Datalord

On 20/05/2019 at 16:44, ollypenrice said:

Do you need to trade off sharpness for noise at all in this image?

Nope, that's my takeaway as well. It's just hard to see the wood for trees while I'm deep in the process.

On 20/05/2019 at 16:44, ollypenrice said:

In Photoshop it would be child's play to put one of your versions over the other and then select and erase those parts of upper one which you dislike.

Can't believe I haven't thought of this before. I do it all the time as a final step on selective sharpening, but I haven't thought of taking entire version into PS like that.

I was very seriously considering a CEM120EC before buying an ASA DM85. But only the EC version. I think those encoders are worth it knowing all the trouble guiding can give you. (disclaimer: Still haven't tried imaging without guiding, but I spent a ton of money getting to that point...).

1 hour ago, Adam J said:

I would go for A, the soft stars in B are making my eye go funny. You could try to isolate the stars when applying noise reduction to the background.

Adam

Thanks Adam. It's a week since I did my pixel pushing on this one and looking at it now, I can barely see the noise difference, but I definitely can see the sharpness difference. The plight of zooming in way too far while processing.

kept on trucking and put it up here: 

I'm having another one of those painful moments where I must trade off sharpness for noise and I can't decide which way I want to go. So I go to the audience, because it is never wrong. The picture is not fully processed with curves etc, but close. This is with and without an MLT in PI.

A or B?

A:

B:

Here's one I did a few years ago. This is handheld autofocus at 600mm with a Canon 6D and Sigma 150-600 lens. As you can see, 600mm handheld is certainly not a great combo. This image is the full image without cropping IIRC.

Welcome to the hobby. As you can tell already now, the money sinkhole is opening beneath you.

I would very strongly encourage you to fully separate visual from imaging. Don't try to make a visual setup good for imaging. I went that way on a NextStar 6 with an alt-az, buying wedge and adaptors and blah blah, only to 6 months later flip the table and buy a small refractor. I made it work for what it could, but it was a waste of money.

IMHO, cancel your order of a wedge and buy the star adventurer. If budget allows more, use it all on the best mount you can afford. Use a regular lens and plan your first upgrade to be a filter drawer and NB filters. With such a setup you can go nuts in large nebulae and learn the processing skills, which in the end will take you at least as much time to master as the the data acquisition. Going really deep to galaxy hunting is where your money will disappear at astonishing rates.

On 11/04/2019 at 18:41, AstroBobG said:

Yup, it does support the AVX mount.

And with the latest beta update it is really, really good. The previous versions didn't implement ASCOM, but now it is a great piece of software.