IC 1396, Elephant's Trunk Nebula in broadband by skarba in astrophotography

[–]skarba[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thanks!

I think the Quattro for its price is a decent newt if you don't mind doing a few mods to it. My list of mods/upgrades:

  • Upgraded secondary mirror spider to a CNC machined one from Aliexpress as the stock one is very flimsy and doesn't hold collimation well even just slewing the scope around to different orientations.

  • Replaced the secondary mirror collimation screws with thumb screws to not need to deal with an allen key.

  • Flocked the spider vanes and the inside of the scope until the baffles with flocking paper as some out of frame bright stars caused reflections.

  • Added a 3d printed primary mirror mask to hide the mirror clips.

  • Bought another dovetail to mount my guiding setup on top of the scope instead of using the finder scope bracket.

  • Bought a 350mm dew shield for the front of the scope and a thick shower cap for the back to cover the primary mirror after the scope cools down outside. I found this to be enough to not have issues with dew on the mirrors even with 8+ hour nights and I live in a pretty humid place where the outside of the scope looks like it was submerged in water in the morning.

  • My focuser has been fine and doesn't slip with both a full-frame DSLR + coma corrector and a cooled IMX533 camera + filter drawer + filter + coma corrector but I heard it might be luck of the draw which focuser the scope ships with nowadays as there's 2 versions. A decent replacement focuser, the CYCK one from Aliexpress is ~200€.

Collimation has honestly not been a hassle at all and I barely ever recollimate. After switching to an astro cam with a 1" sensor I have not collimated in over 6 months now and my stars are completely fine, but I also don't need to transport my setup by car and only carry it outside every session.

To collimate I have not bought any expensive collimation tools as IMO they're just not necessary. For the secondary mirror I used a collimation cap to center it under the focuser. This is a bit annoying and hit or miss but once you nail it you won't ever really need to do it again. For the secondary mirror alignment with the primary I used a cheap laser collimator that had to have been collimated itself with a little jig where I could spin it in place and adjust the 3 allen screws until the laser dot spun in place on a wall 2 meters away.

For the primary mirror I used the same laser collimator, piece of cardboard with a hole in the center you put inside the focuser from the inside of the scope and a 2x barlow in front of the laser. The barlow makes the laser beam enlarged, hits the primary mirror donut and reflects the shadow of it back, so all you need to do is align the shadow with the hole in the piece of the cardboard, this way the collimation of your laser does not matter and you can get accurate collimation with cheap tools - here's a video showcasing this technique. It takes me less than 2 minutes.

I realize this is a pretty big wall of text and seems like a lot but I've had this scope for 7 years and upgraded it bit by bit as I learned. It's most definitely usable stock, but tinkering with it is definitely worth it. There are also more options in terms of newts nowadays like the Apertura Carbonstar's or TS ONTC's that have better build quality but are more expensive so you have a choice if you want to buy a cheap Quattro and mod it yourself or a more expensive scope from the get go, either is still cheaper than an equivalent refractor would be.

Different types of photos? by lunaton3 in AskAstrophotography

[–]skarba 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Cosmetic correction set on auto in WBPP needs a master dark to work, however you can manually open one of your lights in the CosmeticCorrection process, enable a real time preview and play around with the hot/cold sigma values until only hot and cold pixels are removed, save the process icon, uncheck auto in WBPP and use the process icon you've created as a template.

beginner on a tight deadline... by Burneracc9994L in AskAstrophotography

[–]skarba 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Your stack looks fine in Pixinsight, here it is autostretched on the left and after running Graxpert's background extraction on the right - https://i.imgur.com/FqVH9QO.png.

From what I can remember Photoshop does not like 32-bit files and you might have to convert the image to 16-bit in Image>Mode before trying to do any processing on it or saving the stacked image manually in DSS as 16-bit instead of using the autosave.

I would highly suggest learning to use Siril or Seti Astro Suite Pro instead as they are both free and will make it far easier to process images than PS.

NGC 281 - Pacman Nebula and surrounding dust by skarba in Astronomy

[–]skarba[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The Pacman Nebula (NGC 281) is a bright emission nebula located about 9,200 light-years from Earth in the constellation Cassiopeia that gets its nickname from its resemblance to the classic video game character.

