Nigel G

On 16/01/2021 at 23:48, Quatermass said:

Interesting thread I seem to be encountering banding on my recent images which I never had an issue with when using my old modded 350d now using an unmodded 450d and got some banding on my last set of subs 60 at 50 sec each and ISO of 1600 only stacked with 20 darks so maybe more calibration frames will help but to be honest I am getting fed up with dslr cameras and all the issues of dealing with noise all the time. I've stretched his image of Casper the friendly ghost nebula to show the  banding that's going on I've not really encountered this issue before so hope its not going to become a bug bear with this canon 450d and will defiantly be adding more darks if that is helping. Sigh there is always something in this hobby to drive you mad.

 

 

It's very annoying and frustrating, it would seem that not all Canon's suffer with banding, I know some people who have the same camera's as me who do not have the problem, unfortunately both my 1200 & 1300 do. I eventually saved enough money to by a dedicated astro camera, the relief of good quality bandless data was truly uplifting. Since I have sold my ZWO OSC and now have mono and filters I do still use the Canons from time to time for a quick OSC grab, but am quickly reminded of banding. There's plenty of ways to tackle the banding shown in previous comments, and still very good astro images taken.

Sometimes darks would work but not always, Star tools V1.7 has some excellent new features to help with horizontal and vertical banding in the wipe module.

Good luck and hang in there  

On 21/07/2020 at 17:43, iwols said:

great result ,what did you use for stacking and are these cropped,do you have a single image i could see thanks

I used Astro pixel processor for stacking, there's a bit of a crop but not much, Here's a single exposure, no crop.

On 16/07/2020 at 19:21, M Astronomy said:

Absolutely love these! I have similar kit to you and am just wondering whether you had a tracking mount? Are these images stacked?

Hoping to get out imaging tomorrow night and am wondering what I'm likely to see in single sub without a tracking mount

 

Sorry for late reply, these are single exposures on a static tripod. I have since stacked 22x4 second exposures 135mm lens static tripod

I visited a local boatyard to see and photograph comet Neowise.  With a good view to the north it's perfect. 

This also was my first chance to photograph noctilucent cloud which I have only ever seen once before, so a great night for me  

I ended up taking 1600 images also making a time-lapse.

Camera and lenses, Canon 1300d, stock 55mm & a 135mm f3.5 lens

Thanks for looking.

1 hour ago, Craney said:

Here's another one hiding in plain sight.....  check your archives !!!

Sean.

Wow, I have a fairly good image showing this Quasar, superb

3 minutes ago, Waddensky said:

I guess 3C 273 is next? 😁

Thanks for the info. I must attempt this  

The most distant known object I have captured, even further than IC 1101 at a mere 1.04 billion light years distance.🙄

Some of you may also have caught this large galaxy without knowing about it. IC 2729 in the Leo triplet of galaxies, near the Hamburger galaxy NGC 3628

1.09 Billion Light years distance. The light captured here left IC 2729 over 900 million years before dinosaurs roamed the Earth.😲

Cheers

Nige.

On 24/04/2020 at 16:26, edarter said:

yeah got that toolset already. It helps to some extent but not great really. Thanks for the suggestion though. Would still be curious to know how to reduce it with a luminance layer as suggested above.

The lum channel was taken with a Canon clip in Ha filter. I layered this with the colour data in Star tools layers module. 

On 21/04/2020 at 17:14, edarter said:

Hi, Sorry to resurrect this topic but I'm getting similar issues with my Eos600D, though my sub lengths are much shorter (60-75s) as I'm currently unguided. I did post about it a few weeks ago, but at that time I had also been making an error in my processing is DSS, after I corrected that the problem seemed to go away. However, over the last few nights it does seem to be re-emerging.
I am using Darks and Bias, but not flats. I tend to do about 20 or so darks at the end of a session and 40 or so Bias frames. Some nights I don't seem to get the issue, other nights its quite pronounced. 

