StarTools

Hey gang...been a while!

Life keeps happening, donchya know.

So, late last week I finally managed to get the scope out, and get a little over an hour of NGC 6960, from the red zone that is my back yard.

Now, glancing at the raw TIF (Link below) I expected some pretty pleasing results...rarely have I managed to get a cleaner result from the back yard than this.

But...the "best" I've gotten is
Unstretched TIF may be found at http://www.nightskyforums.com/astroimag ... 60_TIF.zip

I'd be much obliged to anyone who'd like to take a stab at it, and post steps to producing a better result than what i've come up with.

Managed to come up with a slightly better effort this afternoon, I think.
Colors are better, and the processing isn't so "heavy-handed", imo.

Gordon, good to see you back in the saddle! Hope life has been treating you well in the meantime.
Will get back to you as soon as I can find some time (hopefuly next few hours or so).

Hmmm... the data appears stretched - pretty rare to see the Veil as well as background noise to show up in 'virgin' data!
Could you outline your acquisiton and pre-processing process?

admin wrote:Gordon, good to see you back in the saddle! Hope life has been treating you well in the meantime.

Eh...ups and downs, you know. Just lots going on.

We DO have a new "base of operations" for AP trips however

admin wrote:Hmmm... the data appears stretched - pretty rare to see the Veil as well as background noise to show up in 'virgin' data!
Could you outline your acquisiton and post-processing process?

Exactly why I thought I had a good shot with this one...it looked awfully clean.

No stretching. Shot raw CR2 files out of the 1100D as always, stacked in DSS with the recommended settings, saved the TIF, zipped and uploaded. Didn't touch a thing in DSS's "post processing" section, and ensured it was set NOT to apply any adjustments to the image when saving.

We DO have a new "base of operations" for AP trips however

Ooooers!! Congrats!

This is strange though. There's no light pollution either and everything looks neatly color balanced, with little data to recover by stretching. It's like the subs were shot in JPEG.
Could you send a CR2 over for me?

Well, there's probably not a WHOLE lot of LP to be had. The Baader does an awfully nice job, and I make a point of selecting the darkest part of the sky when shooting from home.

It IS color balanced...that's part of one of DSS's settings...either Per Channel background calibration, or RGB background calibration. Ever since my disaster with Caldwell 49, I've used RGB background calibration exclusively, and gotten much better results.

No...afraid I don't have a CR2 to send. Once I stack, I burn them unless it's a particularly great shot, since they take up a boatload of space.

Not really a huge deal though, let's not make more of this than it is. I was just trying to find a better result than my original effort, because I'm a bit rusty, that's all. What I linked to is the unstretched (at least, unstretched in any way I know of) TIF I processed off of, so it's the same starting point, regardless.

gboulton wrote:Well, there's probably not a WHOLE lot of LP to be had. The Baader does an awfully nice job, and I make a point of selecting the darkest part of the sky when shooting from home.

It IS color balanced...that's part of one of DSS's settings...either Per Channel background calibration, or RGB background calibration. Ever since my disaster with Caldwell 49, I've used RGB background calibration exclusively, and gotten much better results.

Ok... any sort of calibration in DSS will also significantly affect how much detail can be extracted, how well noise levels can be determined and typically causes clipping and bloating of stars (as is quite apparent here). In the latest iteration of StarTools (1.3.5 alpha and beyond) a nice bit of noise reduction can be had by compensating for the influence of the bayer matrix (long story short, with a typical BGGR matrix, the green channel's information is twice as reliable as the blue and red channels). This only works if the data has not been modified in any way.

No...afraid I don't have a CR2 to send. Once I stack, I burn them unless it's a particularly great shot, since they take up a boatload of space.

Bugger Would've liked to learn why the data looks like it does. Storage is so ridiculously cheap these days though!

Not really a huge deal though, let's not make more of this than it is. I was just trying to find a better result than my original effort, because I'm a bit rusty, that's all. What I linked to is the unstretched (at least, unstretched in any way I know of) TIF I processed off of, so it's the same starting point, regardless.

Ok, may have a go at it regardless - will let you know.

admin wrote: Ok... any sort of calibration in DSS will also significantly affect how much detail can be extracted, how well noise levels can be determined and typically causes clipping and bloating of stars (as is quite apparent here).

I don't really understand this statement...since this has never been an issue before, and it's not like DSS gives you a choice. You can either do Per Channel or RGB calibration...there's no "Don't do any" option. ONE of those two types of calibration has been done to every DSS image StarTools has ever processed.

Bugger Would've liked to learn why the data looks like it does. Storage is so ridiculously cheap these days though!

It's not storage cost..it's OCD

As it happens, however, it occurs to me that i may not have purged them from the session laptop yet however...I frequently copy rather than move them over the network (on the off chance something bombs during the transfer) and sometimes don't go back and delete them from the lappy...I'll check next time I think about it and let you know.

Ivo,

Found the raws...will upload a zip tomorrow...upgrading our connection going to wait till I have some bandwidth