You initially point the scope-align it with the North Star/Polaris. From there you go back to a preset ‘home’ position set in the mini computer the ASIAIR. The ASIAIR does most of the polar alignment by plate solving, but I do have to do the very fine adjustments with alignment knobs on the mount. The ASIAIR is WiFi connected to my iPad where you control the mount during and once it’s polar aligned. You can do a search for a target in the ASIAIR and tell the mount to slew to it. Then it plate solves the area in view again to make sure your target is centered or you can recenter it however you like. Sometimes you must manually rotate the camera to get the framing you want. Then you set up the guiding and the schedule for how many exposures with which filter you want to use. The ASIAIR will ‘run’ the schedule you set up all night annd save the images on a flash card in the ASIAIR And all this is after you have your scope backfocus set correctly and the guide scope focused at the same place your scope is.
The images you see on the iPad are all monochrome/grayscale. With some filters you see virtually nothing but the stars until you move all the images from the flash card taken with the separate filers to your superfast computer the next day and stack them in PixInsight to make sure they all have perfectly aligned stars. Images are stacked into one image for each filter. Once you stack them with calibration frames, you combine/assign the separate filter stacks to different color channels…Then you get a faint color image that you still have to process to arrive at what you see here. It’s 20% gathering exposures and 80% processing in PixInsight. I just started last March, there is still SO MUCH I don’t know-way more than I know for sure. I’m sure I didn’t explain this well!
Leah
Dec 28, 2023 at 03:31 PM
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