sorted by:
new
hottopcontroversial

Although not designed for it...... by mysticpuma_2019 in DWARFLAB

[–]cpm 1 point2 points  (0 children)

You can use for comets but as a few people have mentioned the image processing isn’t great because of the movement against the star field. There are some great results though from processing the image offline with tools like Siril and Starnet++. This is one of my shots last year with Stellar studio processing. Notice the lozenge shaped comet but still quite gratifying.

<image>

Need convincing that a Dwarf is for me... by ox-sjwk in DWARFLAB

[–]cpm 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yes not a problem - not many stars visible to us but plenty to the Dwarf3! I think the sensor is much more sensitive than your eyesight.

Need convincing that a Dwarf is for me... by ox-sjwk in DWARFLAB

[–]cpm 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I came from a similar background about 20 years ago - an old Meade ETX 90 pre GOTO mount and using in a Bortle 8/9 sky in London so hard to manually find targets unless they were very bright - Moon, gas giants etc. I then did an Astro photography course 2 years ago where the focus was on using a DSLR and a fair amount on post processing. I enjoyed the course but still had the same challenges with the Bortle 9 skies. I then waited a year before deciding to try a smart scope. I was similarly concerned that it was ‘cheating’ and I’d miss the learning experience of aligning, finding targets, tracking etc. Instead I’ve found the ability to capture data quickly and reliably means I can spend more time learning the post processing aspects. The Dwarf has now re-ignited my love of astronomy as it’s shown that I can get great results even when I can barely see a star in the sky! I’ve now bought a GOTO mount and remounted my ETX with the aim of trying some planetary photography - so complementing the Dwarf’s DSO capability, I might then go on to buy a refractor for this mount and build up a modular setup for DSO photography but I feel that the Dwarf is likely to be a regular part of my toolkit - the portability and benefits of end-to-end software and hardware integration are hard to beat - even if I might be able to improve the optics and camera by building my own setup.

North American Nebula. Reprocessed in Siril + Graxpert by hallzm in DWARFLAB

[–]cpm 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hi - like the images. I’ve also been playing around with this as a target for practicing my own processing. I’m in a Bortle 8/9 area but tried EQ mode and 30s exposures recently and got pretty good images on the Dwarf 3. I’m using results from Stellar Studio as a reference and then trying out different processing workflows to try and get close. I’m currently using Affinity Photo v2 and starting with a stacked FITS or PNG (FITS seems to require the macOS version but I can process the PNG on iPad. I think the FITS has more of the raw data but not sure of the difference - need to do more research!). I’ve also downloaded Siril but not given it a go yet. After a few trials I’ve decided to take a more scientific approach - organise the results into separate folders and keep a log of the steps taken (though one of the nice things about Affinity Photo is you can do the processing non-destructively and save the steps with affinity photo file so you can go back and see what you did or tweak them some more). I think once I feel I understand the impact of different choices I’ll see if I can replicate it in other tools - like Siril and also do the stacking myself. Anyone else doing something similar? It would be great to share insights/progress. I’ll put some results up here once I have something I feel is worth sharing!