kirkster501

Ha channel gathered last year, RGB last week. FSQ85 + Moravian G2-8300 and Astrodon RGBHa (3nm). 9 x 5 minutes each RGB and 12 x 10 minutes Ha. Everything binned 1x1. Would have liked more RGB but got clouded out. RGB capture completely automated early in the morning.

This is an interesting thread and I am a billion percent in agreement with Carol. I am frustrated at having six projects near completion but desperate for a channel in each one of them - some of these objects are now setting so looks like they are gone for another year unless we get some clear sky and, by the looks of the forecast, that is not happening any time soon in the UK. Sure I researched Deep Sky West and could subscribe to a data pool off of the FSQ106 and QSI683 scope there. $1200 is not that bad really when you think of the fortune of kit in my observatory that spends more time as a towel rack. The cost per picture would be a fraction of what we spend on our own gear considering the almost total cloud out we live under in the UK. I could afford it too. But I won't. It's "cheating" in my (probably worthless) opinion if you do not declare the data to be acquired as such. Getting all the incredibly complex bits working to make a picture, my picture, is the name of the game to me. Now, my pictures are rubbish compared to Olly's and some others. But they are my pictures. That I made with my gear under my skies with my blood, sweat and tears on them. If that gear is yours, that you set up in Spain [insert none 95% clouded out country], that still qualifies in my mind as your picture. You ran the gear and had to get it all working in order to download those subs. Processing data on scopes someone else runs, that you never touch, does not qualify as your picture in my mind. I will never like such a picture unless expressly declared as such (and many people don't). If, say, Sara gave me access to her data pool and free time on her scopes and sent me the subs, I could not consider the resulting pictures to be mine. It is a fine art and skill to get the scopes, mounts, cameras, software and everything else working in unison. That AND the processing contributes to the picture as yours. But then who cares what I think. If it makes you happy then go for it, I'm not impugning anyone. Just sharing my opinion. And not everyone will agree. And that's fine!

Really? OK will investigate a bit more then. Thanks.

Great work! How did you create the superlum? I have not heard of that before. Say hi to Denmark for me. My brother is married to a Dane and lives in Roskilde - beautiful place. Drove there many times.

Thanks for linking to my website; it is very much in development still and a ton of stuff I need to write up in the various sections. It is also a bit slow to load the home page too and I am investigating why. I intend to do a mirror cleaning video as well echoing what I outline on that post and will put it on that page. I have used this technique for many mirrors without any problem at all.

Best way to separate them is to get two trainers, put the two cold welded spacers between the heels of the two trainers press hard with your hands inside the trainers whilst twisting. This will separate almost anything.

Layering in this way was on the PI development team's list of asks for many years but they abandoned it. The only way I can think of in PI to achieve a similar result to layers is to use masks and range masks and the history explorer. It is nowhere near as visual as what Photoshop is. PS is a result of 25 years of development work and billions of dollars of investment by Adobe as their Crown Jewels. I am starting to incorporate PS more and more into my workflow now.

I've worked it out how to use masks and blur, yay!

I think these actions are fantastically powerful. They just have to be controlled by layers and masking because you want to refine where the action is applied to and how much of the action to apply. You can do that with masks and layers and opacity. I am sure you can edit the actions themselves if you were knowledgeable enough but there is little point when you can use in built Photoshop tools to adjust the effect of an action on your subject. I can't work out how to generate a range mask with fuzzy edges in PS.

I think what you'd need to do is to use an action as the latest layer then "brush out" with a reduce opacity brush the parts of the action layer the areas you want to reduce the effect of the action. I don't know though how to make what an action did as a layer... I need to work that out. Seems Olly already has.

Yeah I find that too. You can't CTl-Z and go back.....

Hi Olly, but you have to use Noel's action as a stand alone process and then use PS layers to adjust the amount of effect of that action - i.e. blend/lighten/curves on what the action just did? You cannot intrinsically manipulate within a Noel action? I am quite new to Photoshop with astronomy processing. It is a mighty powerful piece of software. Steve

Hi Guys, thank you for your input. I create a new later and double click the histogram graphic in the layer panel (to the right of the mask icon). I get teh pop up window of the histogram so I can stretch it. I was looking for a way to get this bigger so it can be stretched more accurately, like Histogram Transformation in PI. But even when I make this levels pop-up window bigger, the histogram itself does not get bigger - as per attached pic. I am on latest Photoshop CC with all updates (use it for photography as well). Thanks

Also, I found that you have to flatten all the previous layers in order to get the actions to work or else it says "not found" or words to that effect. I find that annoying as I have to do a PSD save before using an action leavign me two or more sets of PSD files for the same subject. Am I missing something please guys?

Hey guys, When I pull up a levels layer to do a histogram stretch, is there a way to make the tiny little window that pops up that you use for the stretch process a bit bigger? It's so small, like a postage stamp and easy to clip accidentally when setting the black point.

36 x 300s exposures with Astrodon 3nm on Samyang 135mm. 3 October 2019. Awaiting the RGB to complete.

"A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step....."

You could image perfectly well R,G,B.Ha,OIII. You'd beed to bin 1x1 though so could take more time. You need 1x1 somewhere and traditionally this is done on the Luminance. I have not tried 1x1 on say Blue and 2x2 on R and G. BTW - Your Heart Nebula is superb indeed!

A process of mapping a narrowband channel, or channels, (in my case on this picture Ha) to one of the RGB working space channels (red in this case) and then blending that (with stars removed) on top of the "real" RGB image (constructed from the RGB filters) with various degrees of opacity to adjust the redness of the Ha. It is very subjective how "red" to make the Ha. Additionally you can use high pass filters to refine the details. https://astroanarchy.blogspot.com/2009/11/power-of-tone-mapping.html ^^ An old article but it explains it. Hubble Palette is analogous. I cannot get this to work in PixInsight (it must be me doing something wrong) whereas it is a Mickey Mouse thing to do in Photoshop.

Got wide-field and TEC140 both imaging separately and I have got the Dob out Seeing is superb where I am.

Superb picture with some lovely structures. You could up the colour saturation a bit I think. I’m splitting hairs though.

You’re going to have to experiment mate. However, ultimately a good reason to ensure always buy a seven position filter wheel. This is not always possible of course if you have a big chip camera and are using 2” filters.

My processing machine for Pixinsight is an i7-8700k Overclocked to 5Ghz with 32G of RAM and an Nvidia 1070Ti graphics card with 4TB of SSD. In other words, a powerful machine. I built it myself after much research. Even this machine can take a minute or so with intensive stacking and complex, layered processes like TGV Denoise.

IF you have PixInsight then TGV denoise in the linear state......

Sorry mods I should have put this in the wide field section.