Help with M3 for a StarTools Noob

[smartz1]

Thank you so much! I am gonna have to use those tips when I get home and have a chance to work on it again.

[Mike in Rancho]

Thank you so much! I am gonna have to use those tips when I get home and have a chance to work on it again.

Well have fun. I would say use a light touch.

But based on another new post and some reading of the module notes I was doing last night, it might also be good to get Ivo's take on if it is too selective to tame a big star this way.

Generally I've thought of the oversaturated cores and hard-edged concentric donuts (colored or not) as artifacts of acquisition or processing and so not actually real. In a lot of cases the auto star mask works well enough, but sometimes not as much with larger stars that might have extended halos and funky cores. Even moreso if deconvolution creates an extra white ring between the core and the color halo.

To me it seemed more like "repair," but maybe I was just talking myself into it?

[smartz1]

Generally I've thought of the oversaturated cores and hard-edged concentric donuts (colored or not) as artifacts of acquisition or processing and so not actually real. In a lot of cases the auto star mask works well enough, but sometimes not as much with larger stars that might have extended halos and funky cores. Even moreso if deconvolution creates an extra white ring between the core and the color halo.

To me it seemed more like "repair," but maybe I was just talking myself into it?

I've always considered them as such as well. I'm always open to a different take however. To a certain extent, I'm also more geared towards the pretty picture side than the documentary image side. However, I certainly don't want to invent something that's not there. Or at least would be there if there wasn't the artifact. I've always considered it a correction rather than a manipulation or contrivance, but perhaps that's another example of the same self justification of which you speak

I guess it kinda depends on whether it's disingenuous to craft the image to the way it should look rather than the way it looks with what we are considering to be artifacts. While it's not creating something out of whole cloth, I guess you could argue that one should live with what the data shows. But then, it's only a step to say that calibrating the image is a form of manipulation as well. But that too is simply correcting for artifacts created through acquisition and the effect of light and optics. Damn, there I go again with the justification, haha

[ionia23]

This has been quite a thread. Handling globular clusters is making me crazy. I've been working on a set of Messier Object 2 since yesterday and don't seem to be getting anywhere.