StarTools

I've not posted here for awhile and though I'd post a few images. The first is the Rho Oph region. I did this last year from a suburban site and really struggled with the processing due to gradients, chromatic aberration, and color issues. I re shot it earlier this summer from a dark site and much happier with the resulting colors and image in general. Canon 135mm lens and ATIK 460ex.

http://www.astrobin.com/full/200135/0/


Here's another object I did previously, M20. This time, using a C-8 I really wanted to go for a deep image showing the outer blue reflection nebula and dark nebula. This is my first object with the C-8 and it performed quite well with somewhat tighter stars than my C-11. I still needed to do some star reduction though.

http://www.astrobin.com/full/188475/D/

Now one from the C-11. NGC 4725 and 4712. One trick I've been using to reduce star size is to layer in a moderately stretched green sub stack into the master lum for the brighter stars. This works well especially for images taken with the Canon lens.

http://www.astrobin.com/full/186261/D/

Great pictures and a stunning proccesing.

I have a question about processing of images on Startools with mono CDD and RGB filters or narrowband filters. I suppose you need all the channels (RGB) must be aligned when you open the files in Startools because there is no option in ST to align channels. What happens if there are a little misaligned in the images? How can you correct it?

Yes, they must be aligned exactly before you bring them into Startools. I used to take the RGB images 2x2 binned and due to the lower resolution, sometimes I had trouble aligning correctly so I now use unbinned RGB. There is a function called "lens" where you can correct small errors.