Best filter for 585MC

I also use the L-Enhance with the 585, but I also suffer from halos.

I have the L-Extreme too but don’t use it with the 585 because the camera is non-cooled. The narrower pass allows for longer exposures to gather more signal on the target, but it also integrates more thermal noise on the 585. This creates kind of a trade off where you gather both signal and noise from the exposure and risk having the dimmer sections of the target get swamped by the thermal noise. I found that at around 20C camera temp, 5 min is the max the L-Enhance/585 can handle before the thermal noise starts to take over the dimmer targets.

At least with the L-Enhance you get Hb passed in the GB pixels. Helps boost the signal you capture per exposure.

Thermal noise might not be a big deal if you’re in somewhere with cold ambient temperatures however.

Hughes Thompson:
Thanks. Makes sense about the limits on the lEnhance.  I don't get noticeable halos with my 294; not sure why we get them on the 585. Will post results with the lUltimate.

Still thinking about a filter that opens up the NIR bands of this camera.  There are some good results posted with the IDAS GNB.

Maybee the "halo" is just the fact that your setup may be oversampled due to the 585's smaller pixels.

I got the L-Pro  | L-Extreme | L-Ultimate

Pro shows some halos, Extreme as the name implies has terrible halos, other than that it's a great filter.
After I saw comparisons with the Ultimate and how little halos are showing I bought it and gotta say it's a great filter.
The stars are tight, the signal even better and unless you have a really bright star, there are no halos at all.

Surely there are other really good 3nm narrowband filters, I can only speak for the Optolong and can recommend from my personal experience.

My latest picture for reference, no halos at all. L-Ultimate
A older picture with lots of halosL-Extreme

Long exposures or short exposure?

15s is in the "short" category and 60s in the "long" category. For the former I'd recommend gain=252 and offset the minimum you can get away with. For the latter i'd use gain=50 and offset=20.

I've been testing the 585 with different scopes and filters an I've posted a couple of images.  I tried the IDAS GNB and got terrible results with very bad halos.  I ended up returning the filter and I'm wondering how advantage of the NIR sensitivity of this camera without getting halos.
 
I got the best results with the Optolong lUltimate filter, see below:



Gamma Cygni Nebula IC1318



Dumbbell Nebula M27

Hi 585 gang,

I have a question about guiding.

First of all, I barely know how it works. I know you plug your guide camera into the mount and it guides. How? Idk 

I guess software 

But my question is; Can I use my asi 585 as a main camera and a guide camera? At the same time? Does it work that way?

Plz explain how all of it works

andrea tasselli:
To answer your first question: no, you can't. You either use a guidescope or an OAG and a separate camera. So, it doesn't work that way. You need a program, let's say PHD2, to do the guiding and normally it sends the commands to the mount but if the mount isn't connected to some kind of computer where the guiding program runs then you'd need to connect the guider ST-4 output to the the mount ST-4 input via, you guessed right, an ST-4 cable.

If I'm using Star Adventurer 2i, is it really worth it? Will buying a guide camera really improve the result? If I use under 300mm FL

If you own a refractor that is not super well corrected between 400nm and 700nm you should try something like a CLS-CCD which starts at 425ish and cuts at 685ish
If you own a reflector and you trust the glass element (corrector) with your life then it should be no problem
This little chip has a very high sensitivity on IR and still some on the UV spectre
For my IMX585 cooled camera I chose Antlia Triband as it starts at ~425nm but still it is considerably agressive. 
A CLS-CCD should give decent results if you can deal with unbalanced colors in post processing

Alien_Enthusiast:

andrea tasselli:
To answer your first question: no, you can't. You either use a guidescope or an OAG and a separate camera. So, it doesn't work that way. You need a program, let's say PHD2, to do the guiding and normally it sends the commands to the mount but if the mount isn't connected to some kind of computer where the guiding program runs then you'd need to connect the guider ST-4 output to the the mount ST-4 input via, you guessed right, an ST-4 cable.

If I'm using Star Adventurer 2i, is it really worth it? Will buying a guide camera really improve the result? If I use under 300mm FL

I tried to guide mine, but it was doing more harm than good. I did not spend too much time optimizing the parameters, though. Also the fact that you can only correct RA and not Dec, is not helping.

If your setup is not too heavy and it well balanced, you should be able to take exposures of up to 2min. At least with my rokinon 135mm on a simple ball head it works quite nicely up to 2min. 300mm might be a bit of a stretch, but even then, if you manage 30s, that is enough to collect lots of lights and bump your SNR.

I love using the SW SA2i bc of simplicity, it will be soon my only mount once I go full remote with the main rig 😄 adding guiding is something I will mess around in the future again  but just for fun.