Xiga

I too am using Mode 1, Gain 56 Offset 25. Seems to be the consensus that it's a good all-rounder and hard to go wrong with. 

Mode 3 looks interesting for those with fast scopes and large apertures, but be careful. Do not use a Gain of 0 with Mode 3. Up the Gain slightly to around 16 with that mode. See the posts by 2ghouls and my-spot in the link below:

https://www.cloudynights.com/topic/754530-qhy268m-read-out-modes-questions/

Hi

This comes up occasionally. It appears to be a driver issue. Binning solves it, but at the expense of lost resolution obviously. Maybe there's a better driver nowadays but i'm not sure. See the thread below:

18 hours ago, tooth_dr said:

Is there much Oiii in the Sadr region - would you mind posting single subs, ideally with an IMX571 sensor, 300s, but happy for anything posted in Oiii just to see.

 

 

Many thanks

Adam.

Here you go Adam. Single 6 min calibrated sub of Oiii (2" Baader 8.5nm) using the Qhy268m and ED80. Turns out it actually is quite faint after all (although it does stack up ok). 

2nd pic is the same only in Sii (again 2" Baader 8nm). More signal in the Sii channel.

Both have had the same DDP stretch straight out of APP, and nothing else. 

1) Oiii

2) Sii

1 hour ago, tooth_dr said:

Is there much Oiii in the Sadr region - would you mind posting single subs, ideally with an IMX571 sensor, 300s, but happy for anything posted in Oiii just to see.

 

 

Many thanks

Adam.

I did the Sadr region in SHO back in September Adam. From memory, I think there's more Sii than Oiii, but I'd need to check my subs again to be sure. 

We're away for the holidays right now, but due home tomorrow. I'll post up a sub tomorrow night from my SW80ed, Qhy268m and Baader 2" 8.5nm filter. I think I was shooting 6 min subs. 

Ps - Happy New Year! 😃

Truly sorry for your loss Peter. It's a beautiful rendition of a most befitting object at such a time. 

Thanks for posting these great pics Nicola. 

Both my sisters live in Mullingar (a 2.5 hr drive from home), and Birr Castle is only an hour's drive from them. I keep forgetting that it's there, i must remember to go and visit next time i'm down. 

I'm also still using the old version of SGP. It just works, so I haven't seen the need to upgrade. I also did the ASTAP trick too a year or two ago. The insanely quick solves blew me away, but then for some reason it started to crash on me and eventually it got so frequent I couldn't rely on it so had no choice but to go back to PS2. 

On 05/11/2021 at 15:47, MartinB said:

I have been using Platesolve 2 via SGP using a variety of ZWO CMOS cameras with a Canon 200mm lens.  I did get things set up and working well but then, for no clear reason, Platesolve started to fail to solve.  Things work better with Astronomy.Net (and ANSVR for blind solving) but  still not completely reliable and very slow.  Has anyone else had similar problems?

Yes, i've encountered this too when using lenses. If you open the PlateSolve2 settings, there is a checkbox called something like 'Use highest accuracy' (it's not quite that, but you will know when you see it). If you uncheck this you should find it will now solve. I found this little nugget somewhere online last year when i was doing a mosaic of Cygnus at 135mm and having the same problem. Unfortunately PlateSolve2 doesn't have profiles, so just remember to change the setting back when you move back to using a scope. 

You might have more joy posting the stacked file to see if others have more luck. You also have to remember that, shooting Broadband in Bortle 8-9 is like playing AP on INSANE mode! Believe it or not, but 12 hrs of OSC is probably nowhere near enough under these conditions. You might need 30-40 hrs, a sobering thought if ever there was one. 

Saying that though, your screenshots do show quite a lot of colour i think. I use APP, and the order i usually do things in is: Background Neutralisation, then Gradient Reduction (DBE for you), followed by PCC (i sometimes use Siril instead of APP for this). Then remove the green, and finally do Arcsinh stretching to preserve the colour. 

HTH. 

Beautiful work, as always Richard. Has an almost ethereal look about it. 

I don't recall ever seeing an image of this before, so always nice to see something new as well. 

Looks great Rodd. Those are some very detailed tadpoles! Nice to see this imaged with a large aperture instrument. 

The only thing I would add is perhaps a smidge of star reduction, but only on the very largest stars. 

