Dazzyt66

New to StarTools and composites so here's my attempt! Pretty much used all defaults with minor tweaks. Colour was sampled and applied using HST preset. Thanks for great data to 'play' with:

Just out of interest @StuartT, over how long a period did this take in real time?

Glad you’re liking Siril. It’s a hidden gem for those of us that just want to be able to ‘get stuff stacked and processed’ 😊

Ain’t we all done that!! 😂

I do love Siril for its ease of use. I usually use asinh just before I use the histo - it usually works by the time I get to 100 - I don't think I've ever gone over 200 with it as it washes stuff out. Whilst I was getting used to Siril I used the histo 'nuke' (auto) button and then just wound it back a bit. With practice you'll quickly get in a flow for quite quick processing with decent results.

What I love here is that you learn something every day! I didn’t realise you can do background extraction before stacking so I will give it a try! If I don’t use Startools, my processing workflow in Siril after stacking (and generally works well for me) is: Background Extraction Remove Green Noise Photometric calibration (using get info from image) Crop (use auto stretch to see where then go back to linear - photo metric cal will often fail if you crop before) sinh stretch histo stretch After that I use gimp for final tweaks. 😊

That’s how I understand it. Thanks 🙏

Had another go at it last night with my 135mm at f4. Due to cloud was only able to get 6 viable 30s subs but even with that the nebulosity is becoming apparent:

Hey Stuart, I use Siril a lot. This is the best tutorial that I've used from the start and get great results:

That sounds good - I'm in Bortle 7 and was aiming for around an hour worth of subs given the erratic weather...

After a disappointing night last night with a 400mm I'm going back to widefield, but want to try my 50mm (which I haven't used with tracking before). I've worked out that widefield gives me the most satisfaction image wise, but its a learning curve atm. I want to try and get a decent image with about 1-2 hours of exposures - probably around 60s max on my HEQ5. I'm wary of doing the subs wide open f1.8 (or even a few stops down f2.8) as I think this will not give me clean stars. I'm tempted to go for f4 but will this give me enough data for a viable image in the time? At the moment I'm interested in just getting a nice visual with an hour or so of data - with the intention of doing longer and longer integrations as I work out what works and what doesn't. I just want to make sure I get something from the limited clear periods we're having so any advice greatly appreciated.

Here's my go. Nothing fancy, just what I've learned over last few days - you've got some great data there - I'm hopeful I can get something like that at some point! Did a .tif version so you can save and alter colors as you wish - I think there's a bit too much green in there atm... I would normally do some further colour tweaks in Gimp but this is pure ST output... M31ST.tif

Yeah, its the clip in version I'm using. Really pleased with it!

Having never used a filter before and not being sure how much it would be of use now that LED seems to be taking over the world I was really impressed with the difference - takes my garden viewing to a different level. I'm hoping additional use at different settings will be super impressive! And it was only £60! 🤞

Thanks! I was impressed with how it changed just by tweaks here and there. I mainly used the mask in different ways - firstly to bring out the colour in the nebulosity (after getting sampled colouring from the stars rather than let ST do its thing globally). I then used the mask again to de-fringe and dim the stars and then eased off on the noise reduction. It was a mix from about 4 different Youtube ST tutorials. Good use of bad weather!

Thanks for this - I was just going to do it by hand but thought I'd check in case I was missing an automated trick. I don't have a rotator. 🙂

Hi all, What is the best way to adjust the framing of an image in Ekos. I can get subjects centered using plate solving but if i want to rotate the camera slightly for better framing do I just do this using the EQMOD controls in Kstars? If I then image over multiple nights using the scheduler will it re-orientate to what I used before if I provide a sample fits image in the scheduler? Alas, google has failed me on this detail... Cheers Daz

Either way these are great images (although I do prefer the first). On your ST image how much noise removal did you use? - I've found if I go much higher than it suggests that I get too blurry final image -which I think may be the case here - detail wise it looks very similar to the other version. I have also found that I get a better (to my eyes) version of M31 in Siril using colour cal etc. and final tweaks in GIMP than I do in ST. Although to be fair, the more I practice with ST the better they are getting. If I do 'nebulous' images such as NGC7000 or IC1340 they come out really well with just presets in ST. Here's what I mean about M31, first i Siril and Gimp and second from ST (my latest try which is probably version 10!) I run Siril under windows 10 on my Toshiba laptop which is i5 7200 2.5ghz with 8gb ram all OK - in fact its similar speed to DSS process wise...

Hey Danny, I must admit it sounds like alignment to me but I’ll let someone with greater experience guide you on that. 5 mins unguided is expecting a lot (I’m assuming you are unguided)? I have a HEQ5 with spot on polar alignment and I only go for around 60s exposures to be sure of no trails - with UK weather I don’t want to ruin what chances we have. I also leave a 1s delay between exposures to allow for camera shake due to the mirror even though all my imaging is done remotely. HTH

Weather has been rubbish so I practiced my StarTools skills and reprocessed to this - and I'm quite happy with this considering where it started! 🤣

I’ve started to use DSS too to check the difference - I think DSS does get the final stack data slightly better for ST. I followed the exact setup as per the link. The thing that makes the difference in ST at the start is if I select ‘linear’ I get a very bright green image until first wipe - which isn’t useful for seeing what needs fixing, so as you are using a DSLR make sure you use the ‘linear for DSLR or OSC….’ selection. One thing I have found (and I think it’s just my ST skill atm) is that ST is better for nebulae etc whereas I can get a better final image just using Siril/Gimp for Galaxies. I haven’t had any success (so far) if I additionally process the post-stack more in Siril in any way before opening in ST.

It’s all useful stuff. My particular problem was that the Astroberry build for the RPI doesn’t include samba so trying to find all the info to do that is problematic when I am not so savvy with the RPI/Linux protocols. In the end FileZilla was easy and quick - and it worked first time 😊