From Nige's last post, how many darks should I be aiming for? Also, it sounds as though this luminance thing could also be a trick to help, though I don't shoot with any filters currently. Can I use the luminance channel and do some clever jiggery pokery with that ??

Basically any suggestions to help alleviate this would be greatly appreciated as I cannot afford a dedicated astro cam yet!

Thanks
Ed

Hi Ed.

With darks, I recommend a minimum of 22, but more is better. 

Warm weather always made the banding worse, and darks worked on a small % of images with the bands but not much. To be honest darks didn't do much for my DSLR images as temperature would fluctuate a lot, flats and bias did however but not with bands, 

Longer subs will make the banding worse unfortunately, but there's several processing options, Star tools has a good banding module which works well most of the time, and a photoshop plugin, Astronomy tools, pretty cheap and works in PhotoShop CR2 free version plus all the paid for versions.

You shouldn't need to take bias every time you image, once a year I would make 50 new bias frames.

Using narrow band filters did help, its the layering of different filtered images that reduced it quite well, but filters are not cheap and the money better saved for a camera upgrade if your heading that direction. 

It's rare that the banding couldn't be processed out, once you find a good method, it tends to work on most images.

Heavy dithering helps also, as your moving the banding around a little on each sub. A meridian flip worked very well because the bands were flipped on some of the subs, stacking removed pretty much all bands, but that all depended on the target.

Hope this helps in some way.

Best regards

Nige.

Hey guys.

Star tools is coming along good, with quite a few new tools.

Has anyone tried the new 3D module in Star tools. It works very well with nebula, still trying to work out settings for galaxies atm.

It's great for FB posts, also 3D glasses or viewing on web browser.

Nige.

20 hours ago, g-rex said:

Have just got an EQ3-2 mount with the dual motors. Was hoping to buy a 130PDS to go on it. 

Could you advise me on roughly how long an exposure I could get unguided? (I realise this will be down to perfect PA etc but just wanted an idea of what I might achieve)

 

Thanks.

Hi.

The 130PDS is on the absolute limit for this mount so would need to be balanced perfectly.

 With a good polar alignment and balance you could possibly get 2 minutes. But 60s-90s should be doable at a fair keep rate. A refractor would be a better choice but quite a bit more expensive.

Consider re greasing the gears if your handy at taking things apart. I did this with my EQ3 with a good improvement to smoothness of tracking.

Good luck and most of all Clear skies.

Thanks for your kind comments  

3 hours ago, ollypenrice said:

Great images in my view. The Monkey Head is glorious. I might let the black point stay a tad higher, especially in LRGB, perhaps.

It's very mild but there's a strange circular artifact passing through the centre of the galaxy. I wonder what's going on there?

Olly

Thanks & Well spotted Olly. 

I had not taken flats for NGC891. The circular artefact is the secondary mirror reflection from my 200PDS, which is partly why the black point is clipped  

Cheers

Nige.

2 hours ago, The Admiral said:

I like those a lot Nigel.

Ian

Thanks Ian  

23 minutes ago, WanderingEye said:

Excellent set of images there.... 😀👍

Thanks  

Sadly the weather has been pretty poor for astronomy and astrophotography, but I have made the most of what clear skies there has been.

Working on my narrow band imaging and processing and my first LRGB image. I'm enjoying the new process, combining data, experimenting with data, personally finding processing easier than I had expected. 

First NGC 7000 SHO, 30x240s each filter. 80ED.   Second the Heart nebula SHO, 3 panel mosaic, approx 1.5 hours each filter - each panel for around 14 hours. 80ED.   Third the Monkey head nebula SHO, 30x240s each filter, 200PDS.     Fourth NGC 891 LRGB, 15x240 each filter using artificial L from RGB.  Several smaller galaxy's can be seen with NGC 891

ZWO ASI1600MC, sensor temp -10, 139 gain, ZWO 7nm filters & EFW.

Thanks for looking.

A short video of Mercury and the Sun late afternoon on the 11/11/19

Thanks for looking.

