gorann

Thanks Wim! I updated the image here this morning after having found more dust in the Lum data. Mesu is the way to go!

Thanks a lot Mark! Much appreicated.

Thanks a lot Olly, much appreciated coming from you! Yes, doual rigs is the minimum requirement when skies are as they are....

It finally cleared, and not only for one night but for three! Here is the result for the first two nights, mainly the second since the wind messed up much of the first one. Now it has calmed down but rain is back.... RGB collected with ASI071 on Esprit 150 with 0.79 x reducer, and Lum collected with ASI1600 on Esprit 100 (side by side on the Mesu), totally 12 hours. I also had my new traveling scope, a new small TS 71mm quadrouple Apo, piggy backing on the rig but have not had time to look at that data yet.

Thanks Steve! Yes, maybe you are right, and have been on and off about the level of saturation and it is easily adjusted in PS but I am not sure. My version before this one was even more saturated.... After all it is a NB image so everything is allowed. In any case, here is a less saturated version and yes it may be better.

So could I concude that as long that I am stuck to 16 bit and image at a dark site, I should go for long rather than short exposures with my CMOS cameras? Yes, I know we are getting a bit away from the topic of the tread but not much seems to happen with the Astrobin situation right now so we could see it as an Intermission....

Thanks Valiv, very enlightening, I am with you, and maybe slightly worried, but would we notice a significant difference processing in 16 bit vs 32 bit floating and should we put out a warning not to use old 16 bit versions of PS, like me and Olly @ollypenrice?

Vlaiv @vlaiv, that is a very striking demonstration that images saved as 8 bit should not be used for further processing. Would you be equally worried about 16 bit since that is what probably the majority here are processing. 8 bit has only 4% of the theoretical dynamic range of 16 bit. By the way, yes this thread started becasue Astrobin crashed and a lot of people have lost their posted images there, and waiting to find out what can be done. Then it turned out that Rodd has been using Astrobin to save his data rather than trusting a hard drive or some other storage device or cloud. But since his data is saved as 8 bit jpg on Astrobin I have now tried to tell him not to use Astrobin as a way to save data, but only for posting his images, and that he would be better off saving it as something not compressed, like tiff or fits. This may be especially true since he works with PI which I think is normally saving everything as 32 or even 64 bit, which you appear to prefer.

What I am saying is not that an 8 bit image does not look good printed or on a monitor, but it is kind of dead when it comes to stretching it since the faint stuff and bright stuff is not there anymore. You would just get posterization stretching it outside its small dynamic range. So it is only good for the final product that we post and print.

Could feel like that until you compare it to 16 bit, or 32 bit as Valiv pointed out. However, I have a question to @vlaiv: Why go over to 32 bit if there never was 32 bit information in the image to start with? Yes, I know you will probably tell me that stacking many 16 bit images creates more than 16 bit, but it is still quite a big dymanic range. In any case I am stuck on my old 16 bit PS, and the new pay-per-view PS has apparently lost quite a bit of the nice "bits" of the old one I have been told.

But the fact is that 8 bit is 256 levels of brightness and 16 bit is 65536 levels. So after your stretched your 16 bit image and saved it as 8 bit jpg, you have thrown away everything outside those tiny 256 bits and severely consticted what you can do with it later.

Oh Geof, that certainly gives some perspective to our minor problems here. We all hope for the best for you! And even if it would be cancer, I understand that it is only 10% of the prostate cancers that are really bad and the rest can be taken care of by your own body defence. It is an really odd form of cancer, or rather multiple forms.

Yes, png may be ok since it stores at 16 bit and not 8 bit like jpg so you could have all your dynamic range there. I bet someone like Vlaiv @vlaiv could as usual help us out here. I took one of my 89.9 Mb tif files into PS and saved it as png. File size fell a little bit to 72.4 Mb but when I opened it in PS it was still 16 bit. When I save the same file as jpg in PS (at maximum quality of 12) it becomes 10.4 Mb and when I open it it is only 8 bit - so crap for further processing.

Probably becasue a few hundred are trying to do the same thing right now....

The point is that if you saved your image as an 8 bit image (=jpg) you cannot tease anything more out of it from further processing since you lost 99.6 % of the dynamic range. So it is a very poor backup. All processing books will tell you that you should always save in an uncompressed format, like tif (or fits = tif but with some text info on the capture). So, using the normal Astrobin as a way to save your data is not a good idea,

Yes, but it looks like your files there are only 8 bit so only 256 brighteness levels. Can you download them from Astrobin as 16 bit (65 536 levels)?

But when you save them as jpg they are only 8 bit (at least in PS) so not very useful for further processing. Maybe I am missing something, can you save them as 16 bit jpg? EDIT: I just down loaded your last M1 image from Astrobin and it is 8 bit and only 1.6 Mb.

If I get you right you have also used the data backup option in Astrobin? I never did that since I felt was no guarantee that it was 100% safe. I have only posted my down sized jpg files there.

I just looked at your Astrobin page Geof and you are apparently very badly hit - 363 images and right now almost all apear to be gone😣. It will be quite a task to upload them all again so let's hope that Salvatore and his team find you images and can link them. In any case they have to find out what has gone wrong so they can be sure it will not happen again tomorrow, or next month or year.

That was the same for me - and the egg timers were all just broken links.

Scary! Then there is always these "clouds". I would not trust only one hard drive so I have everything saved on two harddrives and expect that they will not crash simultaneously. Also, I keep one at home and one in my little backpack that is usually with me if I am not at home.

By the way Rodd, I hope you have back up on a har drive this time🥴.

Yes, if it does not work it may be a good idea to wait🙄

I now managed to restore all my "lost" 100+ out of 340 images on Astrobin by just clicking on them and go to Edit Basic Information and scroll down and press Save. Now my mouse arm just needs to recover from scrolling down and down and down.... Hopefully it could be equally easy (although tideous) for most of you. Apparently I was only suffering from broken links.

It has so far worked for all my "lost" images, so at least for me it seems to be a case of broken links. What I do is just to press the thumbnail, go to Edit Basic Information, I change nothing there but scroll down to the bottom and just press Save.