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if you have Photoshop you can use this attached PSD image I have been playing with this afternoon to try and improve my workflow. I have made one group of layers called "Processing" that has the stretching and levelling in, then another group of layers that are images from DSS with varying sets of calibration frames applied to the same base set of lights ( except the last one.. ) You can then turn off each base image layer to reveal the layer below it, which has increasingly more calibration frames, and the last one has also jumped from 17 to 111 light frames. I was quite surprised to see the quality difference jumping from 10 to 70 Dark frames, its removed a lot of noise increasing those. I am currently shooting some more. Demo Image of Impact of Darks - Flats - Bias - Offset.psd

Go and get the android app "SYNSCANINIT" I had pretty much the same thing going on and it was down to the mount date / time format being MM / DD / YYYY . I had been setting DD/MM/YYYY Synscan init will tell you exactly what to put in the settings Ed.

Quite a few I would imagine!

aarg its clearly worse now I see them side by side!

is this better, or worse? same set of subs with another couple of hours on top

If you are stacking you need to start building up a library of calibration images, which are flats, darks, flat darks and bias frames I think .. I am not entirely sure of the precise difference between a flat dark and a bias frame yet, I am quite early in my astrophotography adventure myself!

This was mine based on the dates in my file collection, sometime around 7th July 2018. I'm not entirely sure what it's meant to be. possibly just "the sky" I think at this time I had an iOptron star tracker. Next I think I managed to capture Andromeda, this was certainly with the tracker and a Nikon D800e with a 70-200 lens and was when I decided to invest in a scope and a mount. I think I had just about got the idea of stacking but not calibration frames. myfile2.tif

Here's mine, 2 hrs 27 minutes, 270 subs @ ISO 800, 60s stacked in DSS, processed in photoshop where, to be honest I really need to up my game. I think the data I am collecting is getting better, but my post skills are very limited.

Tomorrow I will try to make some sense of this then! right now I can't be in and out of the house to re-fit and remove the mask and tweak the focus. At least the temperature here in the southeast seems to be set to "bloody cold" I started at 2c and its now 1c so, we will see. Its only the second time I have used a mask for focus so, plenty to learn. Ed.

Beautiful. If I can get anything like close to this quality I will be well pleased, its what I am working on tonight to add to subs from the last couple of days.

Great thanks. I was going to measure it in Photoshop and count pixels but on a basic mark 1 eyeball that looks pretty close. I'll take a look at that software too. I have dialled in another hundred subs, currently picking up some light pollution that I am pretty sure is my neighbours getting ready for bed, it happened last night between about 9:30 and about 10:30 Ed.

This is the masked view of Alkaid for tonight's session. From what I can find online this looks to be pretty good focus

I recently had a bit of a windfall so, I'm debating what best to upgrade. I think the camera is looking like the best place to invest. I am looking at the ZWO ASI1600MM pro Mono with filter sets but, maybe one-shot colour is the way to go. Folks say that they are not far behind the mono's in terms of performance, galaxies and nebulae are what I want to be looking at. /edit/ went to check out Startools and it looks sexy! going to have a play.

It does look like I have a good clear window tonight so I will be able to add another couple of hours of integration. I am using an Altair Starwave 102 F7 ED with a field flattener. Focus was a bit of an issue, using FWHM in Backyard Nikon I considered "in focus" to be at step 20514 whereas when I brought out the bahtinov mask 20119 was much closer. As it happens I didn't refocus yesterday but I will this evening.

Brilliant thanks! The problem with the processing workflow is that I don't know what I am doing! It's taken a fair while to get to this point, where I can actually gather the data fairly reliably but once in photoshop its a question of wiggling the sliders to work out what they do then almost randomly sliding them about!

Hey folks. I managed to get the attached file stacked in DSS last night from 86 60s subs at ISO800, DSS picked about 60 or so leaving me with the image file that I have cropped to a manageable size. For the post processing I am using photoshop 2121 trying to follow the guide from Trevor at AstroBackyard and slowly stretching the data with curve layers and correcting the levels but it's still a bit grainy. Where do we go from here? more integration? dedicated astro camera? different settings in DSS? I am getting to about here with this data, and wondering what more experienced folks could do with the same set in photoshop? Obviously I am pretty happy with this, given where I was six months back struggling to find the moon and typing the wrong date format into the mount but if anyone has time and inclination could you reprocess the TIFF file and leave the layers in so I can see what's going on, see how aggressive stretches are and what other tools there are in the box other than curves and levels. Ed. cropped no process.tif Autosave.html

Who wold have thought you could hide a galaxy, behind a speck of dust!

The cleaning kit was in my amazon basket before you could say "filthy!" I guess its 12 years since I bought the camera and I don't think I have ever manually cleaned the sensor in that time, I used the cleaning menu option but I guess there's some stuff that won't shift!

I finally tracked down the source of the dustbunnies in my images. Oh the shame of this DSLR sensor! For the record I was reading up on how to clean my sensor and the key thing I needed to know was to shoot a reference image at F/22 which really highlights the problem! each of these was a vague blurred smudge in my subs

Thanks everyone! Currently I am using a D800E with a 102mm refractor but I, and critically the wife, are ready for an upgrade. Ed.

Dumb question here but, hey its a lot of money to spend so I want to ask, with scopes like this celestron RASA where the imaging gear is at the front of the scope, do all the wires and gizmo's not get in the way of the light and impact the image? I am looking at getting a narrowband mono rig set up and, obviously I can see some incredible results on these forums from rigs but I would like to understand what you do with all the wires in setups like this. Thanks Ed

That's great, thanks. The vignette might be coming with the field flattener. I am re-working the stacking process to try and remove some of the hot pixels.

Thanks for the quick feedback, That should have had 7 of each darks, flats and and flat darks in it but I have restacked it so I can try to work out which problems fall in which areas. in the attached STAR.JPG, the black area in the bottom left, am I right in thinking that's dust on the sensor and the vignette is the curved area around the edge? there is certainly something going on in the middle that might be the target, but only just! in the other one, is the lack of focus showing up in the kind of halo around the star? also, not disheartened at all, this is the second or third image I have worked on, Pleiades I was fairly happy with, beehive cluster I thought was just a bit boring, and then this one. Ed.

Hey, First off that's a great image! I am currently working on the same target, but at a much lower level of skill! I am using an unmodded Nikon D800E on an Altair Starwave 102 F7 ED & NEQ6 I have shot two sessions, one with 32 images @ ISO 800 and 300 sec exposure for a total of 160 minutes and a second session trying ISO 640 with 120 sec exposures. The results have been fairly disappointing relative to my first target, the Pleiades which obviously is a lot easier, I was able to bring out some nebulosity with nice crisp stars. On C31 I have attached my stacked image, picking the best 7 NEF files for 35 minutes total exposure, as you can see the nebula is barely there! For this target do I need to look at a modified or dedicated astrophotography camera? is the filter on the Nikon cutting out the light I actually want to capture ? Autosave009.tif

so, a cheapish 5x barlow arrived today, wife vetoed the Baader plane flattening 4x-8x rare exotic glass one I nearly went for, quite an improvement I think, although I can't explain optically why this is bigger, which is annoying! This is processed in autosakkert. Its also using a different camera, an altair astro GPCAM 224C I bought a couple of years back. the sensor is smaller, the pixels are smaller, so I can sort of get why a small image would cover more of a small sensor relative to the gigantic Nikon D800 35mm sensor... Is it now possible to get a male <> male thread adapter for an eyepiece and do eyepiece projection onto the Altair camera...?