howzat

22 minutes ago, OK Apricot said:

Wow now we're getting technical. I thought planetary imaging would be the easiest due to being able to take a 30s webcam type video and stack individual frames. Have I understood this wrong? 

No not  at all. A webcam is fine for this. Remember you are relying on “lucky imaging” whereby the stacking program looks at the quality of the frames and then stacks the best % that you specify.  My point is that you don’t get more detail with more tiny pixels because the limiting quantity is the atmospheric disturbance. Use Autostakkert for you videos it’s free and great. 

Using a 183MM at full resolution in a 1000mm telescope gives a resolution of 0.5 arc/sec per pixel. Given the seeing is usually 0.8 to 2 arc/sec using full resolution for planetary imaging is not providing any benefit in image detail. It would be better to bin 2x2 and reduce resolution for an increased resolution and frame rate. The most popular planetary camera is the 174M with 2.3MP and 5.86 micron pixels vs the 2.4 on the 183MM. I have a 183MM and love it. For moon and planetary I drop the resolution and bin and still get great detail with my old Lenovo SSD USB3 machine. 

I use a Lenovo Thinkpad refurbished from Amazon. Had it 2 years. Tough as old boots. I5 processor, 500GB HDD, 8GB Ram. Runs SGPPro, Sharp Cap Pro , PHD2 and Autostakkart. Had condensation running off it and no issues. £170!  You don’t need a powerful computer to rum imaging software. HDD size is more important. 

I have started using StarXterminator to remove the stars from an RGB image following a stretch from Linear to non linear in Pixinsight. By checking create star image you get the stars with the correct colour. I then proceed to process the starless image without having to worry about affecting the stars or having to create a large number of star masks. At the end of the processing i then add the RGB stars back into the image. I can say this has improved the final image beyond my expectations. In respect of artefacts i find StarXterminator superior to StarNet. When the stars are removed following the initial stretch the majority of artefacts are dealt with by TGV Denoise. Adding the stars back in at the end removes any remaining artifacts. It is also very useful for adding RGB stars to Narrowband images. Here  is an example.

NGC346 is in the Southern Hemisphere and within a large, dense star field. It is a good test for star removal. The data is from the ATEO-3 Telescope in Chile, and comprises R-G-B and Ha & OIII data. I have put together an HOO narrowband image with R-G-B stars.

1. Non linear RGB image.

2. RGB Stars removed with StarXterminator

3. Non Linear Ha image with stars removed in StarXterminator

4. OIII Image with stars removed in StarXterminator

5. Final HOO image

6. Final HOO image with RGB Stars.

Given the amount of arts in the image (7,500) the starless images are unusable. However the RGB stars are almost perfect and when added to the HOO image produce a very nice image rather than having nasty coloured HOO stars.

I have the Starizona Apex 0.65 for my Esprit 80ED Pro. It is a superb piece of optics. They supply a long version for the ED100. Make sure you put the best quality glass on your triplet refractor. Or you will degrade the picture quality. 

I was lucky enough to be in a dark sky area of Portugal on morning of 3rd December 2021. Crawled out go my camper van at 2:00am and set up my APM 152/1200 F7.9 telescope with a colour camera. Got these pictures around 3:00am

Here is the result: The comet passing M3 globular cluster. I feel very luck and privileged to have captured this picture. I have tried for hours to separately integrate the comet and stars in Pixinsight without success. The comet is too close to the cluster for any separation for rejection to happen. Happy to share the subs if anybody is feeling brave!

Here is my entry. Taken in Portugal, where i travel in my Camper van for some clear skies each winter.

Equipment: SW Esprit ED80 Triplet Refractor; ZWO ASI183MM Pro Camera; ZWO LRGB filters; SW EQ6R-Pro Mount

Software: Capture with SGPro; PHD2 Guiding: Sharpcap Polar Alignment; Pixinsight 1.8.8.11

Sub-frames: Luminance: 20x10s; 20x30s; Red, Green, Blue 20x120s each