Non Deep Sky Astro Imaging

Mr_Cellophane

Hi All,
I want to make this as neat as possible...

Disclaimer:
Okay so I'm not sure where to put this on the forums..so I'm going ot place it here..as I'm thinking it has most to do with the ASIair itself.. But if it needs to be moved to Cameras..or wherever please feel free to move

Introduction
I've been shooting landscape widefields, then moved to deep sky... Now I finally want to start doing Solar and Moon photography with maybe some planetary, but I think that will required a new telescope...so i'll put that on the back burner. I would like to focus on Moon and Solar for a moment.
I should start off by saying I have the ASIair, and a ZWO6200MC camera.

I've done my fair share of deep sky at this point, and the night begins with a good polar align. and from there the Go-to mount can slew to whatever target...no biggie.
I then get my images for the night(s) and I can stack them in pix...Again no big deal. But I'm looking to expand my target...

Lunar Imaging Questions:
This is all thrown out the window when I try lunar photography. I can polar align, and then once I slew to the moon, it's so bright, even at 0.01 exposure, it's so bright that the images that I get can't be plate solved by the Pix insight software. So I have 90+ images that I can't stack. I've tried Pixinsight and DeepSky Stacker.

I look at the raw image previews and yea there's no stars to be found, the moon just blows it all out.

How do you all get around this? I've heard you should take a video of the moon instead of images?
What exposure setting do you use for a full or close to it, moon? Should gain be dropped all the way to 0?
When targeting the moon, I have the eaf auto focuser, should i slew to the moon and then manuall focus it?
What exact steps do you all follow on the ASI air to do this?

Solar:
This is a long way off as I don't even have a filter yet.

My first question here.. is if I'm setting up during the day, how do I use asi air to even center on the sun? I can't polar align to anything because it's day time... Do you have to manually set up the scope then?
Like the moon question, what should my exposure and gain be?

When photography (with the filter) do you take individual shots..? or a video?

Random:

What software do you recommend if Pix Insight can't do the job of stacking planetary, moon or solar images?

Do you need Darks/Flats for Lunar/Solar?

I appreciate anyone who's read this all and even more so if you can spare any experience in answering these questions!!

w7ay

Mr_Cellophane How do you all get around this?

The way to do it is to do a GOTO to a location perhaps 5º away from the moon. Plate solve that location and Sync your mount to it. You can GOTO again to the same spot and Sync again if the plate solved location is not close enough.

Your sync'ed mount should now know its location to good accuracy and any but the cheapest mount should be able to now do a "blind" GOTO to the Moon and at least get it within your FOV.

how do I use asi air to even center on the sun?

For daytime solar, what I do is to attach a small camera as a finder and calibrate it during the daytime. This is one that I use:

The camera is an ASI290MM that has been discarded from autoguide use (not ideal for multi-star autoguiding) and the lens is a Fujinon 25mm focal length. In my case, since the finder is a few inches above the main OTA, I would center the finder on a far away tree, the same number of inches from where the main OTA is centered -- no need to worry about parallex :-) (Good trick, eh?)

Then add a bunch of ND filters to the finder for Solar use. I have a stack of two 10-stop ND plus a 3 stop ND in the above photo; or use some mylar solar filter.

You can also get a Sol-Searcher, but you will need to calibrate its position against the Sun itself, and need to be outdoors to use it. With an electronic finder setup, you can do everything from indoors. If not for having to be outdoors, they really do work quite well (the Hutech Hinode solar guider has a similar "sol-searcher" built in).

https://luntsolarsystems.com/product/tele-vue-sol-searcher/

Finally, a trick that I have not yet told anyone but my favorite telescope dealer ... you will see lots of people using dark hood etc while outdoors in the Sun when adjusting their Etalon. What I do instead is to use a tablet (iPad) to look at the image of the Sun, then connect a "video glass" through HDMI to the iPad (e.g., https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07B69VCDL) . This way, you are hooded away from the Sun once you have a set of fingers on the Etalon knob. You can focus this way too, but I prefer to also do that indoors through an electronic focuser (EAF in the above photo).

Chen

johnpd

Mr_Cellophane

What mode did you use to get your images and what telescope are you using? Unfortunately the ASIAIR has very limited exposure settings in Preview mode. You may get the Moon at .001s but you really need to use Video Mode to properly image the Moon and especially the Sun.

If you can't get the exposure down, you cannot get a good focus. Focus on a star in the general area of the Moon, then slew to the Moon. Plate solve usually does not work because it can't see any stars, but if you are polar aligned, you should be very close.
Once you center the Moon, switch from Preview to Video at the highest resolution (1080P).
Adjust the exposure using the exposure slider until the Moon shows good detail. You can go to a lower ROI to zoom in and refine your focus if necessary.
Your camera generates a large FOV, so depending on your telescope and focal length, I don't know how large and image you will get.
The ASIAIR has a built-in stacking feature for lunar, planetary, and solar, but it is not the greatest. It can generate either an .AVI or MP4 output. Unfortunately the MP4 file is transferred to your phone or tablet with a watermark. The .AVI file is saved to you ASIAIR output drive. Processing the AVI video file would be better using a third party program.

Good luck,
JohnD

w7ay

Mr_Cellophane Do you need Darks/Flats for Lunar/Solar?

Darks are useful for removing hot/warm pixels. If your camera does not have any for short exposures, you can skip it. Each frame is also essentially dithered by the atmospheric turbulence, so hot pixels are really not a problem by the time you shift and stack hundreds of frames (the hot pixels land on different parts of the Sun/Moon). IMHO, it depends on how OCD you are :-).

Flats are absolutely needed if you see Newton Rings -- but it is probably better to use a tilt plate to optically remove the Newton Rings. The Sun/Moon are only about 0.5º across, but you may still want to use flat frames for full disk captures. Again, how OCD are you?

Get a couple of books. Amazon has plenty of books on Astrophotography, and many have chapters on Sun and Moon astrophotos.

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=astrophotography

This one, for example, has chapters on Solar and Lunar (and eclipse) photography (and even availble as Kindle):

https://www.amazon.com/Astrophotography-Thierry-Legault/dp/1937538435

Chen