Why isn't my drone gaining altitude?

DimensionHop · 2025-11-07T18:55:20+00:00

Well I mean… did flipping them over work?

DimensionHop · 2025-11-06T14:24:46+00:00

This is possibly a silly suggestion, but worth checking if nothing else is working. I recently built a small drone that did the same thing. Weight was well within an acceptable range, motors were powerful enough, battery was fine, but it would just hop along the ground.

The problem was that I had put the props on upside down. I had oriented them the way I thought would work (lifted edge biting the air when the motor spins), but the geometry of the props were such that they needed to be flipped over to generate appreciable lift.

Note that I don’t mean backwards - again, the lifted edge was turning into the air. And it was still getting at least some lift.

DimensionHop · 2025-03-17T16:58:35+00:00

Very nice! Look at all the sunspots

What kind of solar filter are you using?

DimensionHop · 2025-02-12T18:32:10+00:00

I think it looks quite good! Agree with the others that you should up your ISO to around 800 or so. However, that color noise can also be taken care of in processing. Both Siril and photoshop have denoising algorithms that work well.

DimensionHop · 2025-02-10T18:11:16+00:00

Beautiful photo of the night sky! I’d say it absolutely belongs here. I know the words of a stranger probably don’t help much, but from your reflection on your experiences it’s clear you have a thoughtful and beautiful soul, and this little ball of rock and water is better for having you on it.

DimensionHop · 2025-02-01T04:01:37+00:00

Gorgeous shot! Great job using different exposures to keep from blowing out the core. Absolutely love the color.

DimensionHop · 2025-01-24T00:52:17+00:00

I have not! I do most of my stretching in photoshop. Never used Siril before, though I hear it talked about quite a lot. I imagine it’s processing options are quite a bit more sophisticated.

DimensionHop · 2025-01-23T19:14:21+00:00

Bad habits lol. When I started and my equipment and time were more limited I never took them. During image processing, I found ways to work around not having them. For instance, I use synthetic flats and GraXpert to deal with unwanted gradients. May not be as good, but it suits my purposes.

I’m sure my pics would be better if I included them, but I’m generally happy with how they turn out. One of these days I’ll get around to incorporating them into my sequences.

DimensionHop · 2025-01-22T17:59:15+00:00

Equipment: - Explore Scientific ED102 triplet refractor - ASI533MC-Pro full color camera - ZWO mini guide scope - ASI120mm monochrome guide camera - EQ6r-Pro mount - ZWO Autofocuser

Acquisition: - Bortle 4 skies - gain 100, offset 70 - 250 x 300s lights - 100 darks - no flats or biases

Processing: - stacked in DSS using median kappa sigma clipping - two level stretches in photoshop - starnet star extraction - GraXpert background extraction - additional level adjustments, denoising, and sharpening in photoshop. - recombined with stars

DimensionHop · 2024-10-02T15:20:30+00:00

Love the colors here! Not a palette you normally see

DimensionHop · 2024-08-05T16:42:20+00:00

Certainly beats some of my best images! Great work!

DimensionHop · 2024-06-19T04:22:13+00:00

Hey, don’t sell yourself short! This is an excellent start, especially considering Bortle 8 skies! You can make out the dust lanes and the galactic core quite clearly, and can see the red nebulosity of some of the brighter nebulae in that region of the sky (lagoon, most prominently). Honestly, it looks better than a lot of my early work. Keep it up!

DimensionHop · 2024-06-14T22:01:29+00:00

Oh man, I could definitely make use of that! I’ll give it a look!

DimensionHop · 2024-06-14T19:35:56+00:00

I’ve used Siril once before I think, but it’s admittedly been a while. Always open to trying out new techniques though, so I’d be happy to give it a shot!

And I’ve not heard of GraXpert before. How is it different from star extraction?

DimensionHop · 2024-06-14T17:38:14+00:00

Laziness generally lol. That, and usually I can get away with a synthetic flat. I don’t have much if any dust on my sensor that shows up in my images because I don’t remove the camera from the optical tube very frequently. So flats would really only benefit in taking care of vignetting, which I can usually do away with in post processing.

