StarTools

This is an RGB image taken tonight under a near-full moon (yes I know, I'm mad...). Trouble was the moon was sat on top of most of the other objects I'm currently imaging, well I have never imaged M45 before so thought I'd give it a shot. The result was some fairly noisy data (10 x 300s each channel R, G, and B) and high background levels. After stacking in DSS (then for each channel) I performed an autostretch to visualise the data, then cropped (20pxl per side), then used develop until it reached equilibrium (keep pressing Home-in button). Then I ran a Wipe (512x512 precision) followed by another global develop, then created a star mask. I used Auto for the star mask but then these fat stars needed personal attention to mask them out. Then I used Deconvolve (2pxl radius, 16 iterations, 7.0pxl mask fuzz). That was all - after that I stopped tracking and de-noised. After doing this for each channel I used AstroArt5 to register the frames, then back into StarTools and used LRGB composition to combine the RGB. A few tweaks with brightness and colour and the image is complete as you see here.



ChrisH

Like!

Those bright stars are hard to keep under control. Did you have any problems with that?

admin wrote:Like!

Those bright stars are hard to keep under control. Did you have any problems with that?

Thanks Ivo, there was not much I could do with the major stars so I just masked them out and left them as they were while applying decon to the nebulous stuff. It was not a good night to be doing this anyway so I was pleased to get anything!

ChrisH