Allinthehead

Lovely image Brendan, hope all's well in Spain.

Very nice Martin, great target that takes quite a bit of determination to complete.

👍 good luck tonight, hoping for clear sky down here too.

I think so. If you look at the star colour of the two images below. M45 at gain 100 and the other at gain 0.

https://www.cloudynights.com/topic/751795-zwo-asi-2600mm-pro-first-report-and-test-shots/#entry10820865 As an aside, looks very promising.

Hi Adam, as above Sgpro won't debayer so always shows image in mono. Darks are needed to remove fixed pattern noise and hot pixels. You'll still get a nice result without but I would use them. I find that bias works better to calibrate flats. I also used gain 100 and gain 0 and have just gone back to 0 as the full well is about double that of gain 100. You'll end up with better star colour at 0. As for offset, just make sure you're not clipping blacks, check the histogram is well seperated from the left hand side and if it isn't adjust up until it is and remember that if you change it you'll need to redo all your calibration. I've experimented with various sub lengths from 150 seconds to 300 and find at f3.3 I get the best results at between 150-180.

Thanks Raf, yes I think it would be worth trying ha with a dslr, I know a few on this site that have had good results. It's not the most efficient way to do it however. You could look at getting your dslr modified to make it more responsive in the red channel or keep an eye on the for sale section as modified cameras come up often.

Thanks, have you read through the thread? I found an atmosphere removal button🤣

At the moment I don't see the need either. I don't have much interest in shooting in narrowband other than ha and I can use the Asi2600 with my duoband filter for that and it's more than adequate for combining with broadband data. The only reasons I'll go down that route is for adding luminance to the Osc and more efficient and higher resolution gathering of ha data, how much of an improvement will I get over what I have now is hard to quantify especially given the cost. This was taken with an Stc duo filter 4 hrs 300 second subs ha extracted. It's perfect for adding to broadband data.

Thanks Steve, much appreciated. Thanks Michael👍 Thanks, I think the mono version will be on another level but 7k? What filters are you thinking? Who needs double glazing, you can just cuddle up to the Tak for warmth.

Thanks, I don't have a sky quality meter but according to clearoutside I'm in a bortle 4 zone. I used an Astrodon 5nm for the Ha and clear filter for the rgb (purely for spacing reasons). I stacked everything in Astro Pixel Processor and processed in Pixinsight and Photoshop. Many different plugins were used from starnet to remove the stars to gradient exterminator, really too many to name.

You greedy [removed word] What's the plan?

That price for the 2600 is nuts, if that's really the amount then the qhy version is very attractive in fact it's a steal at the introductory price.

Thanks everyone for the replies, sorry I missed some. I was preoccupied trying to get to the bottom of Topaz. @Xiga I tried using it on B150 again today and it had a different result, when I did it first it seemed to actually alter the data but today it just enhanced it. Maybe I did something different as it was late and I was struggling to stay awake. Anyway I've not come to any conclusion on this software and I may still use it, always declaring it of course.

Sorry with the amount of replies so quickly I missed your question and I see it's been answered above.

Maybe, but where is the line. Have you ever used a high pass filter in PS? It's like putting on glasses you never knew you needed.

What if they've also used denoise in that image🤣

This is without any denoise and the sharpening set at 50

I find that using a high pass filter with blend mode set to soft light has a similar although not quite so effective result.

I think it's a fine line, if the optics can't resolve detail, should it be there at all.

This is with sharpening slider set to 0

Indeed, I've just clarified that the tool does have a sharpening aspect.

That really shows the impact. I should've added that there're two sliders. One for noise and one for sharpening. This was done with both sliders at about 50%. The slider for sharpening is the one that seems to adding detail. I need to look into it more because I've no interest in using a tool like this if it's adding something that isn't in the data.

Okay, so this is my stack after a DDP stretch in APP and removal of stars using Starnet. This is the result after the image above was ran through Topaz denoise

This is the data that APP spat out when stacked. I'll throw up what it did to B150 later.