Finished New Moon Images

There were two more nights of the new moon that I was able to use. On the first I added a couple of hours of frames for each of my Veil Nebula mosaic panes, then decided to use the last hour of darkness to add to my Cocoon frames.

The preliminary processing of the 110 frames gave me this:

Yes, it's a bit overprocessed and some of the stars have dark halos, but I was seduced by how well the dust around the Cocoon showed up. I like the 3D impression caused by the dark background, even if it was forced. My last effort (2013) of this was in H alpha narrowband and completely missed the dust. All the image details are at AstroBin. I'll probably reprocess this during the cold winter months.

The second night I was able to add an hour for each of the panes of my Veil mosaic, giving me 246 and 240 frames for the north and south panes, respectively. That's 4.1 and 4 hours on each pane!

Here is the result:

The result is very sensitive to the Stretch Amount setting in the PixInsight process StarStretch. StarStretch moves the star image to nonlinear just before you recombine the stars with the starless image. A  Stretch Amount of 5 is what you see above, but using a value of 4 de-emphasizes the stars and provides a better look at the nebula and the dust clouds:

See what I mean? What I like about adjusting this parameter is that it essentially works like a star size reducer. When I do a winter reprocess of this I'll probably play more with the Stretch Amount.

That's it for now. Next up is the Iowa Star Party; if I can get one clear night, I'll probably shoot the Soul Nebula from dusk to dawn. I'm not counting on getting more than that, but miracles happen; I'd better make plans just in case. Maybe something with my 135 mm Samyang?

Op-Ed: Is Astrophotography Fine Art?

We went to the state fair this last week and visited the Fine Arts Building to see the entries. I'd been told one astro image had been accepted and particularly wanted to see it.

If you follow the usual flow of people that turns right upon entry into the building and then winds around the pictures, you come to the image just before returning to the entry. Go look!

After you've seen it I'm sure you'll agree with me when I say it's a beauty of a picture, with a gorgeous capturing of the Lagoon Nebula and surroundings. Everything about it is technically excellent. What you might not agree with is my opinion that it doesn't belong in the building.

I haven't always thought this way about AP at the fair. I once entered a decent-quality image for consideration; it was rejected, and rightly so.

So why did my mind change about AP in a display of popular art? Let me begin by showing you the way art entries are judged for acceptance, as described by Google AI, which I think gets it about right. Following each factor I'll include a few comments of my own in italics.

Before I start, let me make a distinction between deep-sky object (DSO) imaging and landscape  photography. A DSO image contains only sky; a landscape image contains sky and element(s) of landscape (landforms, buildings, and perhaps even people). I'm going to talk almost exclusively about DSO imaging, mainly because that's what I do.

And also please note: what I write here is not a knock on the Fine Arts judging rules, how they are implemented, or the judges themselves. I think the entire system works quite well to provide fairgoers with a diverse taste of the local art community.

Factor 1. Individual Definition of Artistic Quality

The Minnesota State Fair explicitly establishes artistic quality as the fundamental criterion for selection. Because "quality" is inherently subjective, the fair empowers each category's specific juror to interpret this based on their own professional expertise. Judges evaluate how successfully the artist has utilized the core elements of art (such as line, shape, color, and value) and the principles of design (such as balance, contrast, and movement) to create a compelling visual statement.

The judges change each year, meaning that the working definition of  "artistic quality" changes as well. The need to utilize the listed core elements is problematic for DSO imaging that attempts to faithfully interpret reality. DSO images have little flexibility regarding line, shape, color and value unless the imager is willing to make a break from reality. 

Factor 2. Mastery of the Medium (Technical Craftsmanship)

Judges look for a rigorous command over the material used. Each of the eight competitive classes demands proof of technical skill:

• Painting, Watercolor, & Drawing (Classes 1, 3, & 4): Mastery over brushwork, blending, color theory, layering, and line precision.
• Sculpture, Ceramics, & Glass (Classes 2 & 6): Structural integrity, spatial awareness, and handling of form or glaze.
• Printmaking & Textiles (Classes 5 & 7): Intricacy of the pattern, clean execution of the print process, and material manipulation.
• Photography (Class 8): Control over lighting, depth of field, exposure, and sharp composition.

AP clearly falls into Class 8, and certainly offers a wealth of options like exposure time, color channels, number of frames, degree of stretching and dynamic range control, composition, etc. Composition is more than simply location and orientation of the field, it also includes the choice of focal length. 

