StarTools

Imaged M8 Lagoon Nebula the other night with my new Antlia Golden Dual band filter to test for Star Halo
So far results have been excellent with no halo on all the larger stars. My L Extreme filter would always exhibit halos around the medium to large Stars
Also extremely happy with the level of detail from only 1.5 hrs of data under heavy light pollution
I think I will be selling my L Extreme filter in the near future

Bortle 8 skies
6” f6 GSO Newt
Skywatcher EQ6-R pro mount
ZWO2600MC. Cooled to -10C , Gain 100
TS Optics GPU coma corrector
Antlia Golden ALP T dual band filter
45 x 2 minute dithered guided subs
40 x Flats
60 x Bias
Stacked in DSS
Processed in Startools V1.7 ( not V1.8 ) Compose OSC Bi Color
Used the SHO and Interpolate matrix
Color was Scientific and the 50/50 Layer

Synthetic Luminance version
SHO versions

Comments welcome

Thanks

Great results, Martin! That's really crazy for Bortle 8 with only 1.5 hours. You have a well running setup now, I think. Stars look flawless (did you use Shrink?) and the nebula very smooth. Thanks for sharing.

Regards
Stefan

Very impressive! More nebulosity then i could get from it...

Stefan B wrote: ↑Thu Sep 01, 2022 11:09 am Great results, Martin! That's really crazy for Bortle 8 with only 1.5 hours. You have a well running setup now, I think. Stars look flawless (did you use Shrink?) and the nebula very smooth. Thanks for sharing.

Regards
Stefan

Thanks Stefan,
Yes very happy with the result and the new Antlia filter with relatively short integration time
I’ve check previous data using an L Extreme filter on the same object and pushing longer subs say to 3 or 4 minutes yields marginally more fine detail , but on the same token significantly more noise
So for the brighter emission nebula under my sky conditions, 2 minute subs seem to be the sweet spot at Gain 100 with the 2600MC ( obviously more hours with the 2 minute subs will improve SNR as well )
Yes I use Shrink ( 6 iterations) and Super Structure Dim Small ( 60 to 70% ) to achieve this tight Star field
Also I’ve done some testing with SV Decon which I will post separately
Thanks
Martin

fmeireso wrote: ↑Thu Sep 01, 2022 7:13 pm Very impressive! More nebulosity then i could get from it...

Thanks for your kind comments

Martin

I also wanted to see how the Antlia AlpT would fare vs bright stars, so I pointed right at Sadr. Only 2 hours so far, but that's enough to get a sense for how the filter behaves. Sadr is large, but it appears to be a star, not a star plus reflections. I think I can image now without special efforts to frame away from "one of those stars".