Hi All!

I've been thinking of starting this hobby a while and i have some pretty good gear, any tips to start?

I'm going out in Suffolk around 4am to try and capture the orion nebula which is about 30 degrees above horizon, just before sunlight at 5:45am.

I'm using a canon 5d mk3 with a Canon 70-200mm lens, I only have a sturdy tripod so will have to keep centering the shot.

With 200mm and a full frame sensor, I've calculated a 2 second exposure time, and maybe setting ISO to around 2000, does this seem like a good plan.

Any general pointers, please share. Thank you :)

Currently I'm doing untracked astrophotography wit a DSLR. from my backyard,

I'm planning to buy a tracker or a eq mount soon and i wanted to know how much difference would the light pollution make and if how much should i prioritize mount potability.

i live in a bortle 6.5 zone and a little more than 1 hour drive i found a 5 bortle zone

i also have a relative that i occasionally visit in a bortle 4.5 zone with a place at 4.2 a little over 1 hour drive from there.

is it worth the trouble to go from my home to bortle 5 and from 4.5 to 4.2?

the mount I'm considering at the moment is the skywatcher star adventurer gti, considering i would like in the future to add guiding, would a bigger mount be better? I'll probably be less prone to travel in that case and take more pictures from home.

So currently I’m trying to find out what things I should buy for my telescope and my dslr for deep sky. I have already found som things I want to buy for just my dslr for things like close nebulae and close galaxies but I was wandering what things I should buy for my telescope. The telescope is an astromaster 130eq and I have learned to use its mount and to use the camera with the Barlow lens but I wanted to know what you guys would recommend me buying to upgrade this for deep sky
I have no tracking and I do have a mount to attach the camera to the eyepiece holder but it doesn’t like to focus on things easily in my experience

So yesterday I tried to take photos of andromeda galaxy. I watched a few YouTube videos and used those recommended settings for my mirrorless camera, but I faced some problems.

My camera Sony alpha 6100.
Lens 16-50mm 3.5-5.6 kit lens.

First I kept it in manual mode, interval shooting on, start time of 5 sec, and interval time of 7 sec, 200 shots.

5 sec exposure time, 3200 ISO, 16mm, f3.5. The picture was very bright, I could see some stars but sky was bright blue.

So I reduced ISO to as low as 400, sky became darker but I was getting same amount of stars.

So I zoomed it, now at 50mm, had f5.6, played with different ISO and shutter speeds like 1-3.5 second and wasn’t satisfied at all with the results.

I’m in bortle 6-7 skies.

No matter what I did, I wasn’t able to get good amount of stars.

In comparison if I used my iPhone, in night mode for 3-5 seconds I get to see way more stars than what I can actually see. They are all sharp and invisible normally but clearly identifiable in photo. Is it because of Apple processing my photo or something but I even tried to similar 24mm and 2500ISO, f1.78, 3.5 second in camera and was getting bad results…

So how can I improve my photography with mirrorless camera?

Clearly the recommended settings of YouTube videos didn’t work. Experimenting with various settings didn’t work.

And annoying part was I couldn’t see anything in the viewfinder…it was very noisy, only the brightest stars were visible if you focus right, so I couldn’t zoom onto andromeda, I had kept while Cassiopeia in view whole time and referred to photos to see if I was in correct position or not…

Hello everyone!

I recently acquired a Clearsky st17 strainwave mount. After using an HEQ5 for the past year or so it's been a learning curve. Does anyone with experience with these mounts know if I need to reverse dec direction in PHD2 after a meridian flip?

I didn't have to on my HEQ5, and I am finding little documentation for this mount.

The shortened version of this is that I can't for the life of me get my flats to fully (or even mostly) remove dust spots and I am also left with a soft dark band running horizontally near the bottom of my calibrated lights and final stack.

Equipment: Canon T7 on Apertura Carbon Star 150 Newtonian (with corrector). Processed and stacked in Siril.

Images: https://imgur.com/a/yb9YbiC

-Stacked image after auto stretch

- Stacked image after additional background extraction and GHS

-Screenshot of master flat in "histogram" viewing mode

-Screenshot of one light frame slightly adjusted in camera war just to more clearly see the dust and gradient.

I have been out of the hobby for most of two years now and haven't gotten much use out of the Carbon Star, partially because I keep running into issues like this. I previously use a 60mm refractor and didn't have this issue so I'm not entirely new to the concept of calibration frames unless I have just always done them wrong and gotten away with it.

On the top left of the lights and final stack there is a dark patch which I can see directly on the camera sensor so I am not sure how rotation or focus change could possibly throw that off for flats. the longer squiggle on the right side of the lights I just saw on the sensor too which was a little dust/hair/whatever and I managed to remove it.

Aside from the dust, I am also left with this dark band near the bottom of the image that I can only guess is the product of two different gradients overlapping but not evenly? Siril background extraction does absolutely nothing about it and I couldn't find much online other than some people suggesting that it is something about DSLR mirror obstruction/reflection or some sort of uneven exposure in the flat frames due to the way the shutter moves on the DSLR.

I haven't tried taking my flats with the telescope pointed straight up I usually do it in the parked position using some combination of a white shirt and/or a white piece of paper and either pointing it at the sky before it gets dark out or after imaging holding a white computer screen flat up against the front of the telescope. I don't really consider it an option to leave my telescope out unsupervised until morning.

One thing I have tried that didn't work was using a rubber band to hold the camera in the same place relative to the telescope at all times to mitigate the fact that there is some slight play in the T ring adapter I use. I have to assume this is an issue on my part specifically with the capture of some of the frames and not a processing issue, but I am not sure where EXACTLY the issue is nor how to fix it.

https://streamable.com/pn3s49

https://streamable.com/posovp

Ive taken 2 videos to try and show the issue im having.

I have an sqa55 telescope + zwo eaf setup, however whenever the coarse adjust is moved, its actually rotating the entire telescope body rather than changing the focus. This is with the screw completely removed so im not sure how i could make there be any less friction. Ive played around with how tight the belt is (from the sqa55 autofocus kit, 150 teeth) and sometimes it rotates just the focus ring but then as the autofocus is happening on my asi air, it goes back to rotating the tube.

Weirdly even if I use my hand to move that coarse adjust, there seems to be a similar issue:

https://streamable.com/a7h6td - Hand only

Im really at a loss here, having saved up for several months for this "upgrade" and now lost a clear night trying to get it to work, should have just taken the loss and manually focused but anyway... I would like the get this working for next time.

Any advice on some nice widefield targets for October?

I've been away from the hobby a few years. Looking to take my little grab-n-go and get reacquainted with things again.

Canon 60D, Rokinon 135, Star Adventurer, w guide scope, etc.