Whether or not the judges are aware of these factors may vary from year to year. This year's accepted AP entry without a doubt demonstrates "Mastery of the Medium."

Factor 3. Originality and Diversity of Expression

The exhibition explicitly seeks a wide diversity of artistic expression within each medium to demonstrate the full breadth of what can be accomplished.

• Uniqueness: Works must be completely original and completed within the designated recent timeframe (e.g., executed since the start of the prior year) without the assistance of an instructor.
• Creative Voice: Copying existing works or relying heavily on tired clichés is often ground for quick elimination. Jurors favor pieces that show a distinct personal narrative, innovative concepts, or an unexpected manipulation of traditional mediums.

Where DSO AP has a serious problem is creative voice. How does one give a distinct personal narrative to, for example, the North American Nebula? Can a traditionally-processed image of the Orion nebula be innovative? The goal of most DSO AP is to follow accepted norms of processing and not indulge in unexpected manipulations. 

To put it harshly, a straight-up DSO image is soulless. It's a fair point to suggest that a beautiful image reveals the intrinsic beauty of the heavens, but is that good enough to take the place of the missing creative voice? I don't know.

Factor 4. The Digital Submission Quality (The "First Impression")

Because the preliminary elimination round occurs entirely online by reviewing submitted digital images, the quality of the digital entry photograph is practically treated as a criterion. Professional artists and past participants note that otherwise excellent art is routinely rejected if the submission image is blurry, poorly lit, incorrectly cropped, or shot at a low resolution.

If AP teaches us anything it's attention to detail. Blurry, poorly cropped low resolution images would not make it past our own desktops. Digital image quality should not be a hurdle for anyone doing high serious DSO imaging.

Factor 5. Physical Presentation & Framing Compliance

Once a piece passes the digital phase, it faces final in-person evaluation for awards. At this stage, professionalism in presentation becomes a harsh filter. The fair enforces strict presentation rules:

I'm going to skip these rules because they don't really differentiate between AP and non-AP entries.

It suffices to say that anyone who is a serious DSO imager already knows to take their images to professional printers and framers.

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What this all comes down to is that the art of imaging -- and it is an art, given the complexities of data acquisition and processing -- is not really what the fair is looking for. The fair wants a personal touch, something of meaning to the imager beyond technical excellence. 

Can a DSO image convey an emotion? I don't know, but it's an interesting thing to ponder.

Can you think of some way to add feelings or thoughtfulness to an image? 

For myself, I might consider creating artistic overlays for images had I any talent of that sort.

While writing this post I thought of a way to add my own personal spin on the state of imaging. As it turns out others have had the same idea; I'm also hardly alone in thinking about acting on the idea. But I will, because I think it will be fun and possibly even be thought provoking for the viewer. 

Skies willing I'll have an entry for the 2027 state fair, and I'll find out if they agree it's worth acknowledging with acceptance.

Your comments are invited.

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It's almost time to make reservations at Lac Qui Parle!

Evolution

I'm waiting for the next new moon. There isn't much to do aside from looking at the smoke plumes and wondering when they will go away. (September? October? November??)  A diversion is needed, so here it is....

Remember Ed Ting? Of course you do. Here's a video of his from this month; I've cued it up at the salient point for my post today but I think you'll enjoy by watching the entire video. (In the video Mr. Ting is giving his thoughts on what current astronomy opinion is or is not an overreaction.)

His mention of reprocessing some of his old data and seeing how much better it looks now inspired me to reprocess some of my own.

I'll start with an image from 2016 of the M81 / M82 field. The data for this was collected using a TV-102  telescope (focal length about 700 mm and f/6.9) and modified Canon 550d with a peak quantum efficiency of about 40%.   I collected 44 light frames of 3 minutes each,  15 dark frames, and no flats. Evidently ten years ago I didn't appreciate the importance of flat frames. Ten years ago I thought it was a nice image, so I posted it at AstroBin.

The 2016 processing used (the now gone) ImagesPlus and Photoshop with a couple of add-ons that existed back then; in 2026 the reprocess is all in PixInsight + a few addons including most notably the Xterminator triplets. 

I've placed the images in this post consecutively so that you can open one and then use your left/right cursor buttons to toggle back and forth between old and new. The images have been cropped and scaled to match each other fairly well. You can click any image to expand it to its unscaled resolution.

