Noob advice wanted please

Hi @DubbleOHnegative and welcome!
Ok, so exposure is a very tricky thing with lots of factors that I'm going to leave alone (mostly) as there are others on here who are much more experienced than me.

The one comment I would make is that 5 min subs for Orion _have_ to be paired with shorter exposures to build an HDR composite. You can see this in the image you shared. The core of Orion (and a lot of the stars) are completely blown out.

I don't know how important bias frames are for a cooled camera. someone else will need to chime in there.

Flats should be taken with every imaging session as part of their purpose is to 'remove' things like sensor/lens dust from the final image as well as correcting for things like vignetting. Depending on how long your flat exposure time is, you may need to take dark flats as well (darks that are the same exposure time as the flats).

you almost certainly need darks because the ASI1294 can show amp glow and you need darks to remove that.
You can create a library of master darks but they will have to be retaken every so often (I think I've heard either of 3 or 6 months most often)

If you have already bought PixInsight, buckle up and buckle down. Tons of great youtube tutorials on it and the PixInsight forums are really helpful. there are even a few books on it! Use the Weighted Batch Pre-Processing Script for your basic calibration and integration.

If you haven't bought PixInsight, you might want to look at Siril. It's a little rough around the edges but has a much more streamlined workflow compared to PixInsight. @Daniel Erickson might be able to provide some insight on SiriL

I believe that CMOS sensors are notorius for 'star bloat'. shorter subs or doing an HDR composite of longer and shorter subs will help. There are also post-processing techniques for reducing star size (in PixInsight, there is even a plugin called 'EZ processing suite' that has a script for star size reduction)

Hope that helps!

Clear Skies,
Clint

FWIW, here's what an HDR composite can do for you with M42:


M42 - HDR
Details are in the technical card

Clint:
FWIW, here's what an HDR composite can do for you with M42:

Thanks Clint that looks pretty awesome!  That’s the kind of stuff I’m after.  I really love all the points you got on the stars too.

@DubbleOHnegative are you commenting and then deleting? I keep getting notifications that you commented here but then there isn’t a comment???

Double ONeg:
 The best general advise I can give to you is to study other peoples images here on Astrobin of targets you want to try and read their technical cards. You should try to find members with similar equipment to you and experiment with the settings they use.  Unfortunately the reality is that there are no shortcuts, you have to learn the basics and then dive head first into complex processing tools like Pixinsight.  Clint is right about this.  I own an asi294 and it is a great camera and star bloating is not necessarily a problem with it or any CMOS camera if it is used appropriately as the target and seeing demands.  The linked image was taken with 30 second exposures only.


M42, Running Man 2020 Reprocess, OSC  

Most people have a set of darks for each camera they own as a library with settings at set temperatures and gains.  Most keep the same cooling temperature and shoot at a small variety of gain settings for stream lining their calibration.  All  my dark frames are at -10'C because that is a temperature my camera can achieve all year long.  Flat frames should be applied as stated earlier.

You should learn how to stack in Pixinsight in WBPP and in Star Alignment with Imageintegration.  I have been Mac for 30 years also, I do ALL my processing with PI and Photoshop only. 

Hope this helps,

scott

Hi, 
here are my tips:

-Cool your camera to 0 degrees
-use gain 120, so you have a readout noise at around 2e
-use a exposure time around 60-120s
-take darkframes
-take flatframes
-(take bias frames)

Watch youtube Tutorials - Pixinsight is great :-D

Good luck

Regards
Andreas

Clint:
FWIW, here's what an HDR composite can do for you with M42:


M42 - HDR
Details are in the technical card

This is a good example of learning all the time. After a year, I had no idea of HDR. There is always something, which I like.  Reading up on that tonight (since the weather sucks here and has for a while). 
Thanks, Clint!

Like everyone has said in this thread. Start with the basics and don’t get frustrated. The first time I got my first target to show up in a sub I almost fainted (Andromeda, and my family thought I was a genius!) Then I added autoguiding, then better PA, then better focus, then tuned autoguiding, then found out about unity gain and light pollution, then filter wheels, and then auto-focusing....I just added and tried out something new almost every outing. And I echo the above about Pixinsight. Don’t get frustrated, just keep trying and following different tutorials. It won’t be as hard as you think. I started out with PI and now I’m combining Topaz Denoise and Lightroom into my processing. It’s a constant exploration. Love this hobby. (But expensive, don’t tell your wife how much you are spending. That’s my marital tip for the year, LOL)

Cheers!
Rob

I would like to be more disciplined with my notebook but it is so easy to be impulsive, LOL. Glad you brought that up. 
Just got a new scope yesterday, so I installed and tested an EAF and spent a couple of hours putting together variations of image trains with connectors spread across the kitchen island. It was kind of fun and relaxing. My family thought I was crazy.

Thanks very much @Daniel Erickson — I’ve bookmarked it and will follow your advice to the letter.  That should take some of the guesswork out of things.

