Xiga

Stunning image. Comfortably one of the best of this you'll see anywhere.

Well it's clearly working for you Erling, so keep doing it! I've never owned a Newt myself, but i did take a very serious look at the 130-pds and the David Levy Comet Hunter a couple of years back, but ended up chickening out as i didn't like the thought of having to meddle about with collimation. Without a permanent setup, i need to setup and pack away each session, so i need something simple and quick, hence the 80ED. But your image of the soul nebula above (which is really lovely i must say) speaks volumes of what can be done with such an affordable scope, in the right hands. I do love the stars that Newts produce, so maybe one day i'll finally make the jump! ps - Out of curiosity, what causes the diffraction artefacts around the bright stars? Is it due to the focuser drawtube extending into the light path of the OTA, pinched mirror clips, or something else?

Very nicely processed Erling. Lots of sparkle, just the way I like M33 to look. Imaging with a 200pds on a HEQ5-Pro. I take my hat off to you Sir!

Great image Matthew. That looks lovely btw. How nice would it be to be there right now?! Hope you don't mind, but I was curious how good a job Topaz Denoise AI would do with the grain. Given it was working with just an 8 bit Jpg and not a 16bit Tiff file, i think it did really well (see below):

Sorry to see you are having trouble with the Epsilon Adam. I can't offer much in the way of help i'm afraid, but the comment above reminded me of what i needed to do with the Polar Scope of my HEQ5-Pro when i first got it. It also needed aligned/collimated, as the central crosshair was not remaining fixed when i rotated the mount. I needed to adjust a few screws and then it was fine. I would take another look at the grub screws on your focuser, and see if it's possible to loosen and adjust them such that the crosshair doesn't move under rotation. Once done, perhaps it's then a case of carefully tightening all of the grub screws equally, to tighten it up so that there is no slop with in/out movement (which it sounds like you fixed before). If normal collimation, i.e centering the secondary in the focuser, followed by centering the primary, still isn't possible, then it's probably a good shout that the primary isn't sitting perfectly central. Of course, having never actually owned a Newt, feel free to take all of that with a large pinch of salt!

Very nice indeed Adam. I find IC 1396 a hard one to settle on a colour balance, but i really like your SHO version.

Panel 1........complete! Now you can start Panel 2....🤪 Seriously though, well done on a truly great image.

Hi Brendan It's true, they are too prominent in the original, but probably not by as much as you think. The black point in the 2nd version is probably slightly on the low side too. There is a lot to like when it comes to the stars that Newts produce (what with their larger aperture compared to most fracs). If you reduce the stars too much, then you lose much of their appeal imho. Btw, clicking on your image just brings up a black screen on my computer for some reason. The other versions you've seen are most-likely all NB images. NB is good at separating out the nebulosity from the stars and background, but seeing as this is a Broadband image that you have captured, I wouldn't go chasing the NB look too much, and just embrace the star field (which is gorgeous) as it is. You can always come back and shoot it in NB another time for a completely different image! Shooting in NB drastically reduces the star sizes at the point of capture, meaning Starnet can work it's wonders at removing them. Asking Starnet to remove a star field awash with broadband stars is just never going to work unfortunately. For star reduction, Annie's one is quite good I do find (you can always reduce the Opacity if you find the 1st or 2nd pass is too much). Alternatively, Images Plus (which is now free to use) has a good one-click (if you like) star reduction routine which I've been using lately.

I completely agree with everything Olly said. It really is all about baby steps - doing lots of small changes, rather than 1 big one, at a go. FWIW - I actually much prefer your first image above. The broadband stars look lovely, they really shine and bring lots of colour to the image overall. If it were me, I would only reduce them slightly. Whereas with NB images of this target, the stars usually don't have any meaningful colour, so reducing them by a larger degree is more acceptable.

You're right Ivo, APP hasn't yet added GPU support. I could have sworn i read that it had, i guess i got it mixed up with something else. Thanks for putting the record straight! 👍

14 images in a month! Blimey, that's about 3 years output in my world 🤦‍♂️ I think this one is my favourite of the lot. That Rasa really is a hoover for dust. Great stuff Goran.

I'm loving the stars in this one Adam, really nice. One idea - have you thought about putting the Nikon onto the Tak? Seeing as the diffraction spike means you can't shoot it again, why not try out the Nikon and see how it's data compares? If it holds up close enough to the 383l+ data, then you could just stick with the Nikon on the Tak, that would be your Lum and Colour sorted without any re-focusing faff, and it could also free up the 80ED to shoot some Ha at the same time.

Astropixelprocessor also supports GPU's now too. If you only have a board with integrated graphics (which most probably do) then it might not make a big difference. But any sort of half decent discrete graphics card should make a noticeable difference. I have a Gtx 780ti in my home PC and even though it's now old tech by today's standards, it still rips through Starnet, App and PS.