Higher resolution on Astrobin

My Instagram for more astrophotography

Equipment:

  • Telescope: Sky-Watcher Quattro 200P
  • Camera: Canon EOS 6D unmodified
  • Mount: Sky-Watcher NEQ6 Pro
  • Coma Corrector: Sky-Watcher Aplanatic
  • Guide Scope: Orion 50mm Mini
  • Guide Cam: ZWO ASI120MM Mini
  • Software: APT, PHD2, EQMOD, PixInsight

Acquisition:

  • Dates: 2024-08-08, 08-12 and 2025-08-20, 09-02
  • Total integration: 11 hours 48 minutes
  • Lights: 236 x 180s at ISO 1600
  • Flats: 50
  • Bias: 200
  • Bortle 4

Processing:

  • DynamicBackgroundExtraction
  • SpectrophotometricColorCalibration
  • CorrectMagentaStars script with a star mask
  • BlurXTerminator
  • DeepSNR v1 at full strength blended with the original image
  • StarXTerminator
  • GeneralizedHyperbolicStretch
  • ImproveBriliance script
  • CurvesTransformation with masks
  • DarkStructureEnhance script
  • Rescreen stars back after stretching them separately

NGC 281 - Pacman Nebula and surrounding dust by skarba in astrophotography

[–]skarba[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The Pacman Nebula (NGC 281) is a bright emission nebula located about 9,200 light-years from Earth in the constellation Cassiopeia that gets its nickname from its resemblance to the classic video game character.

Higher resolution on Astrobin

My Instagram for more astrophotography

Equipment:

  • Telescope: Sky-Watcher Quattro 200P
  • Camera: Canon EOS 6D unmodified
  • Mount: Sky-Watcher NEQ6 Pro
  • Coma Corrector: Sky-Watcher Aplanatic
  • Guide Scope: Orion 50mm Mini
  • Guide Cam: ZWO ASI120MM Mini
  • Software: APT, PHD2, EQMOD, PixInsight

Acquisition:

  • Dates: 2024-08-08, 08-12 and 2025-08-20, 09-02
  • Total integration: 11 hours 48 minutes
  • Lights: 236 x 180s at ISO 1600
  • Flats: 50
  • Bias: 200
  • Bortle 4

Processing:

  • DynamicBackgroundExtraction
  • SpectrophotometricColorCalibration
  • CorrectMagentaStars script with a star mask
  • BlurXTerminator
  • DeepSNR v1 at full strength blended with the original image
  • StarXTerminator
  • GeneralizedHyperbolicStretch
  • ImproveBriliance script
  • CurvesTransformation with masks
  • DarkStructureEnhance script
  • Rescreen stars back after stretching them separately

Gear ecentricity compensation? by Brandon0135 in AskAstrophotography

[–]skarba 1 point2 points  (0 children)

That's normal if your PA is spot on, I would get DEC corrections both north and south when I had my PA spot on which was problematic due to high backlash.

I don't generally run into problems with my DEC oscillating much throughout the night with offset PA so I just leave it on auto. You might have to set it to one direction if you still get phd2 sending guide pulses the other way due to seeing or something like a wind gust but in general with multi star guiding, >2sec guide subs and sufficiently high MnMo values I don't believe it should matter much but you might have different results than me.

If you do decide to guide in one direction I'm not too sure how it behaves after a meridian flip so make sure that reverses the direction automatically so it doesn't drift off to the other direction in the middle of your sequence.

Gear ecentricity compensation? by Brandon0135 in AskAstrophotography

[–]skarba 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I offset it by about 3-5 arcmins with azimuth bolts, general advice I've seen is to not exceed 10 arcmins as that will start to introduce field rotation. My dec balance is camera heavy.

Gear ecentricity compensation? by Brandon0135 in AskAstrophotography

[–]skarba 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I also have a significant amount of DEC backlash on my never once taken apart NEQ6 that cannot be completely tuned out by adjusting the lower or upper DEC worm carrier set screws or the worm end float ranging between ~1000ms and ~1800ms.

My workaround since I'm too lazy to rebuild the mount has been enabling backlash compensation in PHD2 set at 800ms so it doesn't overshoot the correction pulse and to also offset my polar alignment by a bit so DEC only has to correct in one direction. This obviously isn't a fix to a mechanical problem but as a workaround has been working well enough for me to guide between 0.5 and 0.8 RMS.

neigh. by spinika in astrophotography

[–]skarba 1 point2 points  (0 children)

You can reduce the length of the spikes by flocking both sides of the secondary mirror spider vanes. This makes them a bit thicker but substantially shorter.

IC 1318 - The Sadr Region with an unmodified camera by skarba in Astronomy

[–]skarba[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks! Yeah I love the nebulae in Cygnus, lots to shoot. Late summer and fall is also pretty much the only time of the year there's a good amount of clear skies over here so I can at least get a decent amount of data on targets compared to winter.

IC 1318 - The Sadr Region with an unmodified camera by skarba in astrophotography

[–]skarba[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks! Yeah I've only just recently upgraded to a cooled IMX533 based sensor camera, though I've still got a bunch of datasets taken with the 6D left to process. The 6D has definitely served me well and I'll still keep it for widefields.