2016 Processing

2026 Processing

The first thing that hits me is how much better my modern color calibration is. In 2016 the image is plagued with an overall green hue and the background leans dark blue.

The 2016 image is full of walking noise, which is probably why I clipped the background. The 2026 version handles it better. Ideally I'd be dithering, but that was something I was still learning how to do back then.

For structure, let's look at the galaxies.

M81 - 2016 Processing

M81 - 2026 processing

M82 - 2016 Processing

M82 - 2026 Processing

M81 is substantially improved, both in terms of color and dynamic range. 

If you look closely, you can see the small dwarf galaxy Holmberg IX, at top center of the M81 frames. In the new processing you can see its two dark lanes and evidence of granularity. The dark lanes are barely there in the old image.

The improvement is more dramatic for M82, where some structure is visible for the hydrogen streamers now. 

I'm actually impressed with the data -- it wasn't half bad. In 2016 I was imaging on an original version CGEM and doing all the focusing manually.  With a DSLR I was weaving blocks of dark frames between bigger blocks of lights in order to better match temperatures; set point temperatures were for my CCD camera. And guiding used an old Orion guide camera. Today I can't even give that camera away! 

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So, the smoke is still going strong and new moon is only 11 days away. Oh well....

Finally, A Few Nights Under the Stars

August 19

The router I talked about in my last post worked well, and I should be able to monitor my imaging remotely from now on. Other things happened this night that made it less than successful.

Imaging started with NINA doing a slew, center and rotate, or trying to. I use NINA's manual rotator, which has always worked well for me in the past. This night it did not. My first rotation resulted in NINA requesting an even greater rotation in the same direction, and so did the next. I didn't want to sort it out, the image wasn't going to amount to much given the omnipresent overhead smoke, so I redid the sequencer script to just slew and center and pause so I could do a rotation by eyeball. Not at all optimal but it started the collection of light frames.

After a while I noticed that the images were showing fuzzy haloes around stars. It wasn't a focus issue; the stars were sharp. It was a very dewy night so that was my first guess. I put everything on pause and looked at the objective. It was dry. I could have examined all the other optical surfaces but instead I looked at the camera settings. The camera was at the correct temperature (-5 C) but the dew heater on the sensor window was off. I set it back on and decided to wait and see if it would clear; I could monitor this on my tablet indoors. The images slowly improved, but I was running out of time. I decided to call it a night and started breaking down the setup.

The next afternoon I found that there was a setting in the manual rotator that allowed me to reverse the sense of corrections. Having it set the wrong way would have produced exactly the symptoms I saw the night before, so I was confident that things would work next time. 

Both issues were probably a consequence of my having to restore NINA after a full lobotomy of my laptop earlier this year; the clean reinstall had put everything back to default settings.

August 20

So, two problems, both probably fixed, and a clear night. The moon was at first quarter and there was way too much overhead smoke, but I wanted to see if things were fixed so out I went to the club's Eagle Lake site. Everything worked and I decided to do a quick and dirty two-pane mosaic of the Veil Nebula. I had planned for a minimum of two hours, one for each pane, and started collecting light frames. The northern pane finished with 60 x 60 s frames, then the sequencer did its thing and went to the southern pane. 45 frames into that the clouds swept in and the night was over; the second pane got short-changed. 

An hour per pane was not really enough to for a decent image, but it did give me data to practice mosaic-making. Here is the result:

Veil Nebula 2-Pane Mosaic (1/2 scale, click to enlarge)

Comments:

• This needs more time on target!
• Shooting 60 s subs really helps preserve star color and allows essentially total eradication of satellite tracks, Yay!
• I would like to thin out the stars better during the next reprocess.
• About that lighter area to the right of the Western Veil: is it real or is it an artifact of how I flattened the field? It compares very well to this image in which it shows structure; there's also a discussion (and another excellent picture in RGB) of it on CloudyNights. Since the veil is often imaged using LP filters or in narrowband, most images might not show a dim broadband feature like this. I'm pleased that I'm able to draw it out with only an hour of imaging!
• The image was calibrated using dark frames, flats, and flat darks. Lights were dithered, but not sufficiently for drizzling. I had about a half dozen runs at processing this before I found a good way to merge the panes. The workflow I found that worked best is given below.
• Can you find the two seams? I can't despite knowing right where they are!
• [Added 8/28/2026] Three separate cropping operations (see workflow below) reduced the mosaic down from its maximum possible size of 6248 x 7308 (taking into account the original 25% overlap) to 5980 x 7076. That's a loss of  7.9 percent in terms of area, or about 3.8% linear loss. Not too bad, but I'm glad I started with 25% overlap and had room to spare surrounding the Veil.

