OSC Image...Is this beyond repair? :)

[mcbbcn]

Hi Ivo,

I took this image from my light polluted location, and it's over 2 hours. In this instance, I'm using my regulated CCD OSC camera with an LP filter.

I think it's pretty bad, but just in case, I wanted to run it through you.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/897 ... ration.fit

....& if you have a few steps you can share about the flow, that will be helpful.

The image has already been calibrated, and if I need more signal, I'll get more signal.

Thanks for your help,

M.

[admin]

Hey Miquel,

Could you tell me what object we're looking at?
It's indeed very challening data - low signal, high noise, severe vignetting and lots of dust bunnies.
Some flats would help immensely!

integration(1).jpg (73.96 KiB) Viewed 6678 times

[mcbbcn]

Hi Ivo,

It's the Cat Eye Nebula. Obviously, the nebula must be very faint, because I saw a picture of a professional observatory from Canary Islands, and it was about 7 hours.

Also, I need to do new flats, they're over 6 months old, and obviously, that is a problem.

The other thing I just discovered after using my CCD for almost 3 years is that when I debayer, my CCD is not an RGGB matrix, but a GBRG. I'm surprised at the accurate colors that I've been able to process in previous photos, because I was not debayering in the right way.

How, I'm impressed at what you've pulled, specially the dynamic range in the core of the nebula, so I was wondering if you could share some of the flow, as it'll help me understand how to work through the flow with an OSC shot in StarTools.

I plan to do new flats, and reprocessed everything again. I'll post another calibrated file. By the way, the file I posted was cropped too, because StarTools was complaining of artifacts in the original image, probably, the gradients were massive.

Thanks for your help,...as always I bow to your processing skills.

Cheers,

M.

[admin]

Aha! The Cat's Eye Nebula. Nice!
I'm hoping the flats will make a substantial difference.
Most of the detail was pulled out with the Reveal algorithm in the HDR module (set detail size to something small).
Some decon may also help...

[mcbbcn]

Thank you sir!