steppenwolf

Excellent project and resource - thanks!

Thank you, David - I have just done a 'blink test' for you on the 35 images that I used for this image and only one of them has a satellite trail. I also have a 'rejects' folder for this project and this contains 4 subframes, none of which have a satellite trail but one of them does have a VERY bright aircraft trail through it which is why it is in the 'reject' folder (see image below)! However, some nights I do get some trails but as I dither all my images and use a stacking routine that removes all the more outlier pixels, these are normally completely absent from my finished image. I certainly wouldn't be put off capturing deep exposures like this because of the risk of satellite trails.

Thanks, Olly - now there's a thought for a new technology - 'Feelyvision' Thank you, Mark, pleased you like it.

Thanks, Tony - I am a great fan of mono for both astro and normal photography.

Thank you, Andrew, I'm pleased you like the image. Thank you, Peter - this was a bit of a nightmare to both capture (because of the sky conditions) and to process because it is so relatively dim! Thank you, Carole, judging by the rather poor OIII that I captured last night (albeit in pretty poor transparency!) I might just quit this object while I am ahead and leave it as a mono as I feel that this shows what I wanted to see. My wife will be disappointed though as if it isn't colour, she loses interest!!

A very nice wide field image, thank you for linking to it. I like your mono version as well.

SH2-115 Introduction Having successfully captured a detailed colour image of SH2-112, I wanted to try its near neighbour SH2-115 but this object is much dimmer and it has proved to be quite difficult to capture any deep data. However, it is also an object that proves the old adage ‘there’s no substitute for lots of subs’!! Current poor skies have hampered this endeavour but over four nights of cloud-dodging between 12th and 17th September I managed to collect 17.5 hours of Ha data to produce this mono image. Unusually, I had to process the data in two totally different ways to achieve the result that I wanted and this is the version that I have settled on. Description SH2-115 is located about 7,500 light years away in the constellation of Cygnus about 2° north-west of mag. +1.25 Deneb. The emissions that allow us to observe this beautiful nebula are driven by the energy from a cluster of stars known as Berkeley 90 whose stellar winds are responsible for sculpting away much of the original dust that originally inhabited this region. Image Stats Mount: Mesu 200 Telescope: Sky-Watcher Esprit 150 Flattener: Sky-Watcher Esprit specific Camera: QSI 683 WSG-8 Filters: Astrodon 3nm Ha Subframes: 35 x 1800 sec Ha Total Integration: 17.5 hours Control: CCD Commander Capture: MaxIm DL Calibration, Stacking and Deconvolution: PixInsight Post-Processing: PhotoShop PS3 Location Constellation Cygnus RA 20° 35' 12.0" DEC +46° 52' 39.0" Distance ~7500ly

Lovely 3D looking image - really like this!

Hi, the two formulae perform the following functions:- The second line is the blend function which gives an approximation of the 'screen blend' mode found in PhotoShop but running this has a slightly adverse effect on the background brightness so I devised the first line which maintains the original background levels - it is subtle but it worked well for me and most certainly, on the image that I devised it for (which was for a magazine article), it had a positive impact on the image. Hope that helps.

Thank you, I think this palette works well with this object. I too really like the mono version - Ha mono images can be very captivating! Thanks, Alan, for some reason, it isn't a very popular object to image but it was well worth persevering with for me. Thank you! Oh yes, Nicolàs, I do guide but I don't use a guide scope as I have an off-axis guider (OAG). Thank you, I'm pleased you like the image and that you have been introduced to something new.

Well done everyone, there were some really great entries!

