everything under control at a stroke and reintroduce much of the fainter parts...

Actually... https://hubblesite.org/contents/media/images/1996/04/394-Image.html But sadly you need something much bigger than an amateur scope to achieve this. There are a few scopes that can: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_stars_with_resolved_images

I got a large paper print done and the denoise artefacts were obnoxious! I've revisited with much more careful noise control, cleaning each channel individually before combining.

Hi, yes it's SHO and the thin Oiii outer shell was challenging, a lot more in the data, but it gets overwhelmed. It was about 16 Sii, 24 Ha and 14 Oiii (more Ha as I started before astro dark and dropped some early frames) 150s subs, ASI1600MM Pro and 130P-DS. So only just over 1/2 an hour for Oiii and Sii. My first image at an urban but apparently not too badly light polluted site.

When I get a new desktop are the ~£30 utilities that claim to transfer all your licenced apps/programs over any good? If so is there one you would recommend. I really don't want to spend days finding old CDs and digging out licence keys from archived emails and paper files...