August 22

The night of the 21st was cloudy, but the 22nd was clear. The moon was now two days past first quarter, and there was still too much smoke aloft; the sky looked very bright. My first target (Sh2-114, the "Flying Dragon Nebula") was such a lost cause that I stopped collecting data early hoping to have enough time for a quick and dirty image of the Cocoon. I got 45 x 60 s of light frames: here's how that turned out:

Cocoon Nebula (1/2 scale, click to enlarge)

This would be gorgeous from a dark sky site with no moon, no smoke, and more time on target! There's a lot of entrained gas/dust around the dark lane that extends to the left, and it's only hinted at in my image.

One other glitch did arise this third night of four. The mount stopped unexpectedly well before it should have and signaled it had reached its safe limit. The next day I set it all up and made sure the mount had proper limits and was also correctly configured for meridian flips. I also made sure NINA was ready for flips, too. I'm going to attribute the glitch to the usual guilty party: operator error.

Verifying the change will need to wait for the next new moon, though. I'd also like to see if my setup can do a proper meridian flip.

Mosaic Workflow

This was all performed within PixInsight 1.9.4 build 1695, and I've provided most of my non-default settings for each process or script. PixInsight settings are meant to be explored, and you should find those that work best for your imaged objects and esthetics.

If you don't have the same scripts and processes installed as I use here, you will need to obtain them or find suitable substitutes. I also assume you have at least a rudimentary knowledge of PixelMath; there are two points at which PixelMath will come into play.

Calibration

WeightedBatchPreProcessing (WBPP) is used to do the calibration, and for these images I used the default settings. When it finished I had two master light frames, Pane1 and Pane2. I chose to have WBPP do autocropping even though it sometimes insufficiently crops out edges with weak signal. By the way: I've now stopped using bias frames as part of calibration; they're mainly useful for scaling dark frames with mismatched temperature or exposure time, and I never have need to do that.

Linear Image Background Normalization and Color Calibration

Both Panes: 

Run BlurXterminator with Correct Only checked; this will take care of aberrations. 

Use the ImageSolver script to solve the images.

Apply SpectrophotometricFluxCalibration followed by MultiScaleGradientCorrection.

Apply SpectroPhotometricColorCalibration

If MSCG doesn't give you the results you want there's always ABE and DBE.

At this point the linear image is color-corrected and its background is reasonably flat. If you want, you can apply noise reduction, but in the following workflow star detection will be performed and it's possible that works better with the noise left in.

Preparing and Merging Panes

I use star alignment to create registered panes ready for merging. There are other ways to do this, but it worked best for me for this particular data. This mainly entails creating an image full of synthetic stars that is larger than the eventual mosaic will be and then registering the panes to it.

I make a rough guess at the RA and DEC of the eventual mosaic's center. With only two panes it's easiest to just average the RA and DEC of the panes. I also guess the eventual size of the mosaic in pixels, and add some "elbow room" to make sure the panes will fit into it with room to spare.  You can find the pane centers by looking at the image solutions using the PixInsight Property Explorer.

For the Veil mosaic the center is  20h 51m RA and 30d 33m Dec; the size is 6400 x 7400 pixels. The rotation is zero. Plugging these into CatalogStarGenerator produces a star map image named CatalogStars. If this image appears black to you, apply autostretch.

As noted above, the automatic crop feature of  WBPP sometimes leaves some data-poor edges uncropped. Use DynamicCrop to trim these off to help GradientMergeMosaic work better. Note that this destroys the previous solutions so we will need to re-solve as needed. 

Use StarAlignment to register the panes (the correct settings are reference image = CatalogStars, Registration mode = Two-Dimensional Surface Splines, Radial basis function =  DDM Thin Plate Spline, Working Mode = Register/Match Images). This results in two registered panes.

The pane backgrounds must be matched, so use DNALinearFit. This can be obtained at David Ault's website, and more specifically here. Please read Ault's instructions for the use of DNALinearFit.