Have a look at my M42 in 42 minutes, by the way. I use two sets of exposures to get the core more properly exposed. All in 42 minutes... You can see it here. Our gear is comparable (yours is better), so you can expect similar results, depending on how you do in post-processing.

@Daniel Erickson Woo, gorgeous!  That’s the kind of stuff I’m after here.  BTW, I’m a little jelly of your RedCat.  I’ve been wanting one of those to do a small portable rig.  I’m pretty impressed with the results you can get with that little powerhouse of a scope.

Thanks so much, I'm glad you like it! There's quite a community of Cat users, and I'd say we're a dedicated and addicted (to our cats)! It falls short in so many ways, but when it shines, it really shines. And now that I think about it, on M42 I used the Cat with my Canon, not even my ASI183, which is the perfect camera for the scope. Thanks again for the 'gorgeous'!

What are the areas where it falls short?

Hey Aaron!

Well, you said it...literally a short little guy... Actually, with the short focal length small objects are an issue. Planets are generally out. Galaxy season is really difficult for Cat users, and clusters (which I happen to love) are somewhat difficult. You can look at my portfolio and see how small some of the notable galaxies of the season are. I've also imaged a few (open) clusters, but I love to work on clean stars, so their small size doesn't matter so much. It's almost not worth it to shoot these things, but there is at least a small group of us who get some thrills by shooting things that aren't really up to the focal length. So...having said that the Cats "fall short in so many ways", most of the Cat users I talk to couldn't care less. We shoot. :-)

@DubbleOHnegative  I want to go back to your original post now, since I never really addressed all of your issues. :-)

(1) Re: Exposure length. You'll have to experiment to dial this in. Conditions will change it, equipment will change it. Strange things will affect it. You'll have to experiment. Watch the Glover video I recommended as a starting point. One reason people can't really give you a definite answer is because of the number of variables. 

(2) Re: Calibration frames.  @FiZzZ  is right for your camera, I think. Darks, Flats, Dark Flats. You can redo your darks and maybe even flats (Mileage will vary. You can try it and see and if there's a problem, reshoot your calibration frames) My astrofriend  @Clint recently had a problem with calibration frames. You do everything right, but for some reason it just doesn't work...Gotta learn to troubleshoot. With that said, bookmark and watch this video (3 videos, actually) recommended by astrofriend @Jérémie in Clint's thread done by @Adam Block.  Whether you're actually having a problem with calibration or not, Adam's video is important, IMO, to watch and learn from. He's using PI, too, so if that's your poison, it's even more useful. :-)

(3) Re: ASIAir (I have one and use it religiously.) The AAP is notorious for dropping signal. You DON'T put a Wifi system inside a metal box like that. That said, once you start the run, the AAP will do it's job, whether the wifi gets to your iPad or not. Try not to sweat it, but I know it's frustrating to watch the wifi cut out in the middle of a run... If you actually want a solution (I think you will), tie the AAP to an extender or repeater. I won't go into the details, but the simplest answer is here. That solution works, but like most things in this hobby, it requires that you throw money at it and hope it sticks.

(4) Re: Processing. I don't use PI and I have a Mac. For some AP, that's two strikes against me. If so, then I will keep playing because I'm seeing positive results from my efforts. You can stick with PI if you want, but I wanted to ease my way into this as easily as possible and PI is notoriously unfriendly. @FiZzZ suggested APP, and that is good software, I hear...and it works on a Mac.  Siril is free, easy and works really well for basic stacking and processing functions, too. It's what I use. There are a couple of good tutorials I can recommend from reputable YouTubers, if you're interested...or I can write up a workflow.  As far as the Mac goes, you know it's "not a Mac world". We've both lived in it forever and know it. That said, there are Mac solutions to every AP problem and you just have to network to find them.  Processing is rather thorny in the sense that it is very individualized--it depends on the target, the imaging system and the user. Again, there are tons of YouTubers making their living giving out advice on the best way to start out. You can rely on them (at first) if you like, but in this hobby, eventually, you must go your own way. You're all alone in a vast sea of Astrophotographers who are also willing to help. You're a star!

(5) Re: Stars. If you mean diffraction spikes, then there are software solutions. If you have a particular type of telescope (I don't), you get them automatically. There are things you can do to generate them when you shoot, if you like them and that's what you mean... If you mean shooting so you have pinpoints of light, that's another matter. It comes down to focus...but stars are naturally circular light blobs, not pointy things as our eyes see, so you get to make one of many decisions about what you really want to do in your pictures. ;-)

You've gotten a lot of good advice in this thread. I flailed for many months before joining AB. Honestly, I would have probably given it up without the support of all my astrofriends here...but you also have to remember, you will still flail (and fail). I honestly think we fail more times than we succeed. You're just not alone anymore. I'll step off my little soapbox now... my stacking software is done for the day!