Ron that is beautiful and not just for the simplicity of it. Mind sharing your settings for live stacking. I’ve never done that nor knew it was available. I guess you’d just have DSS monitor a folder and anything new is just added on top of the last as long as they line up? Then bring the black levels up/sky glow down in photoshop? And of course you could just watch your project coming together in a kinda rough draft work flow?

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Great milkyway shot Max. I bet your Markarian's Chain is going to turn out great also with that kind of data.
One thing I've found out is unless your ready for narrowband (mono camera, filter wheel, spacing issues, filters, three to five set of everything and another processing learning curve) a decent filter for light pollution does have it's place. I use an astronomic's lp filter for galaxies and clusters to remove a bit of sky glow and a DMG Omega NB filter to pull out much greater detail in HA (the dmg even works with a lot of moonlight). They have some new ones for osc that are supposed to be really nice like the triad but they are expensive.
But then my suburban sky is a Bortle 7. The thing is my backyard is just so much easier to use.
Have fun and thanks for sharing those shots.
Casey

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Thanks for that edit. They looks soooo much better. Any chance you could list the edits you made? Also, that was linear data so I'm guessing that doing some of that in the pre-stretched state would really be an improvement?

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While looking for an astrophotography all in one solution that worked on a Mac I found INDI/Kstars/Ekos/Stellarmate. Great community BTW. For around six months now I've been reading and learning what the software can and cannot do. To my surprise I've found that the software, if used properly, will do exactly what it is designed to do. Almost all the errors I've frustrated over have been due to unrealistic expectations on my part and user error. Go figure. Anyway, I thought I'd share a couple pictures I got last weekend with a new scope. My processing skills with Pixinsight are very weak still but that's a whole different project.

Each are 100 60sec subs using a one shot color camera (ASI183mc-pro) attached to the front of a 8" RASA astrograph, autoguided on an Orion Atlas eq6 using a Stellarmate for everything (autofocus, platesolving, guiding, capture, dither...) from inside my house. The moon was very strong (80-90% full). Pretty cool.

telescopius.com/pictures/view/40203/deep...galaxy/by-casey_finn [/img]

telescopius.com/pictures/view/40204/deep...galaxy/by-casey_finn

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Have you/anyone been able to completely control the focuser yet? I just got one and am trying to get it working. I got to step 7 last night and it seems to have quit responding to commands/calibration. I read in this thread to use the windows software to determine the min and max then stellarmate will read that info and update itself. Is that a working option? Also, are you able to power the focuser through the usb cable of the stellarmate/pi device? Thanks

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Thanks for your help. I did what you suggested but found the problems. It turns out the pixels are so small in the ASI183MC they just need more light to work right....so after trying this and trying that I turned up the exposure time, a lot, and voila. Plate solve worked just fine and then I could get good images. Also I learned how to use the focus module better.

Related, it seems the stellermate works with two bars of wifi signal but is more stable with three bars (I moved my router back closer to my mount).
So 40mb files are not a problem over wifi. Nice

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Hello All:
Has anyone gotten their ASi183MC Pro working with ekos/ktars over wifi? I have a stellermate on my scope outside (which I love) and control it with my mac from inside. I can get the ASI183MC to focus with some tweaking but plate-solve only works infrequently and taking photos makes ekos crash regularly.

Once the weather got better I changed the position of my home router, updated kstars and changed cameras at once so I'm not sure where the problem lies. It seems the size of the files is the culprit but it could certainly be user error. Native file size is 40mb fits. I recently changed image settings to compress while at 16bit.

Any help or recommendations would be very helpful. I really love the idea of imaging with this camera at 540mm.

Thanks

Casey

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