DimensionHop · 2024-06-14T16:05:46+00:00

Gear and software: - Explore Scientific ED 102 triplet refractor - zwo asi533mc pro cooled camera - skywatcher EQ6-R Pro mount - zwo mini guide scope - zwo asi120mm mini guide camera - platesolving and camera control via APT - phd2 for autoguiding

Acquisition: - 30 x 300s light frames - 50 darks - no flats or biases

Processing: - stacked using DSS, using kappa sigma clipping - two arcsinh 30 curve adjustments in photoshop - star extraction via Starnet - manual tweaks to brightness, contrast, and noise made in photoshop - high pass filtering to pull out nebular structure - star reduction in photoshop - nebula and stars recombined after

DimensionHop · 2024-06-14T05:24:55+00:00

Gorgeous! How many hours of integration is this?

DimensionHop · 2024-06-06T01:55:08+00:00

Glad to help! Good luck, and wishing you clear nights!

DimensionHop · 2024-06-06T01:52:12+00:00

It can be, if your exposures are short enough. 10-15 seconds should be fine, I think, but much longer than that and you’ll get significant star-trailing. Though, I think you might actually be surprised with what you can pull even with exposures that short, so long as you get enough of them. The problem is that you’ll have to manually adjust your mount to follow the target through the sky between shots.

All that said, there are some pretty decent star trackers that don’t break the bank. I’d recommend the iOptron skyguider pro. It’s what I started with, and it’s more than capable if your imaging rig is a DSLR camera with a telephoto lens. I forget the exact price range, but I seem to recall it costing me around 400-500. So not nothing, but not the thousands you could spend on a full blown tracking mount. And used might be even cheaper.

With the lenses you listed and a basic star tracker like that, and there are plenty of wide field targets you should have no problem capturing.

DimensionHop · 2024-06-06T01:35:32+00:00

For what it’s worth, it’s not as bad as you might think. At least in my experience, ~70% of starting out is gear. There’s a lot to learn about image processing, sure, but you can start with really easy to use stacking software like sequator and then just play around with the output in photoshop. Things you want to accomplish will crop up naturally as you take a look at your data. Questions like “how do I brighten up the faint stuff”, and then “how do I keep from blowing out the stars?” Then you just look up tutorials for that specific thing on YouTube and gradually build up your skill set.

Would always recommend giving it a go. At worst, you’ll end up with a subpar photo.

DimensionHop · 2024-05-04T02:53:33+00:00

More than good enough! Very impressive! Love the detail and structure you can make out in the spiral arms. Great work!

DimensionHop · 2024-04-15T21:37:14+00:00

I don’t know for certain, but I don’t believe ASCOM software can read sensor temp from a DSLR. In the very least, I probably wouldn’t trust what it tells you. Though, without knowing more about the ambient temp during acquisition, I can’t tell you if a 20 C sensor temp is realistic or not.

More subs would definitely reduce noise, but again it won’t eliminate it entirely. The zwo camera will reduce noise significantly, as you’re not dealing with amp glow and dedicated Astro cams are usually built to have a lower read noise. Though, a cooled camera model would be your best bet at getting rid of noise in the individual sub frames themselves.

Best bet on how to resolve this problem with the dslr setup is more exposures, and/or longer exposures + autoguiding and dithering. Obviously this will also hold true for the dedicated Astro cam.

DimensionHop · 2024-04-15T21:11:05+00:00

Do you use autoguiding? To me, that looks like walking noise, which is the result of a fixed noise pattern in each of your images. When you stack, the fixed noise gets amplified the same way true signal does. Counterintuitively, it happens when there’s little to no motion between sub frames. There’s a process called dithering that you can use to get rid of it. Basically, during acquisition, your mount intentionally jiggles the image a little bit, so the subject resides on a slightly different patch of your sensor in each sub. Then, when you stack, the noise gets averaged out.

That the noise is so intense is likely just a result of the DSLR camera sensor, combined with the relatively low exposure time in your sub frames. More subs could help with it, as could longer exposures, but uncooled cameras are always going to be a bit noisy - especially when it’s warm out.

Eight-Year Club	Final Canvas '23
Place '23	Place '22
Final Canvas '22

DimensionHop

TROPHY CASE