Ouroboros

Lovely image. Very nice detail along the left edge and in the dark feature. Sorry for my ignorance, but I’m only just starting to get into dual band AP. Is that an HOO image with Ha red and OIII green and blue?

Hello, Irandar. Yes, I have read others saying what you did helps. It didn’t help in my problem as it happens which was solved as described in the post prior to yours.

Oh dear! I can’t think of anything simple. Looks like you’ve done all the obvious. Have you considered a complete re-installtion of the software on both the ASIair and your tablet?

Just as an aside - I connect my ASI2600MC to one USB3 socket and plug my SanDisk flash disk into the other USB3 socket on the ASIair. I connect my ASIair to the AM5 wirelessly. That means I’ve only got one wire - the power cable - between the ASIair and the mount.

Perhaps I’ve missed the point here, but isn’t the AM5 connected with a USB2 cable and USB2 socket on the AM5? Is the ASIair simply telling you that it’s connected to a USB2 device? Sorry if that’s not the issue.

It’s on the UI page for each camera. It’s next to the displayed name of the camera being used. I just tried disconnecting and reconnecting my ZWO ASI2600 camera on that page and it came back as USB3, which it should. So I couldn’t reproduce what Mistuk is seeing, in this way anyway.

When you mention “disconnection / reconnection”, @mistuk, are you referring to the disconnection and subsequent reconnection of your tablet?

Absolutely superb. The detail is fantastic. I take my hat off to your dedication and perseverance.

I’m a serial monogamist. I only use one of my three scopes at a time.

A 30cm dew strap from W&W Astro just arrived in the post for my new Askar FRA300. All tested and working. Unfortunately it came with clouds. I’m sure the forecast for tonight was clear. No longer it ain’t! Sorry.

I did have a brief OMG moment when I first glanced up.

I don't know if you can see this mobile phone pic, but this is what I could see just after I set up for an evening of astrophotography. Those light beams stretched right overhead. Some kind of light show in the town consisting of bright search-light like beams flashing and dancing across the sky. I don't know. Shakes head in despair. It's a reasonably clear night, the Moon is out of the way, and some nerks insist on flashing lights around. Fortunately I am using a dual band so I'm hoping it won't affect things. But anyone doing visual or broadband might be miffed to say the least.

Wow! That is a fantastic image. You really have pulled out the detail in the dust. Nice to see the bubble so well. Personally, and this isn’t a criticism because it’s all a matter of personal taste, I don’t like the colour pallet. But then, I instinctively react against false colour astrophotography unless it’s for justifiable scientific reasons. I know that’s against the current trend, but there you are. That’s my view. Given the obviously good quality of your data, have you considered processing it more realistically? Might be interesting. The crescent nebula looks like you’ve got lots of OIII there. Keeping Ha as red and OIII as green/blue might look very striking.

Fantastic image. I am so impressed with what some of you ‘real’ astrophotographers can do. Thanks for posting your workflow. So useful for those of us still padding around in the foothills of astro processing. What does integer resampling do for you?

Interesting. I was wondering whether doing some initial stretch to the whole image followed by star separation might have provided a better approach. I had to look up DDP as I have not come across it. It is available in Pixinsight, but seems to be considered obsolete compared with other methods. That’s not to say it is in the applications you’re using of course, and anyway seems to work for you.

Very nice colours and nice image generally. You must have been up half the night processing. It is a fascinating set of objects though isn’t it? Coincidentally I had another go at widefield imaging the whole Cygnus Loop last night. I packed in about 11pm after getting three hours of data. I want to get a few more hours of data before processing. I had my first go at dual band imaging this region a few days ago. How did you find separating processing the stars? I found stretching the stars to give a satisfactory star field difficult. Did you separate the stars at the linear or nonlinear stage?

Very nice pic. And great to capture that in such a short time. Oh, I know the Cornish weather very well. Warm, wet, westerly winds as they taught us in school geography. Not 'arf!. Some of the best astronomy weather I've had down there is when the weather has been coming from the east.

Surprisingly we had clear(ish) skies here yesterday evening. I was beginning to give up hope of ever testing my new Askar Colour Magic 6nm dual-band filter with my recently acquired Askar FRA300 I posted on in October. Inevitably perhaps the first target had to be the Cygnus Loop. I should really have framed it differently. I've chopped off some of the object at the bottom of the picture. But I didn't know whether I was going to get 20 minutes of clear sky or several hours. So I just went for it and in the end managed a modest 71 x 120s reasonable subs out of 85 or so. I found my first process of dual-band interesting, and need to study how to do this rather better. Stars in particular were a bit of a challenge. Using an unfiltered star field would probably be better I imagine.

What a fascinating object and an excellent image of it. It looks three dimensional.

It is too aggressive. It took me a long time to realise this fact. Unfortunately a lot of introductory videos use the STF/Histogram as the standard method to stretch to non-linear. So you sort of assume that's the correct way. They should really carry a health warning. For a while now I've been using GHS as my go to stretcher.

Yes, better still. I should have run NoiseXT slightly harder maybe.

OK. So this is my most recent effort after reviewing some of your comments. I think I’m still struggling but at least the blotchiness in my initial attempt has largely disappeared, and I’ve managed to pull up some of the background not unlike your various examples. I could go on fiddling with it for example by attenuating the noise a tad more. Incidentally I didn’t start applying noise reduction until towards the end. Anyway, thanks for all your help everyone.

Thanks, Bryan. I will look those out. I like AB’s vids.

@Nikolai De Silva Excellent. Amazing what they did with photographic plates isn’t it? I bet someone had to guide those long exposures by eye for the whole duration of the exposure too. Also amazing that those images were the best of what could be achieved then with big very expensive equipment ….. and that people can now produce better images in their own back gardens. The coloured plate of spectra is amazing. I checked my own copy of encyclopaedia Britannica published in 1953 and it does not have such good images.

I was interested and intrigued to see @bdlbug how you returned to generalised hyperbolic stretch again at steps 18/19. I don’t expect you to recall why you did that here but is that something you do regularly? I’ve come across GHS as a means to stretch in a more controlled way from linear to nonlinear than is achieved by using the STF + histogram transform method. But I haven’t seen it used in the later stages as you have here.