Bluesboystig

Thanks! I hope the clear sky gods will help us... I'm really excited at seeing how much I can push my dslr

Great image! I just posted an image of the Western veil myself, but soooo far away from your quality!

I finally managed to start collecting data on the Western Veil, on my to do list since starting astrophotography last year. I have around 3h of data in total from last night, with the idea of adding until I get to 15h perhaps. Hopefully that will show all the good stuff in the area But for the initial 3h I'm quite pleased with myself. I like that there's a fair amount of detail in the Pickering's Triangle too! Acquisition: 97x120" frames, 10 darks, 10 bias, 10 flats. 60% moon, Bortle 6 sky. Equipment: SA GTI, WO z61 with flattener, Canon 2000d modded, Optolong L-Extreme, Asiair Mini, ZWO Mini Finder-Guider & ASI 120MM-Mini guide camera. Siril: stacking, crop, background extraction, green noise removal, photometric colour calibration, generalised hyperbolic stretch. (I ran starnet which usually gives me no problem but this time the starless result was so obviously messed up, not sure why, so I decided to process with the stars in). GIMP: levels, curves, I created different layers for the red and the blue, streched and increased saturation. A very light touch with Topaz DeNoise. Any comments are more than welcome, keen to learn!

That's a hell of a shot there! Love the blue and orange combination! 15h of integration time look like the money shot for me, but I guess the more the better?! I thought for a super bright target like m31 3h would be enough to get decent details, but I was definitely wrong. I think the problem here is that to get the details out I need to stretch the hell out of the data, and that brings out an awful amount of noise. More integration time, more patience, and more restrain. This hobby is a lesson in self management! Thank you so much for the feedback, much appreciated!

Thanks so much for the feedback, I really appreciate it. The point of me sharing this images is to learn, definitely not to brag (not much to brag about in the first place anyway), so thanks for taking the time to look and share your thoughts. Using Siril and Topaz Denoise I’m not sure I can apply sharpening and denoising selectively, what I can do is check how much noise there is before firing TD. I guess it’s about compromising at this stage. And regarding the blackpoint, I stopped bringing it in when I saw I started clipping data, even though it was just 0.001%.. maybe I was too “protective”? I’ll keep playing around with this data and try different things. Thanks again for the feedback!

Ha thanks so much! A little friend called Topaz Denoise I suppose? But I also try hard not to overdo it with the stretching, I guess I’m losing out on some data but at least I think I’m managing to keep that noise under wraps a little..

A little bit of tinkering and this is another version, trying different ways to get better colours.. more noise in exchange for better colours?

They do look good to me, I honestly like a lot all that internal structure, they look really nice!

Thanks, definitely worth a try! I really like your images by the way, plenty of nice detail in there!

I did, and it completely kills all the colour, it comes out really really flat and white, and weirdly also for some reason the final image has much more noise as well. I used the Human Weighted Luminance colour model in the GHT in Siril to get some colour out while stretching (the even weighted luminance model was even more orangey). What I like of this version is that there is a fair amount of detail without too much noise. The goal when capturing was to get one of those epic images full of blue, with hints of red etc. No idea how to get that though, I thought 3h would give me enough to work with but clearly I still have plenty to learn (and understand).

I have finally managed to re-process 3h of integration time on m31 from the autumn, and I'm quite happy with the improvement, as I contained the noise and managed to get good (for me at least) details. Not 100% sure about the colours, any feedback? Acquisition: 70x180s, 10 darks, 20 flats, 20 biases, ISO 800, Bortle 5 Equipment: Star Adventurer GTI, WO z61 with Flat 61, Canon 2000d modded, Optolong L-Pro, AsiAir mini, ZWO mini guidescope and Asi 120mm guide camera. Processing all done in Siril: stacking, crop, background extraction as much as possible (there is still some gradient that I can't seem to be able to remove), starnett ++ for star removal, generalised hyperbolic stretch. Noise removal done with Topaz Denoise. Happy to hear comments/tips. Cheers

Hi everyone, after months of british weather and a toddler that zapped all my energy, last Saturday night I finally managed to get the setup out to the garden again, and have a second go at the North America nebula. I didn't take calibration frames, because I totally passed out and woke up in the morning, so once again this is not optimal, but I'm still quite pleased with the result. Happy to hear thoughts/suggestions/tips. Acquisition: 60x180" subs. Bortle 5/6. No moon. Equipment: SA GTI, WO z61 with flattener, Canon 2000d modded, Optolong L-Extreme, Asiair Mini, ZWO Mini Finder-Guider & ASI 120MM-Mini guide camera. Processing details: Siril: crop, background extraction, photometric colour calibration. Separated the nebulosity from the stars using Starnet. GIMP: stretched the nebulosity, separated the nebula from the background and applied levels and curves, adjusted brightness and contrast. Siril: Star recomposition.

Thanks for your comments, as always very helpful! I like you managed to keep the colours! I'll give it another go, I'm sure there's plenty I can do better in processing. Cheers

It worked, all the lights need to be calibrated by night, then put together in one folder, registered together, then stacked. Thanks so much for the help!

So after messing up my first go at this classic, last Friday I managed to get 3.5h of data.Given the brightness of the object I'd have expected to be able to extract a lot of good information from the data keeping noise under control, but either I was (again) mistaken, or I really need to learn to process better. I have the feeling it's going to be both My stars are elongated, especially int he top left corner, not sure why, guiding was really good. I noticed the same issue on other recent projects, but only in that corner, while here it seems more across the entire image. Not sure if it's poor tracking, weight of the camera, or sensor tilt. Acquisition: 70x180s, 10 darks, 20 flats, 20 biases, ISO 800, Bortle 5 Equipment: Star Adventurer GTI, WO z61 with Flat 61, Canon 2000d modded, Optolong L-Pro, AsiAir mini, ZWO mini guidescope and Asi 120mm guide camera. Processing: Siril: stacking, crop, colour calibration, green noise removal (I didn't do any background extraction because despite trying basically everything I kept obtaining funky backgrounds, full of brighter and darker patches), star removal with Starnet ++, Generalised hyperbolic stretch. GIMP: levels, colour selection and stretched only the galaxy. Siril: star recombination. I have tried to run Denoise AI but I didn't like the loss in sharpness so kept the noisier version. I'd really appreciate any comments/suggestions to help me improve. I'll attach the stacking result from Siril in TIF format if anyone want to have a go at the data. Thanks so much! result_12600s.tif