Next is more cropping! First, creat a temporary composite image Use PixelMath's max function like so: max(pane1,pane2) where pane1 and pane2 are the identifiers of the two registered panes. Remember to tell PixelMath that you want to create a new image, not overwrite one! Use DynamicCrop to crop away all the black portions of the composite and then apply the crop to both registered panes. Save these newly cropped images.

Merge the newly cropped panes using GradientMergeMosaic with type of combination = overlay, Shrink radius = 1, Feather radius = 10, and Blackpoint = 0. If you see pinched stars, you can rerun it with an increased feather radius or you can black out offending stars. At this point you will have a linear mosaic image.

Traditional Single-Pane Linear Post Processing

At this point processing follows your usual workflow for a single linear image.

Do serious color calibration by using ImageSolver followed by SpectroPhotometricColorCalibration.

Do serious background extraction by running SpectroPhotometricFluxCalibration followed by MultiscaleGradientCorrection. I use MGC as it usually gives nice results.

Now you have a choice to continue post processing on the mosaic as it is, or to split it into starless and star images. I went with the latter by applying StarXterminator. 

You can do all sorts of things to the starless image; noise reduction and sharpening are probably the most important. I used NoiseXterminator and BlurXterminator (disable automatic PSF, set PSF to about 3 and sharpen nonstellar to 0.5). Apply and fiddle with the settings to taste. 

At this point I did see some mild star pinch effects in the starless image and ended up correcting them by adjusting settings and blacking out some of the offending stars.

Because I was seeing some residual green in the star image, I applied  SubtractiveChromaticNoiseReduction to both the star and starless images. I did nothing else to the star image.

Stretching

Starless image: I used MultiscaleAdaptiveStretch with target background = 1.25 and scale separation = 256.

Stars image: the usual STF-HT method wildly overstretched the stars, so I used StarStretch with the stretch amount = 5 and color boost = 2. The stretch amount is where you can get very fiddly. It's worth exploring the entire stretch range of 4 to 6.

Combine Starless and Star images

Combine the nonlinear starless and star images with a PixelMath line ~((~$T)*(~stars)) where stars is the identifier of the stars image.

Final Tweaks

At this point you're free to do more noise reduction, adjust saturation, apply curves, get fiddly with dynamic range; it's up to you.

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Next time: imaging at the September new moon. Will it be clear? Will it be smoke-free? Will I be local or camped at Lac qui Parle state park? 

Setting up Remote Desktop on a Windows 10 Home Version Laptop

If you've ever camped at Minnesota's Lac qui Parle state park after mosquito season has begun, you know one thing for certain: the park has mosquitoes. Lots of them. Gnats, too. 

So while you're imaging it would be nice to be in a place of relatively safety; it's not fun having your blood simultaneously drained and replaced by several diseases. Some of you have RVs with doors the mosquitoes haven't yet learned how to open, so you're good. Me, I have my car, a 10x10 netted enclosure, and my sleeping tent. Not quite as comfy as an RV, but it serves.

Regardless of our particular camping style we need something that will let us talk to our gear from our safe places. In the past I've done this using a USB data cable (a tripping hazard and possibly unreliable). If there's a local wi-fi network available that's much preferred. The unfortunate truth is that, at the time I'm writing this, Lac qui Parle does not have any wi-fi at its campground I can tap into. Nor do the remote places where I like to image: the Nebraska and Iowa star parties, and a friend's semi-rural back yard.

The good news is that Chad over at Patriot Astronomy has a series of instructional videos for obtaining, configuring, and using a system that will act as a wi-fi network and enable you to use a mobile device to control your gear. Basically you connect your mount-attached minicomputer to a stand-alone wi-fi router, and then connect your mobile device to the router and remote desktop into the minicomputer. Easy-peasy.

But not if you're me: I have a couple of problems.

PROBLEM 1: Chad makes the reasonable assumption that I am using a Windows 11 minicomputer. Instead I have an old Windows 10 Home version laptop that sits on a table near my gear. Win 10 Home lacks the remote desktop feature that will be needed. My laptop is fine, and I really don't want to drop $600+ on a new one just now, so I'll need to find something to give me remote desktop access. This means finding software for the laptop and my Android devices.