SH2-112 Description This rather beautiful object lies approximately 5,500 light years away within the constellation of Cygnus about 1.3° west-northwest of the bright star Deneb. The nebula’s emissions are driven by the mag. +9.2 star BD+45 3216 which is approximately 30x brighter than our own Sun and Ha dominates here substantially. There is a dark band of dust to the nebula’s western side orientated north-south. I really struggled to get adequate OIII data for this object in the last month so the 21 subframes used for the OIII portion of this image were captured over 5 tortuous nights of imaging while dodging clouds. However, in the end I captured enough to produce a worthwhile image when combined with the much easier Ha data to produce this bi-colour image. Ha was mapped to the Red channel and OIII was mapped to both the Green and Blue channels. Ha/OIII/OIII version On the subject of Ha, a mono image of this object using just Ha data shows some really lovely detail in the nebula itself as well as in the background sky as shown below. Ha only version Image Stats Mount: Mesu 200 Telescope: Sky-Watcher Esprit 150 Flattener: Sky-Watcher Esprit specific Camera: QSI 683 WSG-8 Filters: Astrodon 3nm Ha, 3nm OIII Subframes: 22 x 1800 sec Ha, 21 x 1800 sec OIII Total Integration: 21.5 hours Control: CCD Commander Capture: MaxIm DL Calibration, Stacking and Deconvolution: PixInsight Post-Processing: PhotoShop PS3 Location Constellation Cygnus RA 20° 34' 38.0" DEC +45° 43' 17.0" Distance ~5500ly

The M31 image does absolutely nothing for me and if I were one of the many other entrants to this competition, I would feel cheated by this result! This really makes a nonsense of an astrophotography based competition. On the other side, ‘art’ is a very personal thing but sadly it doesn’t hit that spot for me either! However, I would still like to genuinely congratulate the winner for pulling this £10,000 win for themselves - no mean feat!

I can't think of any real advantage in doing this for just guiding as guiding software is only interested in the centre of the star and is usually very tolerant of star shape.

OK, 'Bias' = BIOS - now I see what you are asking ....... Yes I had to enable WOL in BIOS although in my case, this was already enabled.

I just had to insert the Mac and IP addresses of the observatory PC so that the 'Magic Packet' knew where to go. You can get these two pieces of information either from you Internet Hub or by dropping to command level (cmd) and typing ipconfig /all The Mac Address is called the 'Physical Address'.

Absolutely you should send it back - ignore the supplier's nonsense about 'they all do that sir' and send it back within the 14 days or whatever the limit is, don't waste good observing time on testing it - those dusty optics are unacceptable!

Certainly here in the UK, the HEQ5 is a VERY different beast to the EQ5 - The HEQ5 is much more capable than the EQ5 and both are available with GoTo

It's difficult to define exactly, Olly but I feel that MaxIm gives a 'smoother' stack with an aesthetically appealing appearance straight from the stacking process so I often use it these days for a quick look at what I've captured so far. However, this apparent smoothness seems to release a little less of the very fine detail that PI seems to produce and I can deal with the lack of some smoothness by capturing more subframes or using some of the noise reduction tools in PI. I would still recommend MaxIm as an alternative in this role but PI does excel at this early stage of the processing. Using either piece of software though, I move pretty quickly on to PhotoShop for the rest of the work! Now that might change in the future and I do still tap into some other processes in PI as I get up to speed with them but I much prefer the immediacy of PhotoShop.

I can confirm this too and for many years, MaxIm has been my weapon of choice for stacking but in my numerous tests, PI has produced slightly better results which is why I now use it for this process. However, after deconvolution, I can't wait to get straight on to PhotoShop for the rest of the processing tasks.

🤣🤣

Very smooth indeed!

If you are interested in using data from a mono camera and filters, I would be happy to walk you through the process.

Graham, as you already have PI, I would be tempted to persevere with it as it does an excellent job of aligning and stacking and I have an almost foolproof workflow that so far has never let me down! Have you tried using the 'Batch Pre-processing' script supplied with PI? This is an excellent tool for Calibrating and Star Aligning your images prior to using the 'ImageIntegration' process to carry out the final stacking? You simply select all your Light, Bias, Dark and Flat images from within the script and it will apportion them to the correct area of the software automatically and will then produce a nice set of calibrated and aligned images for you. Although this script will also stack the images for you, I would recommend that you untick this option and stack the data as a separate process to give you more control. From within the ImageIntegration process, try to use 'Winsorized Sigma Clipping' whenever possible.

Great news, John and welcome to Pulsar Dome ownership, Bob!