Datalord

Brilliant result. Thanks for your help! 

Hey Wim. I've placed the unstretched, uncropped masters in this folder: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/if37gb0vud8l1ep/AAAze5c7ATSAu8eJdvdJc3Ifa?dl=0

They have been deconvolved and aligned, but not stretched. I'm pretty certain I know what to do, though: de-noise the masters with a very heavy hand to create the colour master, then use my Ha as luminance to add contrast and detail, just as I would an LRGB. But if you are curious, take a look at it. The data is pretty decent.

It got me a lot closer. I think I'll have to change my tactic on the noise side, but the colours are at least much better. Thank you!

Yeah, yours is much better. Getting the blue center from yours should be easy. I'll take a look. 

Thanks! 

I have tried a few times to get a hubble palette image in PixInsight and always end up using something else because I just can't make it look good. Forget about the noise and sharpness and all that, I can deal with that, but getting the colours to that vibrant blue an gold is beyond me.

This is what I have, right after I have masked stretched each of the NB masters and combined with pixelmath:

After a series of ColourMask and CurvesTransformation, I get to this:

Can someone give the first one a shot? Do I have to alter the straight SHO formula?

Thanks all, I ended up setting it up the past two nights and now I have 11 hours of O3 and S2 bin2 data on the tadpoles. 😎

3 hours ago, jjosefsen said:

No darkness during summer, and rain / clouds during the winthe

Yeah, the other benefit of Spain is that the summer nights are still about 8 hours of astro dark. It really helped me get my gear used. Yes, it's expensive, no doubt about it, but it is that or giving up. I haven't used my UK rig since summer because it isn't worth the aggravation at the clouds here. 

Definitely not the easiest target out there, but it is quite pretty. It probably needs at least twice the time I have in this one.

I decided to go with my gut and did a bit more sharpening and a bit more contrast. Consulted Mrs. Datalord and she agreed this was better. Thanks for the comments.

37 minutes ago, Dixie said:

Dead loss this winter has been and tonight has descended into rain - would you ******* believe it!!! 

Exactly why I decided to go with e-Eye. All that expensive equipment unused.

Well, I did shoot yesterday, and a good thing I did. The forecast shows clouds for the next week, but I think I got enough O3 and S2 yesterday to finish. 

I have a robotic gig in e-Eye, though. I just have to decide whether to shoot or not... 😅

Hmm, I already have 11 hours Ha on the tadpoles. I need O3 and S2... 😐

Hmm, I try to avoid overly sharpening my images, but somehow I felt compelled to do a bit more on this one. I did this in PS, so I didn't have the proper starmask I have in PI, but any thoughts? Should I be more aggressive with my sharpening?

So, I have this situation:

What do you do? Set it up and deal with the gradients? Chill and drink whisky instead?

29 minutes ago, Laurin Dave said:

Not sure they'd work at the same time though (flex)

In that case I'd rather not risk anything. The point would be to add even more imaging time to the rig.

Hmm, with the risk of hi-jacking the thread, I have had the same thought. Adding a piggy backed refractor to my RC. I wouldn't want to change anything on my RC and keep the OAG, because everything is working flawlessly. 

I guess my question would be :  how much do I risk messing up a perfectly working rig? 

1 minute ago, symmetal said:

In 'Setup\Catalog' click the catalog tab and ensure the max FOV number for the catalog required is set high enough to display in the selected FOV number. 10 means display it at all FOV selections.

In 'Setup\Chart, coordinates' click the Object filter tab and adjust the 'Deep Sky Filter' settings to taste. Unticking 'Filter deep sky objects'  will show the DSO catalogs at the settings set in the Catalog tab previously. This may give a cluttered view so perhaps just reduce the 'Limiting size' setting (and maybe the 'Limiting magnitude') on the 'Deep Sky Filter' settings  for the higher FOV numbers,until the abell or other catalogs show as required.

Alan

Thank you! Exactly what I needed!

I'm having issues showing a new catalog in CdL. I added an Abell catalog and it is present and searchable, but I can't comprehend what to do to just show it in the map when I browse around.

These two Abell's are shown because I searched for them and added them to the observing list:

But zoom out and no Abells are present at all:

Since this thread was necroed and I now saw it, I want to mention that we now have an amazing starmask tool at our disposal in the form of Starnet++ for PI. This process, set to a stride <=64 produces starmasks that are way, way better than anything I can get out of the StarMask process. On the resulting starmask, you can do a morphological transform with a dillude, followed by a MultiscaleLinearTransform with bias disable for scale 1 and 2 and you have the prettiest starmask with soft gradients you can imagine.

5 hours ago, DaveS said:

Going to put this on my hit-list.

Well, with your slightly bigger FoV you might be able to get all of it in one frame. 

I spent a bit of time around New Year on IC443 and got some narrowband action done.

ASA DDM85+RC12"+G3-16200. 

32*1200s Ha bin 1, 25*600s O3 and S2 bin2 for a total of 19 hours.

I started out with a classic SHO, but I dodn't really like the yellow image, so using the colourMask script in PI, I managed to tune it differently.

Updated it to this final:

4 hours ago, DaveS said:

What autofocuser are you using?

FocusLynx. It's a great piece of kit, extremely effective and reliable. I'm certain this isn't the root of my problems. 

Well, there might be a pattern. If I recall correctly, the autofocus routine was one of the culprits, which is immensely frustrating since that is the absolute weak point in my setup right now. 

The second problem for me was that APT is simply so easy to use for all the platesolving, plans etc, that it was frustrating to go from that to this "professional" software. Still, with APT I haven't managed to get the autofocus routine to work with any kind of success. 

I have to mention that my focuser works perfectly, as long as I just use it manually. 

3 hours ago, alacant said:

Despite the fact that f8 is far too slow for astro-photography (don't!)

I'll immediately put an axe to my 12" CFF RC at f/8.