Xiga

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?

I've had the same experience Adam. What looks best on screen tends to look a bit underwhelming when printed. You almost have to 'over-process' the image a bit for it to look it's best in printed form. Interested to see how you get on with your multiple versions.

Yup 🙂

Hi Steve Seeing as you are cropping in P.I before moving to APP, i presume that means you are using P.I for stacking the individual panels? If so, then i strongly recommend you do all the stacking in APP instead. One of the major selling points of APP is it's mosaic capabilities, and to fully take advantage of that you will need to use it for the stacking too. Once you have the registered Lum and RGB images, you are then free to move on to any program you wish for your usual post-processing workflow. Here's a great video guide, and a summary of the main settings, if you're not sure: https://www.astropixelprocessor.com/part-3-register-normalize-integrate-the-mosaic-of-the-mosaic-tutorial-milky-way-to-rho-ophiuchi-by-mabula/ The really important bit, and it is one that might need a bit of experimentation with the settings (No. of Degrees and Iterations) is the LNC settings in the 6) Integrate tab when you come to create your 4 individual mosaics for each channel (Lum, R, G, B). With the right settings, the brightness of each panel should blend together really, really well. I did a mosaic myself recently, and i used 2nd Degree and 10 iterations for a 6 panel Ha mosaic and i thought it worked really well. I did have some issues at first, but i tracked it down to using LNC on each stacked panel. Once i turned it off, and only applied it at the mosaic creation stage, the results improved a lot. Of course, YMMV! Additionally, i would try using APP's 'remove light pollution tool' (i'm going to abbreviate that to RLP) instead of DBE. A lot of folk seem to think it does a better job. I can't say for sure myself, but seeing as you're in APP anyway i think it makes more sense to keep this stage 'in-house' so to speak. I also wouldn't run RLP on each individual panel. I would only run it on each 4 fully-completed mosaic channels, and then again on the combined RGB mosaic. HTH.

Brilliant post Olly. Plenty of food for thought there! I do wonder though how hard this method would be in reality for those of us not in the same league of PS skills. I haven't looked at the data myself, but it might be a good idea Adam to share the stacks for the two Lum panels. Then we could see if there is a better starting mosaic possible. I know you use APP for stacking. Did you use any LNC (Local Normalisation) settings when creating the mosaic? I recently did a quick 6 panel mosaic in APP. With no LNC, the varying brightness of individual panels was very noticeable. But with the right settings i found it blended really, really well, so much so that I don't need to amend any of the overlaps manually. Olly's idea of using an Equalized stretch to show up small imperfections is a good one. With only 2 panels it will stack very quickly, so you could just do several stacks at different settings (Degrees and Iterations) and Equalize them in PS to see which works best.

Yep. Just pull some Cyan out of the Reds in selective colours should do the trick.

Thanks Mark. Hopefully the weather plays along and I can finish it in good time. Thanks Simmo!

After doing a dry run a couple of weeks back with the vintage Tamron 135mm F2.8 lens i picked up last year, i was finally able to make a start on my Cygnus SHO mosaic project on Sunday night. Conditions were mostly pretty good. No moon about, and i only lost a couple of subs due to clouds. As it stands, this is currently a mosaic of 6 Ha panels, each one consisting of 3 subs of 720s each. So 36 mins per panel, or just over 3.5 hrs in total. I still have to capture a column of 3 more panels on the RHS, with the lower-right panel hopefully including the Veil Nebula. Imaging time is hard to come by for me these days, so I'm only aiming for upwards of 100 mins per panel, but might make do with just 60 mins instead. Haven't decided yet, depends on how co-operative the weather is over the next while. In any case, the overall goal is not for a deep image, but a big one, showing the large-scale nebulosity throughout the region. I've since picked up another vintage lens, this time a Zuiko 50mm F1.8. The plan is to use this to shoot the Oiii and Sii. It turns out that the FOV of the 50mm is almost identical to the 9 panels of Ha at 135mm. I figured, seeing as some people get by with binning their Oiii and Sii data, that i might be able to just capture them at a lower resolution instead, and save myself some hassle by only capturing one long panel of each, instead of having to do 9 shorter ones. Only time will tell if this works out or not, but here's hoping 🤞 I also plan to blend in some higher res NB data from my 80ED on a few panels (NAN, Pelican, Crescent, and Veil) for the final image. Minimal processing done on this, just some NR, contrast enhancement and star reduction. I really just wanted to see how it was coming along, and make sure APP was able to stitch it together ok (it did a great job as usual). In processing this, i have realised that with this setup i'm not dithering enough, as i can see what i think is walking noise in some of the raw stacks. Because the imaging scale (8.4") is lower than the guider scale (6.09") it means that even at the highest Dither setting in SGP, i'm only getting a dither of a few pixels, so next time out i'll have to up the scale factor in Phd2 to 4 or 5 to compensate for this. I probably need another 3 full nights to complete this, so roll on more clear skies, so i can finally put the 383l+ on to the 80ED! Full details: Atik 383l+ Tamron 135mm F2.8 @ F4.5 HEQ5-Pro 6 panels of Ha (2" Baader), 3 x 12 mins per panel stacked in APP, processed in PS Presented at full scale, so it's a big image!

Fantastic image Maurice. Refreshing to see this in natural colour rather than NB, and i really love the colours you've achieved.

Looks even better now Adam, good work!

This looks great Adam. I really like the colours, especially the colour in all the background stars. Just a few small pointers if I may: you need to crop off your edges, the sky background has a bit if a magenta tint, and it could maybe do with a smidge of star reduction to my eye (although I'm only looking on my phone). This is also a target that takes well to Deconvolution, or alternatively, some very careful selective sharpening. Based on this image, I'd say your combo of ED80 colour with Tak Lum is working very, very nicely indeed 😎

Very nice indeed Brendan. Being so faint, it would be very easy to overdo the sharpening on this, but I think you've judged it perfectly.

Astonishing image, and level of commitment. You've made a very faint object look anything but. Congrats!

My first thought was that it resembled a ballerina. I take it you see it too?

Thanks for this! I don't use PI so i just use the standalone version, and this has made a dramatic increase in speed for me. I usually use a Stride of 32, so i'd normally have to wait 20-30 mins for it to complete. I haven't timed it, but it's now more like 5 mins. Sweet! 🙂

Thanks Sam. The drizzle is definitely making a difference for you. Good to know that 20 subs is around what it takes. I'll probably have to forego it myself though. With the 8300 chip being quite noisy, I need to do fewer longer subs, rather than a higher number of shorter ones. I could of course just shoot more subs, but I'm going to have to be pretty strict on limiting the exposure per panel, to have any chance of finishing the mosaic.

Amazing image. Can't recall ever seeing brown dust look as good as this, and I'm only looking on my phone. Bravo!

Funny you should mention Dylan. I'm also an O'Donnell. I've seen a few of his Youtube vids (felt like i had to really, being distant relatives and all, lol). I quite enjoyed them. Made me want a RASA! 😄