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That's a terrific image Stuart and just shows what can be done with the evolving meta these days: short subs, no guiding, no calibration frames, urban skies... Really impressive.

You can indeed build up a dark library and re-use them for a good long time (a year or more - cameras do evolve and get more defects). Some software (PixInsight for example) will adjust the way darks are applied to compensate for different exposures etc but I prefer to take matched darks still. Now that said, today's cooled astro cameras are so quiet that you can definitely get away without using darks and just using hot/cold pixel correction in software. Using flats was probably the single thing that improved my images the most even though. I tend to cheat though: I make sure everything is super clean so I take flats with an EL panel and reuse them.

From the wife... yes. The trouble is still the trees!

Looking good Francis. I've been clouded out here for months (obsy project on hold but without it I can't take advantage of the couple of hours of clear skies before the rain...)

Beat me to it!

This is the famed Philips SPC900NC - webcam of choice for the early "lucky" imagers. They certainly used to be worth a few quid so would be worth putting it on the for sale forum if you don't want it...

Ah yes... I was forgetting how big the FLI ML16200 chip is in comparison to the Atik 460/490 that I usually use. I very much enjoyed seeing this image Brendan so thanks, as ever, for sharing.

Another wonderful image Brendan. Is this a mosaic, I wonder? - I recall this being a pretty big target.

Bit late to the party but just to add my appreciation of this terrific image, Ciarán. Loving Olly's mash up too - what a wonderful part of the sky... Great stuff...

Nice image Bobby. On my monitor the background looks a bit black to me and I wonder if you've clipped the black point at some stage. Cheers, Ian

Lovely image Rob - congrats.

Wowsers - what a surprise. Thanks so much - lots of great renditions and I am absolutely honoured. I agree with @Grant - this is a tough target to process. In honesty, I was never particularly happy with the results I got from my own data, but the IKO stacks were lovely to work with - especially the OIII which had so much to give - and I was really pleased with what came out of the process. There were so many great images posted in the thread... it must have been tough to judge! Thanks again FLO and IKO for providing this great data. I really enjoyed processing it and seeing all of the submissions. 🙏

Interesting, thanks Olly. I don't get the same thing when I do an ABE... something odd going on! It does seem clear that the black point of the stack has been clipped somewhere along the line...

OK could you indulge me here Olly... by default I always get that posterized view of the background map (whether using ABE or DBE) but as I understand it that's just the Screen Transfer Function skimping on resources... So could I ask: if, in PI, you go to IMAGE > Screen Transfer Function > Use 24-bit STF LUTs (or indeed if you drop the STF into Histogram Transformation and apply the stretch for real) then do you still get the crude gradients? I am curious whatever, because I assume that you don't usually see backgrounds looking like this... so something must be different with this file. Ian

So I don't think that this has anything to do with your capture (the individual sub and the stack itself are definitely not over saturated)... so in my view it's something to do with the CCD range that AstroArt is applying to the stack, for some reason.