Padraic M Posted April 26, 2021 Share Posted April 26, 2021 This is the result of the last three nights imaging - had the mount set up and aligned in the garden for the week, and NINA was generally well-behaved. So much easier when you don't have the hour of set-up time to do every night - just power up, cool down and press go. My only issue was with ASTAP plate solving failing consistently in the sequence, when it works perfectly when I run it manually in NINA. Luckily astrometry.net works great every time. Managed quite a few automated meridian flips too! I've got Bortle 8 skies, with a 3/4-to-full moon so plenty of LP and noise in there. I'm not going to collect any more data until I get dark skies and no moon. A total of just over 11 hours, made up of: 36x 600s Ha 110x 60s Red 110x 60s Green 110x 60s Blue Luminance created from an all-channel stack. Processed in APP, Gimp, Noise Ninja. Captured with NINA and PHD2. Esprit 80, HEQ5 Pro, ASI1600MM Pro at -20C. 6 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
paul Posted April 27, 2021 Share Posted April 27, 2021 Certainly challenging conditions for a big and not bright object, but you have lots of structure there to build on. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MarkAR Posted April 28, 2021 Share Posted April 28, 2021 Good effort considering the B8 skies you're under plus blobby being a pain as well. Strange that you've had issues with ASTAP, I always found it fast and reliable running through EKOS. EKOS now has it's own PlateSolver which is even faster. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Padraic M Posted April 28, 2021 Author Share Posted April 28, 2021 @MarkARNot sure it's ASTAP's fault, but also not sure where to begin with diagnosis. Screen shot below - in the NINA Meridian Flip pipeline, after 'Do the flip' there's a 60-second settle period. Then it takes a 4-second image for platesolving. If what's shown in the image window is the 4-second platesolve image, then there's some serious star trailing, so it's not a wonder that ASTAP failed. I can't understand how there could be star trailing after a long settle, and in a 4-second exposure this isn't just standard sidereal tracking - the mount must still be slewing. I don't think that NINA retains the platesolve images after solving for inspection. As I said earlier, ASTAP in NINA works fine manually, and has worked in the past on flips, but is consistently failing now when executed as part of a sequence. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AstronomyUkraine Posted April 28, 2021 Share Posted April 28, 2021 6 hours ago, Padraic M said: @MarkARNot sure it's ASTAP's fault, but also not sure where to begin with diagnosis. Screen shot below - in the NINA Meridian Flip pipeline, after 'Do the flip' there's a 60-second settle period. Then it takes a 4-second image for platesolving. If what's shown in the image window is the 4-second platesolve image, then there's some serious star trailing, so it's not a wonder that ASTAP failed. I can't understand how there could be star trailing after a long settle, and in a 4-second exposure this isn't just standard sidereal tracking - the mount must still be slewing. I don't think that NINA retains the platesolve images after solving for inspection. As I said earlier, ASTAP in NINA works fine manually, and has worked in the past on flips, but is consistently failing now when executed as part of a sequence. Try increasing the settle time to two minutes. I have noticed the same problem in SGP occasionally with Astap. Platesolve fails because it's trying to solve an image with star trails. So maybe it is a glitch in Astap. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
paul Posted April 28, 2021 Share Posted April 28, 2021 I noticed on one evening that during the autofocus routine that the settle after focus shift timer seemed to run in parallel with the image timer. Occasionally images were streaked - maybe a similar thing is happening in the plate solving. You've reminded me to report my observations. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
peter shah Posted April 29, 2021 Share Posted April 29, 2021 lovely work, and you have managed to pull out some of the faint outer regions 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MarkAR Posted May 3, 2021 Share Posted May 3, 2021 On 4/28/2021 at 12:38 PM, Padraic M said: @MarkARNot sure it's ASTAP's fault, but also not sure where to begin with diagnosis. Screen shot below - in the NINA Meridian Flip pipeline, after 'Do the flip' there's a 60-second settle period. Then it takes a 4-second image for platesolving. If what's shown in the image window is the 4-second platesolve image, then there's some serious star trailing, so it's not a wonder that ASTAP failed. I can't understand how there could be star trailing after a long settle, and in a 4-second exposure this isn't just standard sidereal tracking - the mount must still be slewing. I don't think that NINA retains the platesolve images after solving for inspection. As I said earlier, ASTAP in NINA works fine manually, and has worked in the past on flips, but is consistently failing now when executed as part of a sequence. There's definitely something wrong but I think it might be NINA. If a mount is still moving 60 seconds after MF then I think there must be a fault in NINA's coding. Using EKOS auto MF, it hardly takes any time at all to stop and run the alignment plate solving. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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