Datalord

Yeah, that could be interesting. That might be one for next summer to augment this one.

Thank you! Yeah, I've gotten to know the data it produces pretty well by now. One thing noone tells you about astrophotography is that the quirks of your gear is present throughout all your processing. Hmm, I didn't think of doing this in LRGB. I think I would also be pretty apprehensive about adding another image and blending this one without ruining both. Do you have any examples of what I might find there?

I spent quite a bit of nights gathering data on IC1396 while the nights were short, so I managed to get a total of 23 hours. I boiled it down to 15 hours of the best frames and got a result I'm pretty happy with.

As usual at this time of year I had to point the scope on our glorious companion galaxy. I spent two nights and was very selective with the subs, so it's just 6 hours of data, but it turned out quite well imho. It's such a bright target, which helps everything.

Thanks! Yeah, I think I read that somewhere as well. But at 300MLY, the distance between that one and the other four must be 10s of MLY. My trigonometry skills are not what they used to be.

I didn't think about that, but it does make some sense. 30 to 300 million, however, is not that much redshift. NGC7320 is redshifted at 800km/s, while the others are about 6500km/s. In the grand scheme of things that is not much when compared with the billions of years we otherwise see quasars at.

I've been waiting for this beauty to get up and with the latest moonless nights I managed to get some proper imaging time in. It's 5 galaxies visually close to each other, but NGC7320 is "only" about 40MLY away, while the four main galaxies, who are most likely in the middle of merging, are about 300MLY away.

Yes, that's fine once you have committed yourself to the software. I was hoping to learn some points about what APP does different/better than other software. Once convinced, I would see a load of tutorials.

The CometAlignment process in PI works well. It's fiddly as you end up stacking 2 times, but it works. Used it on this.

I am watching right now and I have to say I'm disappointed in the decision to showcase an upcoming niche feature like comet-stacking, instead of trying to show off something that would convince a PI user like me to come over. Mosaic use and more regular mono workflows would have been so much more interesting. Yes, interesting, but definitely not making a convert out of me.

I'm not becoming a fan of narrowband. It completely evades my ability to make a good image out of it, even if the data seems to be good. This is what I got our of 14 hours of 10 min subs: Here's a link to the calibrated stacks. Nothing has been done to them: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/mp2cl08p3p976mu/AABfFvxPkhN1m4pbNbnc0OBpa?dl=0

Hmm, might be amp glow. but yeah, the lower right hand corner always seem to light up.

I think I'll have to disagree with this one. Decon is a seriously good tool to sharpen nebulosity. So much so that I sometimes go a little too far with it, but it definitely works on nebulosity. I have the same problem on all nebulae. They're obviously in the Milky Way and both the RC and RASA are photon buckets. Any substantial amount of integration time will have the image lighting up like a Christmas tree. I just reduce their size, but I very rarely go full starless. All those stars tell their own story. I can't help notice you have some pretty serious vignetting in many of your images. How do you calibrate the images?

Thanks! I only had to do a few stars to clean up, otherwise Starnet++ did the heavy lifting.

Agree! Looks like this data has been a sufficient challenge for everyone. It's really interesting to see just how different results we all get from the exact same starting point.

Accidental because I didn't intend to do it, but the starnet result was so good I almost didn't have to correct anything. Definitely not 10 minutes as starnet takes about 20 minutes on each sub to finish. But yes, easy. Thanks! I used Starnet++ in PI. I had to correct the nebula in two places where the stars were too big for it to handle. I carefully clonestamped them out.

Definitely not a mosaic with the RC, that would take me 10 years. But I actually did start to collect more data on the RASA for a full mosaic, but as that one is in UK, clouds and summer darkness stopped my progress.

I wanted to highlight the difference between the same object in the RASA in broadband and the 12" RC in narrowband at different focal lengths. So I started processing it and accidentally went starless and it turned out pretty good. For comparison, here is the RASA version. And only 2h20m.

Agree, he nailed it. I'll have to try to do that myself.

That's a beautiful and delicate image you managed to get out of it. Really well done!

Nah, the DDMs are a different league completely. I would happily have one of these over three others...

Wow. Doesn't even look that expensive. And getting 35 hours of data is suddenly just a matter of 2 nights. Brilliant result.

Interesting thought. But that would be fragile in the sense that if one of them had a problem, it can't be replaced. I suddenly remembered the dragonfly. I don't think they are taking pretty pictures with it, but it is interesting.

Interesting. I can't grog why it would be any different from having just one? That's so un-intuitive to me.

Thank you very much! 🙏 Honestly, you could call me lazy. Even with these globulars being pretty easy to process, it takes long enough that I want to make sure I have enough good data to get a decent final result. As such I can't be bothered to start processing on a smaller stack and would rather wait another night.