Hello Ivo,
thanks for your answer and, most importantly, for your software
The coloring is spot-on - looking at the dataset it appears you even managed the slight chromatic aberration of your lens very well too (there are techniques to deal with that if it becomes a problem).
I'm happy to know that I manged to correct the chromatic aberration, but honestly I don't know how I did it
I just played around with ST settings. Do you have any idea on what I could have done to fix it?
I can see some walking noise - dither between frames if practical to solve that. StarTools 1.7 now has walking noise reduction if needed.
Yea, I saw that too
unfortunately, I have no idea how to dither with my skyguider pro. When I will buy the ASI Air pro for guiding, I will be able to dither in RA. Maybe this will help?
For star-crowded widefields like these, signal fidelity is not so much an issue, however, it may be worth finding out if ASTAP can turn off white-balancing.
The white balancing causes luminance noise to increase before StarTools can track and mitigate it.
Interesting, I'll have a look at it. Worst case I'll spawn up a Windows VM and install DSS. Unfortunately, DSS doesn't work well on WINE
I'm not a massive fan of StarNet++ for a few reasons. Intuitively star removal sounds like a great idea; remove the stars, work on what's "underneath", put them back again. However in practice the results are quite the opposite; I can almost always pick images that were processed (e.g. stars removed and then layered back in) using StarNet++ as they usually contain many artefacts and detail that doesn't actually exist in reality. I actually really hope it is a fad that will go away soon. It is somewhat useful for star mask creation for applications that don't have decent tools (e.g. PI), but ST does and all its modules are star-aware. Truth be told, I cringe every time I see an image where it was employed.
That's just me though and it's a free world! There is a guide for using StarNet in conjunction with StarTools here.
It is better to keep the stars in situ and modify them in-place if you are so inclined. There are two main ways you can do that in ST. You can use the Life module's Isolate preset (selected by default) with full mask set ("green"). This will push back a busy star field and re-focus the attention on the bigger structures. The other method is to put the stars in a mask and use the Shrink module (revamped in 1.7). Or... combine them.
I've played a bit with it in the past and, honestly, I'm not a big fan of it too. I'm more than happy with what I'm achieving with ST, so I see no need to complicate my life
I should spend my spare time to better learn ST instead
Great work!
Thanks a lot
And going a bit off-topic, just so you know, the top 2 reasons why I bought ST are:
- you: always active and always ready to give us suggestions! Thanks a lot and keep up the amazing job you're doing
- ST's user-friendliness and its results: I was blown away with how simple it is to post process an image with ST compared to other tools
Clear skies