Thanks Wim. More than likely just a reflection of the extra time I took with mine Have you thought about using the Nikon for colour Adam? Until you get auto-focusing up and running on the 80ED, it would eliminate any possibility of ending up with some colour channels being out of focus. If you can find a way to get Dithering working on a 2 camera setup it would definitely be a big help (although I can imagine it's not an easy task to get working). I think you said that APT can do this, is that right? Perhaps one option would be to use SGP to get everything framed and focused, then just when you're ready to start capturing, switch over to APT to let it capture and dither? Not sure if that would work or not. I wonder what other multi-rig users do for this? I know @tomato has a triple rig, maybe he has a better working solution?

I decided to have a go at your data as well Adam (the weather's been crap, so it was nice to spend a bit of time on it). It was pretty tough to process, due to the varying gradient in the 2 panels, as well as the Green and Blue data being out of focus. I did it in bits and pieces over a few nights, so i'll do my best to recall as much as i can. APP used to remove gradients and do star colour calibration. Then worked on a stars image, by manually stretching the Lum and RGB images (arcsinh stretching used for the RGB) and then combining them in PS. Because the Green and Blue channels were out of focus, i ditched the Green and Synthesized it using one of Carboni's actions in PS. I then reduced the star sizes in just the Blue channel. This yielded much more useable colours, which were used for the stars only. Then worked on a Galaxy image in PS by combining a bigger-stretched Lum with a more arcsinh-stretched RGB. Some colour adjustments in LAB mode. Once i was happy with the look of the galaxy, i ran starnet on it and cleaned up the biggest artefacts using the Spot Healing Brush in PS. There were also some remaining satellite trails in the Blue and Green images, so i removed them using Carboni's Horizontal Line Reduction actions. I then layered on the Starless image (Screen blend mode) over the Stars image. Downward curve added to the starless image, adjusted to minimise any halos around stars. Contrast added to the starless image to bring out the dust lanes, and NR added to the starless image's sky background. Finally, i just did a Stamp Visible (to lock in the stars and starless layers) and then did some final tweaks using Colour NR, HLVG and Levels. ps - I noticed the Lum stack has stacking artefacts running throughout. You need to really zoom in to see them, but once you do notice them you can see that there are actually a lot of them. You might want to play around with your settings in APP to fix that. Thanks for sharing the data! 👍

It's actually pretty easy in PS Adam. Have a look here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7ixwq_1FFg&ab_channel=AdobeAsiaPacific https://creativepro.com/creating-tilt-shift-effects-in-photoshop/

I'm a bit late to the party, but have just finished reading through the whole thread, and have thoroughly enjoyed the discussion. From an artistic point of view, i don't mind the photo at all. I quite like it actually. But it shouldn't be winning 'Astronomy Photographer of the year', no way. As others have said, there should be two separate categories. One for serious AP, and another for creative 'arty' interpretations of AP. The panel they chose is really only fit for choosing the later. They should have a proper panel of AP experts for choosing the serious one. Funnily enough, a few years back i tried something similar myself (just using PS, and not to very good effect) with the very first astro photo i ever took (also of M31). I was only messing about, but maybe if i was a bit more clued-in i might be £10k better off today! 🤪

So much for the notion of having to guide at half the imaging scale! Pretty amazing Lucas. Just goes to show what can be achieved by eschewing the norms.

Very nice Goran. This is quite the tour of the skies you are on with the RASA. I'm very much enjoying reading them all, so keep em coming! Sh2-119 is one I only discovered recently, whilst doing a mosaic of Cygnus. All the times I've spent looking at NGC 7000, and I had no idea it's sitting just next to it! Looking on AB, it looks like it will make for a nice SHO target, so I'm hoping to get to it myself at some point with the 80ED.

Hi Chris Have you tried stopping the lens down at all? I am guessing you are trying it wide open, although even then the disparity in focus in the gif is pretty huge. What exact lens are you using? Some vintage lenses are ok, but most are not great by today's standards. If the lens is ok, you can get some pretty decent images with mono and NB. I recently had a go at this myself, using an old Tamron 135mm F2.8. It needs stopped down to at least F4 though. As long as your lens doesn't have any serious issues like astigmatisms, then stopping down should work. I've only had two outings with my setup, I've posted links to them below. The 1st was just a test session, and the 2nd is a WIP project to capture Cygnus in SHO. HTH.

Fantastic image, very well processed. 👍

Love the processing on this. The image has a gorgeous, ethereal quality about it. Top quality stuff Maurice!

That's some image for a first attempt at SHO. I'd say your current approach is working quite well!

Really useful to know Olly, thanks!

Very nice Lucas. What was your imaging scale for this, and what was your avg RMS in Phd2?