M101 LHaRGB

[Padraic M]

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.

 

[paul]

Certainly challenging conditions for a big and not bright object, but you have lots of structure there to build on.

[MarkAR]

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.

[Padraic M]

@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.

 

[AstronomyUkraine]

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.

[paul]

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.

[peter shah]

lovely work, and you have managed to pull out some of the faint outer regions

[MarkAR]

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.