tomato

Hi Peter, please could you elaborate on this? Both Starnet and StarXTermintor give you the option to create a stars only image (i.e. an image containing only the extracted stars, no nebulosity) but as far as I can see APP’s tool does not have this function, therefore you can only create an original stars plus nebulosity image and a nebulosity only image? I suppose you could take these into Pixinsight and use Pixelmath to create one that way.

I have just found out (Thanks @Tomatobro) that I was not using the latest release of APP, and it now has a star reduction/removal tool, they seem to be all the rage at the moment. Have any APP users had a look to see how it compares to Starnet or StarXTerminator? One thing it doesn't seem to do is create separate stars and starless images, only the latter, so I guess you would use this at the end of all other processing to reduce the stars?

I still tend to be in attendance during an imaging session so keep a close eye on the FWHM trend line as the subs come in. If it starts to trend up and sky conditions remain unchanged which I can check by looking at the guide star stats, then I will refocus. It depends a lot on the elevation of the object and the orientation of the scopes, as well as how steady the ambient temperature is.

A stunning Soul Nebula Dave and you most certainly cannot see the join. May I ask what total integration time does this image represent?

I have a Baader UV/IR cut filter (£79) on one scope of my identical dual rig and an Astro Essentials (£39) on the other. Which produces the better images? I think the Baader just edges it but not enough to concern me when there are so many other variables to get right.

Here is another emission nebula from the full moon session, IC405 150 minutes integration, made up of 19 x 4 mins NBZ and 37 x 2 mins with the dual Esprit 150/IMX571c rig. I tried a pseudo Hubble palette on this one but preferred the original bicolour image. The short integration time and moon light contribution has made noise suppression difficult, and there are those grey halos around the bright stars which might be down to my handling of the StarXTerminator tool in PI. Thanks for looking.

This is 346 minutes of integration made up of 139 x 2 mins RGB and 17 x 4 mins NBZ using the dual Esprit 150/IMX571 OSC rig, all captured under a full moon. Calibrated and stacked in APP, processed in StarTools (0.35 binned data), APP (LP removal, star colour calibration), PI (EZ suite, StarXTerminator, curves transformation, @Luke Newbould HST palette conversion) and Affinity Photo. The colour palette is a bit of a mash up, I wanted to put some red back into the rendition. Thanks for looking.

But @teoria_del_big_bang has a mono camera?

On my QHY 268c with the dual band NBZ filter in place on an Esprit 150, I was using #1, High Gain mode, Gain 60, Offset 30, with 240 sec subs, temp set pt -20 deg C. However, I have just shut everything down as a thick mist bank is rolling in from the North East.

Great capture, the object shows some well defined structure in your image which a lot of PNs seem to exhibit, but then it disappears into the amorphous glow of the hydrogen cloud. Another target to add to my list to do, even when the moon is up.👍

Thanks for the comments, the individual 2 min subs were not very inspiring, the background on the Risingcam subs was so bright all the dust bunnies were visible! It would appear that some nebulae are more forgiving under a full moon, even in broadband, rather than galaxies, my preferred targets. I have my NBZ filter back from @Tomatobro who has been putting it to good use on his dual SY135 rig, so if the forecasted clear skies materialise over the next few nights, I’ll be trying a combination of dual band and broadband OSC capture.

I’ve never owned a F4 Quattro but have read posts that they are not the easiest reflector to collimate. Will you have someone at the remote site who can perform this task if needed? Wishing you every success with your remote setup.

I was going to image this last night, until I realised there would be a rather large oak tree blocking the photons…

It was wonderfuly clear last night over Shropshire but floodlit by a 98% illuminated moon. The Iris and Pacman Nebulae were best placed away from it so I got 120 x 2 and 106 x 2 minutes respectively on them with the dual Esprit 150/IMX571 OSC rig. Calibrated and stacked in APP, binned to 35% of original in StarTools, then processed in PI, using Background Neutralisation, EZ Denoise and Soft Stretch, then StarXterminator to allow curve stretching on the nebula and reduction of the stars, followed by further adjustments in Affinity Photo. Full use of the Remove Background tool was needed, thanks to the Moon's contribution. The Pacman image was a rather bland red so I used @Luke Newbould's excellent PI tutorial to create a Hubblesque palette. They are noisy, but given these are OSC RGB images, they came out better than I expected. Thanks for looking.

I was very impressed d with the early IMX571 OSC images that were coming up on here, particularly @gorann's posts with the RASA8/ASI2600c. I thought "I must have some of that" and purchased the same scope and camera. To date I haven't managed to replicate his results, but he does have a nice dark sky, superior processing skills, I'm sure and now also a dual RASA rig! However on my dual refractor rig I have found capturing RGB with the OSC so much easier than my mono CCD and filters, especially with the constraints imposed by the UK climate. So much so I have bought another budget IMX571 camera to see if dual CMOS can deliver results comparable to CCD Lum and CMOS RGB. I would like to think I have an open mind on the subject of CCD vs CMOS, and ultimately will settle on the combination that gives for me the best balance of capture convenience and final image quality. Until recently image processing complexity would have been a big part of the equation but I have a lot of time on my hands being retired so I am gradually warming to the software processing side of this hobby.

CMOS cameras have made large format sensors affordable to me and as previously mentioned, the latest offerings do not suffer from amp glow. I started out with a little OSC CCD which IMHO is definitely not in the same league as the latest CMOS OSC cameras. Having said that, CCD mono cameras remain first class Astro cameras and it’s a great time to be a fan of them, as the second hand market has loosened considerably. As for putting the Astro imaging gear away in the Spring, that’s not for me, it’s Galaxy Season!

The clear sky over my part of Shropshire has not materialised tonight so I have had another go at this data. Reading Ivo's notes on the binning tool in StarTools I really should be binning the OSC data at 25% so I had a go and this is the result. Still not getting the golden hue usually seen in images of IC342, but it hasn't got the palette usually displayed for M51 or M101 either.

Nice one👍

Despite a recent thread on here arguing the contrary, I am still going with dark flats on CMOS cameras, rather than bias frames.

I’m in a Bortle 5/6 location according to the LP map, the Milky Way is just visible when my vision has dark adapted. I have a LED streetlight on the adjacent road facing towards the garden which I normally keep well clear of, but Orion was directly above it when I took the subs.

Processed the original 16 minute moonlit image further and squeezed a bit more detail from it.

Well to be fair I haven’t processed them quantitatively the same, and I binned the data in Startools which only allows you to save the file in TIFF format. This is a big difference between the two workflows. Can you bin RGB images in Pixinsight?

This is 46 x 2 mins taken with the dual Esprit 150/IMX571 OSC rig, calibrated and stacked in APP, processed in PI and AP. This was captured with an 85% illuminated moon high in the sky so I went for a target on the opposite side of the sky which was good, but it meant the target was only at about 30 degrees elevation, and sinking. The scope/camera combination is imaging at 0.712 arcsecs/pixel, so I should bin the data at least 50%. The second image is the binned version, done at the linear stage then following the same processing workflow as the first. I prefer the unbinned version, but what do other folks think? Thanks for looking Binned version:

Are any of the materials and hardware that comprise the JWST of Chinese origin? Very little I suspect, but it would be interesting to know.

Great result, is there a bit of red bias to the background?