geeklee

Great detail Adrian and those OIII areas must have been hard won under such a bright moon.

Lovely image @simmo39 Great detail and attractive, muted colours. Two great images of this area in short succession - brilliant 🙂

Fantastic image @MartinB. Those 2.3 micron files must have been huge! Worth it though as there's loads of additional detail across the image. As always, top notch processing that retains such lovely flows of nebulosity alongside the subtle palette.

Great thinking for this bracket Adam. Looks perfect on the camera and seems like a solid solution for easing the USB strain. I'll be looking out for those appearing with cameras in the future! Awesome. 👍

Great start @Philter An offset of 1 does seem unusually low but it's possible the application might have registered that as a default value rather than the actual one. I primarily use the ASCOM driver for my ASI533 and clicking "properties" for this in Apt (or any application) brings the ASCOM dialogue up and there's some built in defaults for unity gain (gain), highest dynamic range (gain 0) and lowest read noise (high gain). This keeps things simple if you want one of those defaults as it sets the offset for you, although at a conservative level.

Great timelapse @Knight of Clear Skies While frustrating for the satellites, the framing and setting of M31 looks awesome. What a difference the moon rising made and I guess because you'd applied the same processing it really showed the washed out difference.

😁😁😁 All the things I was wondering about when planning it out are answered there! That definitely looks challenging. My offending lights are further away but at a height that they still encroach - mainly worse at certain directions and low altitudes of course. Glad you've got something - even temporary - that can help.

Me too, lovely image. With so much integration, the swirling dust looks awesome and the data so clean.

If you don't have separate shorter exposures for the core, perhaps blending in a less stretched core with a mask? I'm guessing the core will still be well blown out @ 300s but a less stretched version might give you something back.

Thanks for the link 👍 From that angle it definitely looks like it's doing a decent job of blocking the street lights. Ha! Funnily enough I have a sketch and a list of parts to do the exact same thing - I think I might keep that on the shelf for now as I'm not the most handy

Cool Adam. Is that a home made light shield to the right of the scope?

Fantastic start. You can really see the depth to the nebula and it has that effect of looking into something rather than at it - excellent.

The extended detail outside M42 and the depth to the clouds within M42 are stunning. Sounds like a lot of challenges to overcome, so no wonder you're impressed - you should be!

What a "first"! Great image Craig. It's always enjoyable seeing this close up as it's not common given the FL needed. You've captured a lot of detail in there too. At least this area stays in good sky positions for a long time (if you have the views) so you can always add OIII and SII another time.

Excellent Tristan, both the original and newer one with added Ha look great.

That's coming together nicely even with 2 hours. A third night?!? shh, don't say it out loud...

Both still great images Luke - the detail in M42 is stunning. Great perseverance through the full moon - I've not integrated some of the RGB stuff I got over the last few nights but the histograms on the individual subs are like nothing I've seen before - just so washed out! I'll aim to check out your recent videos this week, thanks for sharing 👍

Fantastic image @Magnum I've asked the same a few times in this thread but haven't had anything concrete back. I've seen all sorts mentioned here and elsewhere - using the 7nm at F2, using 12nm ones, using the dedicated high speed ones etc. I'd expect F2.8 to be more forgiving than F2 of course. I think my L-eNhance (rather than eXtreme) seemed to do quite well but it has much wider passes. Like the 7nm I'd expect the L-eXtreme to struggle too... I've finally received my M48 adapter for my Samyang 135 so hoping to get my 460EX onto it soon and only have the normal Baader filters - including the 7nm Ha.

I tried a variety of methods to add Ha to my M81/M82 image and one successful one was using a mask so it only goes where you want it - so, definitely not the background or the stars. I'm not sure if any of the scripts mentioned doing this as I haven't used them. As Adrian mentions, experimenting is the way forward. Methods will vary with when it's added (linear / non-linear) and where it's added. I don't have a lot of experience with DBE but from reading and experimenting myself, that background might not be ideal. Typically it's removing a gradient so it should be smooth not lumpy. In areas that look lumpy, look where samples have been placed, remove and re-run. Always keep an eye on the background model. I've quickly thrown ~5 hours of Lum into PI and DBE. It's not perfect (at all) but an example (simple STF - orig, after DBE, background model): BTW, great images and processing. The IFN is REALLY faint and even Holmberg IX - you've done well to pull the latter out cleanly even though it's faint. You might find the GAME script can help with galaxies and areas of interest you'd like to work on in isolation.

Very interesting @tomato I have found myself mulling over a similar point of view. With a young family and other activities going on in life, the cloudy nights almost work into the schedule well (although this recent run seems excessive!). Would I like more clear nights - absolutely. Would that be ideal or work out well for me... I'm not so sure. The flip side of course is that knowing you're not limited with clear skies, you can go out at your leisure and for less time (if you want) and still get plenty of data... rather than living with one eye on CO all the time! Very interesting perspective from @swag72 and a real shame it came to that. Hopefully a longer break brings the mojo back.

This sounds normal for a "by the book" stretch - dragging the STF onto the HistogramTransformation process and applying to your image. The histogram will then look like this before applying (i've made the HT process really wide so you can see how far the midtones is across (it's merging on the left without zooming in): A lot of the beginner processes out there follow this approach. I usually find the STF a very hard, uncompromising stretch, but it depends on your data. Anyway, I look forward to any future revisions! 👍

I always have a chuckle at MorphologicalTransformation. I think my process icons with this are called "StarReduction" and "AlterStarMask" or something similar!

Excellent images @Rob63 great contrast, detail and clarity.

Both excellent images Brendan and had me off to CdC to look at its location as I haven't seen this before.

Welcome @Clarkey ! That's a great start - really like the Rosette 👍 The detail in Melotte 15 is really coming through too.