PROBLEM 2: I don't have a standalone wi-fi router.  Chad recommends a GL.iNet GL-AR300M16-mini) that's mainly suitable for an area the size of hotel-room, which is fine if it can push signal though your RV's cabin wall or the distance to my tent. (GL.iNet also sells one that has dual antennae for a little better range. If you decide to buy the router Chad suggests, go to his YouTube video and use his Amazon link to make the purchase. That way he gets a little slice of the action.)

I solved problem 2 by rescuing my old ASUS RT-N12 D1 router from the family Goodwill donation pile. The ASUS is nice because it runs off 12 VDC using a standard power jack, only needs about 1.7 W, and provides 2.4 GHz wi-fi. That last bit is good because 2.4 provides better range. Despite being 2013 technology the ASUS was up to the task. You buy this router used on eBay for under $20.

I should add that technically the router can double its range if it sits halfway between my laptop and my safe area. It will just need a dedicated power supply like a small 12 V lithium battery. A single 7 Ah 12.8 V battery can power the ASUS for over 50 hours.

If it has a failing it's that it is not rated as waterproof. All its air vents are on the bottom, though, and I doubt a heavy dew will bother it.

The mighty ASUS RT-N12 D1 router

As for software, searching with Google AI mode is wonderful -- if you like having to pick between options. Word your question in different ways and you'll get different recommendations. When it came to remote desktop software for Win 10 it gave me a choice of titles, Real VNC, UltraVNC, NoMachine, and TightVNC. Let's take those in the order I tried them.

Real VNC. The "free" version turned out to be a 14 day trial that would require purchasing a plan to continue using -- making it a non-starter.

Ultra VNC. It was impossible to find the correct download link among all the ads for scams. It wasn't just me, their forum was loaded with similar complaints. I eventually clicked a bad link and had my browser hijacked by a phony shopping site. In other words, DO NOT USE Ultra VNC.

NoMachine. This one seemed promising at first. I installed it on my laptop and my Android tablet. This was said to be free for personal use but it insisted on my setting up a no-cost account with them in order for it to run. I created an account but regardless of how I tried to get it running it insisted that I enter a license key which I did not have. Google AI said this was a problem that was sometimes solved by creating a local user on Win 10, so I did that, and it did not help. At this point I'd wasted the better part of a day beating my head against NoMachine, so I said No to NoMachine.

TightVNC. This is open source so it doesn't keep trying to get you to sign up for a plan; it installed and ran simply. I wish I had started with it.

For the Android side, there were two suggestions, VNCViewer  and avnc. I could not find VNCViewer in the Android play store, but avnc was there; it installed and worked nicely. avnc is also open source.

Adding a stylus and small bluetooth keyboard gives me convenient and accurate input control. Configuring everything mainly involved setting up passwords for protection. Using built in password managers really helps!

What this means is that my laptop will now sit out by the telescope with the ASUS next to it. I will sit in my screened shelter, or maybe just nap in my tent. The only times I'll be out feeding the pests will be when polar aligning, a meridian flip is happening (must watch those cables!), or when the time comes for shooting flat frames. Hopefully when those last two happen it will cool enough that the bloodsuckers will have already called it a night.

On its first night in the field, the ASUS bridged the 140 feet and one outside wall to connect laptop to tablet; 20 feet from laptop to router, then another 120 to the tablet. 

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Trivia Time

I hope the name Ed Ting means something to you. Starting around 2000 he started reviewing telescopes...lots of telescopes! You can still read all his reviews here, and see more modern videos here. Many of us found his reviews quite educational. In my case his review of the INTES MK67, though short, influenced me just enough to buy one.  Alas, that's one of my "I wish I never sold it" scopes now. 

But that's not why I mention him. Did you know that he also solves New York Times crossword puzzles? And that he sometimes comments on them in Rex Parker's NYT Crossword Puzzle blog?

Opening Night 2026: First Light for a New Camera; A few Glitches and One Dumb Mistake

 June 14, 2026. 

It was a long wait but finally everything aligned: personal availability, cloudless sky, hardware readiness. The location was the M.A.S.'s Eagle Lake facility. The goal was to see if everything worked well. I think it mostly did, but there were several distinct glitches.

First was PoleMaster. Normally PM delivers amazingly accurate polar alignment quickly and easily. When I compare first and last frames of a full imaging session it's almost always difficult to see any field rotation due to misalignment. This night, at least for a while, it misbehaved.