👌

10 hours ago, Spongey said:

Yes, the luminance for stars is based on the super-lum integrated from the three narrowband channels.

Colour for the stars was brought in with a starmask using the colour calibrated RGB image. I did this using channel extraction / combination in CIE Lab mode.

Yeah that's how I would do it too. Cheers. Just thought I'd check, as I never seem to manage to get any RGB on my own NB images. 

Very, very nice indeed! And holds up extremely well when viewed at 100%. 

When you say RGB stars, do you mean you use Ha stars for Lum and then colourise them with the RGB subs, or do you not use the Ha stars at all and just use the RGB stars in full? 

35 minutes ago, tooth_dr said:

 

Love the look of these scopes Ciaran, all the best with it.

Thanks Adam. 👍

It will be a while before i use it I'd say. Lots to get done to get it (and me) imaging-ready, so it'll happen when it happens. The RC6 i bought this time last year is still in it's box, Lol. Which reminds me, i need to sell that now. 

Bought a 2nd-hand Newt, my first one! 

It's a Vixen R200SS, 8 inch F4. Interestingly, you can get an x1.4 extender for it, which turns it into an F5.6 and 1,120mm FL scope. Might be an option come galaxy season. 

Based on the specs, i was expecting it to be light (just 5.3 kg) and it really is. It's also quite compact too, at just 70cm long, so should be easy enough to manage. With only having a belt-driven HEQ5-Pro, i would never go for a normal 200/800 sized Newt, so i'm really hoping the mount will be up to the job. We shall see!

The previous owner was unsure how old it is, maybe the mid noughties. The mirror needs a good clean, but I won't be touching it until I've seen what it can do. 

Now to start collecting Newt accessories, collimation tools etc. It never ends 😂

I like that Adam! Nice and vibrant (without being OTT) and lots of lovely dust on show. And with a slight reddish tint to the dust on the RHS, which to me is always a sign of a really good M45. M45 is not an easy one to process. It's deceptively difficult, due to it being so bright, so i think you've done excellently here. 

How do people find StarXterminator's handling of Newtonian diffraction spikes? 

2 hours ago, rsarwar said:

this is my sadr on 3.5 Ha on 72ED + QHY268M. i am tempted to say that the halo is more controlled for me. i am quite surprised to see such difference honestly. I am temped to go with astronimik 6nm  honestly for Sii and Oiii. atleast for the Oiii. i think i am happy with the Ha honestly.

 

Looks good to me 👍. I was pretty disappointed with mine tbh. Sadr is ridiculously bright though, so I've just accepted that it's hopefully not going to be a problem for me 99% of the time. 

But I also have been put off Baader now. When the time comes to upgrade the Oiii and Sii filters, I think I'm going to try Antlia next. 

Very well done indeed. Great job on the processing, on what is a very tough target. 

What are your skies like? I'm guessing they must be pretty decent. 

Very nice Emil. Amazing what can be done nowadays with the advancements in camera technology. 

I'm in a Bortle 5 (veering on 6) area, so I usually don't even bother trying to image anything dusty. What are your skies like where you are? 

Unreal data, as always. A joy to process! This was my workflow:

1. Used AstroPixelProcessor to remove what little gradient there was in each channel. I then combined them as SHO to create the RGB image (also in APP). The advantage to this is, APP will scale the channels accordingly to balance them. Before, i used to stretch each one individually and then combine, but this doesn't produce channels that are anywhere near balanced, so you then need to balance the histograms yourself. Once the RGB image was created, i gave it a light DDP stretch and saved it as a 16bit Tiff. I then made a 2nd RGB image, combined as HSO, to use just for star colour later in processing. 

2. Open the Tiff in PS, crop off the edges and then extract that S-H-O channels from the R-G-B. Save each one for individual processing. 

3. Run Starnet++ on each channel. Clean up any remaining artefacts using the Spot Healing Brush in PS. 

4. Denoise each starless image. I used Topaz Denoise Ai at 1% level. Even this was too much, so i recovered some of the original detail using the slider. No sharpening. 

