Gear:
- Celestron HD800 with CGEM Mount
- Canon 50D doing Prime Photography
- Astronomik CLS Clip-in for Canon
- Backyard EOS
- PHD2
- Successful polar alignment and reasonably precise tracking (no streaks after 10 minute exposure)
- Successful with Dumbbell and Surveyor Galaxy (see below)
- Success capturing darks, flats and bias frames
- Used DeepSkyStacker 3.3.4 to stack raw .cr2 files with darks, flat and bias
- Used StarTools 4.1 64-bit to resolve Dumbbell to a decent quality (see below)
The problem I am seeing is that some of my images are noisy with a lot of red noise/lines/bands. I tried a few different things with the Eagle Nebula and the images just seem impossible to get anything useful from. I want to understand why and what I can do to fix it. Even the Survey Galaxy should be a lot better I know.
As a test, I shot a Galaxy (not sure which one) with 30, 90 second exposures. Camera noise reduction off at ISO 2000. I shot bias, dark and flats. I thought higher ISO and shorter exposure would solve any noise problems. But I saw the same noisy red mess in my shots as if the signal is too low which suggests I need longer exposure.
Here is what I see in StarTools for my Eagle Nebula I am trying to resolve: My workflow to this point was autoDev, wipe with vignette, autoDev redo-stretch (darks, bias, flats)
Here is the Eagle Nebula .FTS file that came out of DeepSkyStacker with darks, bias and flats applied (linear, auto-wb):
http://www.oakleafs.com/startools/eagle_nebula_fts.zip
I do not know where to begin solving this problem. In fact, I am not even sure there is a problem! I would appreciate your help telling me if something I am doing during the capture phase is causing my raw material to be bad from the start. Or, maybe what I capture is okay, and the problem is in the stacking or in my StarTools workflow. The score values I get from DeepSkyTracker are between 15-180. I never get any score higher than 200 (not sure if this is important or not).
Here is a zip file with 4 images I shot at different ISOs and different duration in an attempt to narrow in on the problem. For these shots, I had camera noise reduction turned on. I have since turned that off, but either way, the photos end up looking the same.
http://www.oakleafs.com/startools/EagleNebula.zip
Just for companion, here are my raw shots of the Surveyor Galaxy which turned out better as you saw above. This was done with 8 exposures and a duration between 150 seconds and 600 seconds, all at ISO 800. Camera noise reduction was turned on. I had darks, but no bias or flat.
http://www.oakleafs.com/startools/SurveyGalaxy.zip
So to summarize:
- What do you suggest I use for exposure duration, ISO and number of exposures for my setup?
- What should I do In StarTools? I have tried several of the length workflows you have shared to help others. But thoes do not help me. Just looking at the first 3 steps in the workflow, I see the following:
- ---> From YouTube, I see autodev, wipe, autodev (redo stretch). This always leads to a useless image for me
- ---> Manual Develop, digital development to 80, wipe, mess a lot with colors, sharpen (to get my dumbBell)
- Any other tips or pointers to get me on the right track for making my long nights more effective?
Bryan