I am new to the site and unfamiliar with your practices. My experience on DSOs is all through remote imaging starting in June. My only DIY experience in my light polluted, view restricted Washington, DC location is planetary drift videos on a homemade 6" Dob I built 22 years ago.

I put in a simple first request for 1 hour each of 300 sec exposures in S2, Ha, and O3 on the Heart Nebula from your OSG46 unit in Italy. On FTP I see generic bias, darks, and flats directories but none of the flats match my exposure length. I also see a directory for Poseiden-M Pro with sub directories by temperature and bin. My guess is that I should select the temperature subdirectory that matches my lights (-15 last night) in this directory, and the bin1 subdirectory for my calibration files. I would select the 300s darks. I see a variety of autoflats for different filters. None of them match my exposures but I don't know if that matters. Absent further guidence I would just grab the auto flats and bias frames in the -15/bin1 directory and use them.

If someone is monitoring these discussions, can you give me a bit of beginner guidance on calibration frames?

As an aside, looking through the FAQs I saw something about this network starting out in the Dolomites? Are you still headquartered there? It is one of my favorite areas in the world. I have been on two bike tours there.

Hi Donheff,

Flats only need to match your binning, gain, and offset values. All of the observatories here (of which I am an owner of one) have their own methods of providing calibration data. For customers of ours (Dark Matters CDK14 in NM, and CDK20 at El Sauce, Chile coming online early Jan 2024) we provide flat masters that match the customer requests, and keep our dark library up to date. To save on space for SkyGems we do not auto-upload everything, but we usually get the flats online within 24-48 hours after the request has completed.

HTH,
Bill Long

7 months later

What is the current status of providing calibration files for the Tecnosky Newton230 in Italy? The folder identified for those files on the Observation Planning screen doesn't exist. Also the initial data I obtained on May 11th with that telescope came from a much smaller field-of-view than advertised as being available on the Planning screen. The acquired frames only covered about 1/4 of the expected angular area of sky. When the calibration data come, will they cover this reduced field-of-view, making these existing data usable or should I request a refund?

I received the Tecnosky Newton230 on May 10th. A total of 36 shots (22956 9_NGC 5982) can be taken, but they have no value for me without calibration images.
FG Tomas

15 days later

I logged onto the forum to see if I could get some help and saw this thread and thought, "great. maybe they are talking about the stuff I need to know." Then I saw it was my thread 🙁 I am still pretty clueless on calibration files, although usually either I get them right or close enough not to matter. But I found some strange ones today that I have questions about.

I ran a session on NGC 5128 the other night on the Hakos iDK 20" in Namibia (RID 22909). with 300 sec LRGB lights. I grabbed what I thought would be the proper calibration files (the most recent batch) and when I processed the image, I got a distinct vertical black line on the left side of the galaxy. When I looked at the calibration files I saw that both the darks and the bias frames have that line. The lights do not. If I process the stack with flats only, I don't get the line but I do get some other artifacts that didn't appear when I had the darks and flats.

Can anyone suggest what the right bias and darks would be for 300 sec exposures on Jun 2. What I used were the 3 300-1 darks from 4/20 of the year and the only bias I guessed would be right were also from 4/20 and are 000-1s. The flats were from 4/10 and 4/11 and are 20-1s which I think were the only recent ones.

    donheff Just an update, I browsed thru some previous bias and dark files and used some that didn't have the offending vertical line. I ran them thru WBPP and on a quick autostretch view I don't see a problem. I would love to know whether I was just blindly picking the wrong files or if the files I used were faulty.

      The owner of the Tecnosky Newton will gather some more calibration data and upload it these days.

      a month later

      I need bin1 bias, Ha flat and OIII flat cal files for the FSQ106 telescope in Namibia. The few recent bin1 bias files on the website all are empty (0 kB), and the "latest" bin1 narrowband flats through the Ha and OIII filters were taken last fall.

      The bin1 bias files were taken, but not the flats.

      It looks like the telescope is taking bin2 flats rather than bin1 flats. In retrospect, I forgot that the camera has a CMOS camera and that taking the target data at bin2 would have made more sense than the bin1 option I selected. But my data were taken at bin1. Is it programmed to do those once it finishes the bin2 set?

      Still on it... We had troubles with the dome in the last nights which shall now be fixed.

      17 days later

      I need bin2 flat calibration files in the H-alpha and SII bands for the CDK500 at Nerpio in support of RIDs 24596 and 24649. All of the flat files in the Dusk Flats and Default-AutoFlats folders on the SkyGems web are for bin1,

      7 days later

      They still haven't been taken after a week has elapsed.

      @SkG ok that's odd... let me check what happened.

      EDIT: I mixed up filenames, sorry for that. Shall be taken tonight, weather permitting.

      What's the difference between the default autoflats and the dusk flats? There are now Ha bin2 entries in each of those folders; which should I use. Currently, bin2 SII flats only appear in the dusk flats folder.

      Hi @SkG ,

      try the latest of either series. Some get taken at dusk, the others at dawn 🙂