StarTools

Hi Ivo,

I took this image from my light polluted location, and it's over 2 hours. In this instance, I'm using my regulated CCD OSC camera with an LP filter.

I think it's pretty bad, but just in case, I wanted to run it through you.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/897 ... ration.fit

....& if you have a few steps you can share about the flow, that will be helpful.

The image has already been calibrated, and if I need more signal, I'll get more signal.

Thanks for your help,

M.

Hey Miquel,

Could you tell me what object we're looking at?
It's indeed very challening data - low signal, high noise, severe vignetting and lots of dust bunnies.
Some flats would help immensely!

Hi Ivo,

It's the Cat Eye Nebula. Obviously, the nebula must be very faint, because I saw a picture of a professional observatory from Canary Islands, and it was about 7 hours.

Also, I need to do new flats, they're over 6 months old, and obviously, that is a problem.

The other thing I just discovered after using my CCD for almost 3 years is that when I debayer, my CCD is not an RGGB matrix, but a GBRG. I'm surprised at the accurate colors that I've been able to process in previous photos, because I was not debayering in the right way.

How, I'm impressed at what you've pulled, specially the dynamic range in the core of the nebula, so I was wondering if you could share some of the flow, as it'll help me understand how to work through the flow with an OSC shot in StarTools.

I plan to do new flats, and reprocessed everything again. I'll post another calibrated file. By the way, the file I posted was cropped too, because StarTools was complaining of artifacts in the original image, probably, the gradients were massive.

Thanks for your help,...as always I bow to your processing skills.

Cheers,

M.

Aha! The Cat's Eye Nebula. Nice!
I'm hoping the flats will make a substantial difference.
Most of the detail was pulled out with the Reveal algorithm in the HDR module (set detail size to something small).
Some decon may also help...

Thank you sir!