5. Create the Tonemap by copying the denoised SHO channels into a new RGB image. Then do Selective Colour adjustments to taste - i like Bob Franke's  approach http://bf-astro.com/hubblep.htm

6. Create the Lum layer. For this, i used Topaz Denoise Ai on the original Ha image (not the starless one). Similar settings to above, but this time with some mild sharpening. The small & medium sized stars are now a mess (due to sharpening) so i bring it into PS and layer the original Ha image on top and add a layer mask to only allow through the original Ha stars. This layer mask is created from the Original Ha image and the Starless one using Blend Mode Difference. The mask needs the white point brought waaay in, in order to protect the teeny tiny stars. This is now the base Lum layer.

7. Start a new image in PS, with the Tonemap on the bottom as a Color Layer, with the Lum on top as a Luminosity Layer. Some minor Curve adjustments to both. 

8. Bring the HSO image from pint 1 above into PS as a new image and work on it for star colour. Duplicate the layer, set to Color, run HLVG (to remove green) then invert the image, run HLVG again (to remove Magenta) and then re-invert back again. Boost the saturation, being careful not to overdo the Reds and Yellows. This is now the star colour layer. Add it into the main image, set Blend Mode to Color, and add a layer mask (the same one we made earlier containing only the stars). This adds the nice star colours to the stars only, leaving the colours we created earlier in the tonemap alone. 

9. Added some contrast using the Clarity slider in PS. Making sure to protect the stars, using the same star mask as before (only now inverted). Then add a small amount of Vibrance. 

10. Added a very small % of NR using Carboni's Space Noise Reduction. Only needed in the top portion of the image. 

11. Star reduction pass 1. Minimum Filter on just the very largest stars. I only selected the biggest 10 or 15 for this. 

12. Star reduction pass 2. Used ImagesPlus to do one pass of star reduction at default settings. Then brought this into PS as a new layer and dropped the Opacity slightly, to re-introduce a slightly soft edge to the small stars. 

13. Rotate for better framing (to my eye at least) and done!

Very nice image Steve. I also prefer the HaRGB version, because it goes deeper, but i also like the magenta/pink hues of the plain RGB. I assume you added the Ha to the Reds only (in Blend mode Lighten, and with the stars removed), which is the more correct way of doing it, but as Vlaiv points out, adding a certain % of the Ha as Luminance will also make the reds more pink. 

Btw, if your intention is only ever to add the Ha to Red in Lighten mode, then you might be surprised just how little of it you need. 8 hrs is definitely overkill in this case, due to NAN being so bright, but even on most targets you should be able to get away with a lot less. In processing the Ha, you can actually take a sledgehammer to it and crank the contrast way up. It will look downright ugly, but because of the way it gets added, it won't really harm the resulting image. 

38 minutes ago, tooth_dr said:

I've tried it on a few images now and I'm getting a much coarser grain with Star XTerminator compared to Starnett++.

Images below, any input welcomed.  I was using a 2600MC with an NBZ filter.

 

I haven't used it myself Adam, so i can't really offer much in the way of help, other than to say you should post your issue and images over in the CN thread (linked below). Russ is very active on it, and asks for images that don't work the best so he can improve the AI. 

https://www.cloudynights.com/topic/789257-new-ps-plug-in-for-removing-stars-starxterminator/page-7

I agree, i don't think the algorithm should matter for creating masters. I think it only gets used for the accuracy of star analysis and then obviously when the subs get debayered at the integration stage. 

If you wanted to be absolutely sure, you could always just test it out yourself pretty easily. Create 2 sets of Masters, each using a different algorithm. Use them to calibrate a stack and see if there is any visible difference. If they look the same, give them a DDP stretch and save as a Tiff, then throw them into PS and Equalize them. That should show up any differences. 

18 minutes ago, teoria_del_big_bang said:

Through Summer and Spring it seems to have been okay but Yorkshire probably rivals Ireland in Winter so maybe worth putting it on, what do you put in the tube ?

Steve

You fill it with the orange dessicant beads you should have also received. Then you undo a screw on the side of the camera and screw the chamber on. 

If you connect to Qhy's capture program (I forget what it's called) and bring up the graph that shows the temperature, there is also a gauge showing the Relative Humidity (RH). Qhy say this should be kept close to 30% ish. Mine was as high as 60% but after 2 to 3 days in a flight case with the dessicant tube attached, it dropped back down to about 35%. Note, it will increase during imaging, but you want it to drop back down again when idle. So worth checking up on it every now and then just to keep an eye on it.