Because of my laptop's problems (see previous post) I had to reinstall PM, and I used the current version, an update from what I had been using. This new version seemed not to want to run for me. Four times it failed to generate the celestial pole marker needed for adjusting the mount's polar axis. I finally got it working by using very large calibration rotations. This never happened with the older version, so I've stepped back to that.

Once the mount was polar aligned, it was time to calibrate PHD2. I used the Calibration Wizard; it slewed the scope to its preferred orientation and did its thing. At calibration conclusion it reported the quality of the calibration was poor and that it should be repeated after changing some of the settings. This is something I'll have to research for next time. 

As it turned out, the stars in all 53 light frames were nice and round, so PHD2 seemed to be working fine.  PHD2 reported sub-pixel guiding error. Maybe with the focal length I was using (about 387 mm) it's not a discernable problem. It's worth noting that during the 2+ hours of imaging there should have been approximately 8 dithers and 5 autofocuses. PHD2 behaved perfectly across all of those.

The next problem was an odd behavior of NINA's manual rotator. It was giving wildly varying recommended rotations, as if it were making random guesses.  Plate solving was giving correct results and the mount had slewed and centered the target without any issues. After a few tries I simply did manual rotations until it looked about right and finished with a final slew and center. This was fine for a simple single-session image, but won't do for collecting multi-session data or data for a mosaic. I have no idea what might have caused this problem.

All those things were eventually overcome, but I still managed to mess up the image!

At about 1:20 AM a band of high clouds came through and I decided that rather than wait for it to clear again, I would call it a night.  Then in my impatience I decided to defer shooting the flats until the next day. Big Mistake! There was a largish dust mote on the flats that ended up being misaligned when I finally shot the flats. My finished image has a nice dark crescent on one side of that mote, and a light crescent on the other. 

It's not much of a loss: I knew going into the evening that the image was not going to be a "keeper." I was imaging into the sky glow over Minneapolis and 106 minutes of total exposure was inadequate for the object (Sharpless 129). 

A so-so image ruined by awful flatting; note the lovely donut just below center

On the plus side, I did learn how to process one shot color data in PixInsight. And now I have a NINA sequence for shooting flats so I won't have an excuse to skip that. 

The July new moon less than a month away!

Catching Up

It was an interesting spring!

January and February: 

Cloudy and cold. But that's what late winter is like here, so it was hardly a surprise.

Mid march into early April: 

Covid. Yes, after six years of somehow avoiding the thing, we're no longer possible Novids. My wife came down with it first, and because she wasn't showing the classic symptoms we assumed it was just a head cold. Then five days after she started showing symptoms it was my turn, and it was a fun five day run with it. I had the latest variant's calling cards: minor fever and wicked sore throat. Despite not resorting to the Paxlovid thing by day six I was feeling pretty much back to normal. Unfortunately I kept testing positive for a couple of weeks longer, keeping me in a self-imposed quarantine because I wouldn't wish that sore throat on anyone!

Mid April and May: 

I splurged and purchased the ASI2600MC, the near-identical twin to my MM model. This year I'll concentrate on imaging with it on my FSQ-106EDX4 and a couple of cameral lenses. I'm curious to see how the results compare with LRGB imaging.

A head cold forced me to cancel new moon reservations at Lac qui Parle state park. I missed one beautiful night of the three I had reserved. Two were cloudy.

I did manage to get out one night and test my backfocus adapters for the new camera. The results were great. Field tilt was essentially zero so the camera has the usual fine ZWO quality. I always use at least one pass of BlurXterminator while processing and its default values produced pinpoint starts all the way to the image corners. Can't really ask for more.

There was a minor disaster when my imaging laptop's Windows10 suddenly decided I needed to log into it and would not accept any of the passwords I had for it. After much research I found that my only recourse was to wipe the machine and reinstall Windows. This meant I lost all my imaging configurations. 

Several days of restinstalling software ensued. This wasn't a totally bad thing, as it fixed a problem I was having with getting NINA to recognized my mount. In fact, I can now use NINA's connect all button without it squawking about some sort of ASCOM error.

June: 

The last thing I needed to restore was the autofocus parameters for NINA; I've now completed that for imaging with the FSQ plus its focal reducer and with my Samyang 135 mm lens. 

Tomorrow night is forecast to be clear, so I'll be going out someplace modestly dark and imaging Sh2-129. Assuming that happens, I'll have the results next time.