SharpCap Forums

Like Dave I too started with the ASI120MC. I've attached a single 120-second light frame of M33 Triangulum Galaxy so you can see how the sensor was swamped by hot pixels. This camera is not designed for Deep Sky. It's best for Lunar, Planetary, and for guiding. You can still get decent Deep Sky imag...

Today's NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) is a celebration of the 100th anniversary of astronomy's Great Debate held at New York's Museum of Natural History between Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis. Shapley argued that the Milky Way was the size of the known universe and that the Andromeda Neb...

This has got me thinking...

Let's suppose I was able to actively guide in both RA and DEC. If my polar alignment is off by 1 degree can I still get decent astrophotos using guiding software like PHD2? In other words, how critical is PA when you can guide?

Brian

I visited the website. Accuracy within 30 arc-seconds is not good enough for me. I can only speak for myself and one other person but we do not actively guide. We rely on the accuracy of our polar alignment and periodic error correction. My mount is 50 years old. I have no control over the declinati...

Thanks everyone for your encouragement. I was hoping to capture more data last night but the forecast fell apart as time approached. In the meantime I wanted to briefly discuss the differences between the two applications I used in my original post: 1. AstroImageJ, aka AIJ, allows me process my raw ...

Dave, Great write up! I like your "compare and contrast" style. I too have found noise-reduction to be woefully inadequate. I use GIMP's "selective Gaussian blur" followed by sharpening, not the other way around. I downloaded Neat a few months ago. My impression was that it did a...

Photometry with your CMOS or CCD camera has always been and continues to be of great importance to science. There are many different types of variable stars. There are Cepheid type stars that lie in the Instability Strip of stellar evolution that are used to measure the distance to galaxies, and the...

One month ago I came across this "NASA APOD" image: https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap200304.html I looked it up in planetarium software (C2A) and saw that it was a mere 2 arc-minutes in size. That's quite a challenge for my 418mm refractor but hey I'm a glutton for punishment. I decided to use...

Yes, you are right I suppose. From your description it is hard to quantify "veering left".

Hi, You wrote: "Whenever I try I and get polaris in view the scope is not in the home position it is veering left.." I may be mistaken but Polaris and the Home Position are not the same thing. Polaris' declination is not exactly +90 degrees. It is +89.25 degrees. Polaris will never be at t...