tomato

Thanks for these, I’ll load them into APP and see how they compare to single subs from my RCIMX571c.

Interesting, have the SW design department been thumbing through an Ioptron catalogue by any chance?😉

Nice, I never knew there was so much dust around the Cocoon! I think the checkerboard artefacts are a result of how the star removal software works. Other imagers have reported seeing them, but I have only seen them once with StarXTerminator when clearly something went horribly wrong with the processing…

I don't know if this is an option but if it is getting snagged on an extended imaging run, can you just unplug it, and plug it back in when you want to move the mount? If you are running EQMOD can you not dispense with it altogether?

Wow Olly, I've never seen all of your images in one place, that is some body of work, and what a fantastic advert for your business! Have all of the galaxy images now had the RC tools treatment? I suppose the dedicated AP visitor to the site would like all the technical information on the images but of course they would probably search on Astrobin for that.

Very impressive, I’m only viewing them on my phone but they look stunning. Did you do anything with the star shapes or did you just minimise the stars when you put them back in?

@ONIKKINEN, thanks for posting these, very impressive and interesting results, much better than I thought they they would be.

If you use StarXTerminator or something similar, that should leave an image with the nebulosity and the glare artefact. It should then be possible to carefully clone out most of the artefact. Could you paint the stack with automotive exhaust paint? You would need to remove the highly polished finish first.

I would aim for around a 3-5 second exposure adjusting the brightness of the light panel to achieve the histogram peak around 2/3 along the horizontal axis. You will likely get some edge effects when stacking large numbers of subs, but these should only affect the edges, not encroach very far into the image.

As previously advised don’t be too hasty powering it back up, too much drying time is better than not enough. I once put a pre touch screen Sony mobile phone through the washing machine, the display was a mess afterwards, but I dismantled it as far as I could, put it in the airing cupboard for a week and it was fine after that, even the display cleared up.

Yes, total respect for the folks who organise these, just attending one is a bit of a logistical nightmare, so I can only guess what they have to sort out.

Great image Wim, I wish I could achieve that kind of star colour. But galaxies are where its at, everything else is just raw material.😉

Another 5 hrs of data has allowed me to be a bit more subtle with the processing, but this is still all under a full moon. Annotated Crop

Indeed, he helped me with my decision to buy a Mesu right at the outsight, something I have never regretted.

Thanks @tooth_dr. Moves are afoot to purchase a QHY268mono. I thought about another Risingcam but China is a long way away compared to Modern Astronomy.

TBH I don’t think ticking the BG neutralisation box changes how the master flat is applied in APP’s calibration process, the frame characteristics are all sorted out by the software. However, if it is then displayed as you would expect the flat to look like, you know there is nothing fundamentally wrong with it.

Just for a laugh last night I thought I would try NGC 7497 and the associated 'Galactic Cirrus' MBM 54. This is 5 hrs of 2 minute subs with the dual Esprit150/IMX571c rig, and UV/IR cut filters. To my surprise I have the molecular clouds visible after some heavy processing. The background was incredibly noisy after the stretch required to render it visible but NoiseXterminator did a marvellous job in cleaning it up. All hail modern CMOS cameras and processing software. Thanks for looking

How does the flat look if you tick the background neutralisation box in APP? This is what my Risingcam master flat looks like with and without BG neutralisation:

That's a great "full moon" M31. It will always be hard to achieve a reasonable background and good colour balance with so short an integration time and the moon illuminating your subs. I how found that a big chunk of dust right on the camera sensor window will be difficult to calibrate out, even with flats. Big dust particles can move without any help so the problem may have gone away.

Just to help reassure you, here is a sub from my RisingCam IMX571c:

I also see the misaligned histogram on individual subs, and the intense green/yellow cast. This is removed after normalisation and stacking, or at least it is for me after calibration and stacking in APP. I use darks, flats and dark flats for calibration. I haven’t encountered the flats too dim issue when using NINA’s Flats Wizard. I usually have to dim the panel to get a reasonable exposure time of 2-3 seconds and a peak around two thirds along the axis. This is with an Esprit 150 and both the Risingcam and QHY OSC versions, they behave very similarly. I also see multiple peaks on the flats histogram, which concerned me initially but the subs calibrated OK with the master flat so I was relaxed about it after that. Do you get any warning messages when creating the master calibration frames in APP? How does your stacked image look after gradient removal? Mine always look very washed out before I apply the ‘Remove Light Pollution’ tool in APP, an essential first processing step for me.

I was planning to image tonight, despite the prominent moon. 20 minutes in I have this:

+1 for pointing it at the moon right now. You’ll know it’s in the field of view no matter how far out the focus is and as the previous posters have stated, then you have something to start making your camera and focuser adjustments on.

One consistent feature I have noted of just having OSC data is that the colour is never very strong after the initial stretch compared to when I shoot LRGB using mono cameras and filters. Boosting the colour brings its own problems during the processing, so I wonder if this issue will be exacerbated when my proportion of RGB data contributing to the overall image is decreased. I’m not planning to dispose of any cameras to acquire the mono camera, so ultimately I suppose I would have more options to play with.

I’ve been fortunate to be able to image for sometime with an Esprit 150/IMX571 OSC dual rig with some success and I am enjoying processing the data, but in the quest for further improvement I’ve been considering replacing one of the cameras with a mono version. I’m trying to decide if this would be a successful combination. I would get a ‘proper’ luminance channel which I think is important for my preferred galaxy targets, but would I suffer from an equivalent lack of quality RGB data, given that this would all be coming from the OSC camera? Any thoughts before I commit to trying to sell some kit to help fund the camera purchase would be much appreciated.