Clouds have stopped play for a while so I have been messing around with a little animation.

M51 taken 1 image per century over a period of 250,000 years, bit of a long project 😂.  

A bit of fun using pixaloop android app.

Cheers

Nige.

I now have a ZWO ASI1600 cooled mono and 7 position filter wheel.

The day it came in the post we had a few of hours clear sky, the first for weeks. Very odd, to get a chance on the day of delivery ( been cloudy since )

First I had problems with APT and random horizontal lines, think its a usb problem, so have ordered a mains powered usb hub.

ASICAP seemed to be ok though.

After wasting a while sorting the problem I managed to capture 9x240 Ha 10x240 O3 & 7x340 S2 on the Elephant trunk, I used the Ha & O3 to construct a HOO image. Bare in mind, this image has no darks or flats added, just light frames.

Looking forward to using this fine camera again

Thanks for looking.

Nige.

On 09/09/2019 at 21:25, Manners2020 said:

Thx.  Astro pixel looks like something  I'll  be using from here on in. Should be seeing some improvement from now. I do like the lp  remover on it and the very reasonable  price.

Very nice M101 well done.

I have been using APP for a while now, I stack and light pollution removal with APP then process with Star Tools. Sometimes polish with Photoshop express.

Astro Pixel Processor was a big step forward from deep sky stacker for me and Star Tools works well with an APP stack.  Star Tools 1.5 has some good new features, your computer probably struggled with Star tools with a full size image,   bin 50% before starting processing and it will run twice as fast without loosing detail in the image. When you start star tools and open an image, on the left side with the tools is bin.

If your happy with your chosen software, ignore the above

Nige.

On 05/09/2019 at 10:12, wormix said:

Also, resources for beginners - would a copy of “Every Photon Counts” be the best starting place?

This is a very good book, covering all area's of deep sky imaging. Perfect for starters.

Nige.

On 02/07/2019 at 10:29, Nerf_Caching said:

Here are my first ever attempts at dslr astrophotography with a scope. From top to bottom:

M4, 6x30secs@iso 800 w/ 3 dark and flat frames.

M19, 24x30secs@iso 800 w/ 7 dark, flat and bias frames.

M9, 16x30secs@iso 800 w/ 7 dark, flat and bias frames.

All of these were taken with a Canon 650D dslr attached to a Skywatcher evostar 72ED OTA, mounted on a Nexstar 4/5SE mount tracking in alt-az mode.

Excellent first attempt, great looking stars. 

4 hours ago, Nerf_Caching said:

BTW, I only know very little on post-processing based on other youtube tutorials, so any help with removing gradients and stuff would be greatly appreciated:)

Have you tried Star Tools ? great post stack processing software, unlimited free trial.

https://www.startools.org/

Nige.

7 hours ago, wesdon1 said:

oooohhhh haha see! Told you i'm a newbie without a clue! haha Thank you for letting me know. It never crossed my mind that there's likely dozens of globular clusters, and here's me assuming there's only one, and it's name is M13! Doh! haha

We are all newbie's at some point, you have to learn from somewhere   I have never seen a global cluster on tv and only new they existed when I started astronomy 3 years ago.

1 hour ago, wesdon1 said:

forgot to mention, isn't the "M3" globular cluster actually M13 Globular Cluster? Forgivbe me if i'm wrong, i'm a newbie learning the ropes lol

Its M3  this ones M13

Oh my word. I never expected this.

Thank you so much, to everyone involved.  

I have a very exciting sailing campaign going on now, so spirits are high. On top of that this really has made my day, no my month  

Cheers

Nigel.

I have the Equinox 80ED. It has a retractable dew shield, a good smooth duel speed & rotating focuser.

No dove tail bar, just a short 4 inch bracket, so I had to bolt it to a 12 dove tail bar to be able to balance it with a guide scope, which is mounted on the finder bracket.

All in all I'm happy with it.

Nige.