Good afternoon, I have been very happy with my STF-8300M (serial number 83F011467). Recently, some of my light images have demonstrated a strange banding effect that seems to be intermittent. I have just fixed an intermittent connection at the power jack, so I am wondering if there are some residual power supply issues now that the connection has been fixed. I have uploaded two final stacked FITS images. Panel 1 shows the banding along the left side of the image. Panel 2 seems to be okay in the luminance stack. The third image, a starless LRGB of panel 2 that shows the banding in the RGB frames on both the left and right side of the image. For some bizarre reason, the preceding R and G images seemed okay, or at least not affected enough that I could detect a problem. I was lucky to have done a set of new bias images with and without the banding artifact (I have similar banding in the dark files as well): - old master bias is from before the intermittent problem. - new master bias is a stack of 400 bias frames with the intermittent problem done last week. - newly redone master bias is a stack of 400 bias frames just done today without the intermittent problem. Please, do you have any idea what could be causing this intermittent banding issue? Thank you very much for any guidance you can give. Scott
Normally we need completely unprocessed images in order to diagnose a problem. PixInsight in particular completely changes the data range in an image to be on a 0-1 scale instead of 0-65535. That makes it impossible to diagnose many issues. In this case, I think I can tell anyway. It looks like analog power supply instability. You can see the background level doing a damped oscillation after every vertical clock pulse. This wouldn't have anything to do with the faulty connector. It's just a random failure. If you would like to send it in for service, please use this RMA contact form: http://diffractionlimited.com/request-rma
Thank you very much for replying so quickly, and after 5pm I see. I am very grateful. I have filled in the RMA and will prepare to send it in. Scott
