Hi guys,
It's my first time actively posting here after I have been following this forum for almost two years. For the past two seasons, I've been experimenting with my gear, before finally deciding I want to continue exploring this hobby and therefore investing in some nice gear. Currently, I am using the SkyWatcher 150p F/4 600mm with coma corrector, ZWO294MM cam + LRGB Astronomik + 6nmHa/SII/OIII Astronomik Max FR filters, on a SkyWatcher EQ35 mount. Autoguiding is done by ASI290mini + ZWO 120mm mini guiderscope. For autofocus, I use the ZWO EAF. Everything is hooked up to a ASIAIR Plus.
I can now finally say that I think I worked out all of the hardware related issues: I took the whole mount apart, greased it in with some high quality stuff & put it back together, so now everything turns nice and smoothly. I manage to polar align down to ~3 arcmin.
In short, my gear works at intended and I've started to get the hang of it. I still face some issues that I don't yet understand and I would highly appreciate it if you could share your thoughts with me on the matter. I am very eager to learn
So, what am I facing? After taking 30s subs of the Helix Nebula with the RGB & Ha filters from my Bortle 5 location, I use DSS to calibrate my frames. I used 15 x 30s subs for light frames, 30 corresponding dark frames, 30 flat frames, 30 dark flat frames and 50 bias frames. I set the star detection threshold at 2% and DSS only recognized ~100 or so stars in each frame. With the Ha filter, there were only about ~10 stars. I have no idea why there were so little stars in the images. The sky was clear the night I took the frames. Is this amount of stars normal? And if not, what do you think the issue could be?
I tried to post process the images anyway, so I compiled a master frame for each of the channels R/G/B/Ha with DSS. I then use Photoshop. The first thing I did is to assign each of the master R/G/B frames to a respective RGB channel on a new image. My image looked extremely green though, and I have no idea why. The stars overlapped fairly nicely without apparent trails. I tried stretching the channels anyway, but I noticed in the channel histogram that there was a quite broad spike in the middle, with almost no data to the left or to the right of the middle. So basically, stretching seemed like it would do no good to the image. I became really frustrated and started the workflow all over to make sure I didn't miss anything, but I had the same result.
Needless to say, my first experience with the new gear was no fun, and I would really like to turn that around. Therefore, any help or insights that you may have, are highly appreciated!
Thanks so much in advance!
Sorin