Make hay while the sun shines!

[coxy322]

Hello strangers, it's been a while hasn't it!?

I have had a cracking 3 and a bit nights imaging and even on 'school nights' since it has been so long! Thought I'd share my images from this week.

This is the first time I have really had the grasp of calibrating my images and getting better at post-processing. Still using free tools, DSS and GIMP.

Any comments welcome!

1) A bad attempt at the crescent, whislt mildly ok for subs and darks my flats let me down.

2) Here is a better attempt at the Crescent from tonight.

3) Gamma Cassiopeiae. I might get a modded camera one day....

4) Omicron 1 and 2 Cygni. A pleasing double.

5) The all might itself, Andromeda. This was my first ever shot at this beauty. Only 3x 1Min subs, no calibration. Taken at a dark sky site on Friday last week but the clouds rolled in and ruined the night. Still, it was amazing to see the Milky Way shining so brightly - another first!

6) The Coathanger.

7) Just a shot of my old man putting the finishing touches to his scope. Mine is primed and ready for action in the foreground!

So the forecast is looking gloomy, I think I have had my fix!

Night all!

Ash

[Qualia]

Excellent photos and thank you for sharing them with us, Ash. The double and Andromeda look surprisingly beautiful. Great work

[Gina]

Lots of good images there

[laser_jock99]

My favourite of the group is the Coathanger.

[coxy322]

Thanks for the comments guys.

I am now getting confident with astrophotography, just mastering the calibration shots (namely flats were my bad area) and processing techniques are getting better every time I have another try. Still only using free software though, no all singing Adobe CS etc (yet).

I do find the activity most addictive. I am starting to understand the limits of the equipment I have much more now too (camera mainly).

[farunj]

Excellent photos!! Like them!!

[davew]

Hi Coxy,

The one for me is the Omicron double. What a wonderful, simple and colourful image. I would never have thought of trying these. You've even got the camera angle right. Thanks for posting it.

I'm normally a boring mono man !

Dave.

[SJJ]

I like the double, really nice colour contrast.

[Quatermass]

Addicted

Sent from my GT-S5670 using Tapatalk 2

[coxy322]

Hi Coxy,

The one for me is the Omicron double. What a wonderful, simple and colourful image. I would never have thought of trying these. You've even got the camera angle right. Thanks for posting it.

I'm normally a boring mono man !

Dave.

Cheers Dave!

As time progresses and I get more data and nights under my belt I'll keep building a portfolio of them. I had a shot of Albireo but the seeing was not too great - that's a great colour contrast double too, so soon I'll retry that and get a clean shot like Omicron Sygni above. Mirach in Pegasus/Andromeda is another beauty.

Ash

[coxy322]

Addicted

Sent from my GT-S5670 using Tapatalk 2

Posting at 3am, you're addicted too!

[Quatermass]

Posting at 3am, you're addicted too!

LOL your not wrong there

[Rihard]

Hello strangers, it's been a while hasn't it!?

I have had a cracking 3 and a bit nights imaging and even on 'school nights' since it has been so long! Thought I'd share my images from this week.

This is the first time I have really had the grasp of calibrating my images and getting better at post-processing. Still using free tools, DSS and GIMP.

Any comments welcome!

So the forecast is looking gloomy, I think I have had my fix!

Night all!

Ash

Hi there,

TBH I like the colorful look of the first one And Andromeda is lovely too! Very very well done for only 3 subs, especially if I think that I have a very similar setup and haven't produced anything worth looking yet

Being (also) a Linux user I like that you are using free tools for your imaging.

Keep us posted, there is always something to learn from other's experience

Clear Skies

[davies07]

Ash,

Very nice images but just one thought. Isn't GIMP only 8-bit integer depth; if you do a lot of stretching, GIMP would give you posterised images, i.e. with boundaries appearing between the tones.

I use Nebulosity for front end contrast stretching, background neutralisation etc. It works in 32-bit real arithmetic so it maintains smoothness in the processed image. Once the main work is done in Nebulosity you can then move to GIMP to finish off. I think Nebulosity costs just a few tens of dollars. Recommend it.

David

[Rihard]

Ash,

Very nice images but just one thought. Isn't GIMP only 8-bit integer depth; if you do a lot of stretching, GIMP would give you posterised images, i.e. with boundaries appearing between the tones.

I use Nebulosity for front end contrast stretching, background neutralisation etc. It works in 32-bit real arithmetic so it maintains smoothness in the processed image. Once the main work is done in Nebulosity you can then move to GIMP to finish off. I think Nebulosity costs just a few tens of dollars. Recommend it.

David

There is some good news, GIMP should be supporting both 16/ 32 bit:

http://www.gimpusers.com/news/00422-16-bit-goat-invasion-ready

[coxy322]

All good info there regarding Gimp, thanks David & TziuRiky.

As I am still getting to grips with the hobby and finally getting some rather decent end results (happier with calibration) my next step is to find a more suitable image editing program.

I use Windows 7 64bit and so far the software is Gimp 2.8. Not Linux, Tziu, although I could Virtualise if there were good enough reasons to use Linux over Windows for this reason?(although a Vm means the processing power capacity will be dropped).

Who ranks what software, and what sort of costs are we talking? CS/PS seems a bit too expensive, Id rather invest more money in the hardware at this point in time...

[davies07]

An alternative to the PS route is to go for PixInsight. Costs about £140 if I remember correctly, but that is cheaper than PS and PI more can do more with astro images. PI uses real numbers arithmetic (as Nebulosity) whereas PS is 16-bit integer.

[Ewan]

Breath taking pictures Coxy, my favoritr has got to be Andromeda, i'd like a crack at that one day.

How do you get your stars so sharp ? with the 'cross' efdect ? i have done it once but didnt notice until after my session so not sure what settings i had

[Rihard]

All good info there regarding Gimp, thanks David & TziuRiky.

As I am still getting to grips with the hobby and finally getting some rather decent end results (happier with calibration) my next step is to find a more suitable image editing program.

I use Windows 7 64bit and so far the software is Gimp 2.8. Not Linux, Tziu, although I could Virtualise if there were good enough reasons to use Linux over Windows for this reason?(although a Vm means the processing power capacity will be dropped).

Who ranks what software, and what sort of costs are we talking? CS/PS seems a bit too expensive, Id rather invest more money in the hardware at this point in time...

coxy322 sorry for going a bit Off Topic and going more into the IT side of things.

I mentioned Linux mostly because when I was a full time Linux user (for me Linux is the GrandMaster of the free software), GIMP was the main graphic tool for the operating system. 50 % of my time spent using Linux was indeed using GIMP (doing banners or fixing old pics). With the time, many APIs (like the GTK) were imported to Windows, allowing a lot of nice and useful software from the Linux or GNU world to be offered to Windows users as well.

Good reasons to use Linux instead of Windows? I don't think there is any special one in these circumstances (unless you love Linux or OS's in general like me ), unless you are really into IT stuff, an advocate of free software, do not need a lot of specific software (and obviously a lot of astronomy software and commercial graphic software is only available on Windows and Mac) and you are really in need of a strong filesystem, or paranoid about security and similar reasons. Some people successfully use a bunch of Linux software to do their planetary or DSO imaging, some others mix up Linux software and run Windows software on Linux through WINE (it's like an emulator but it's not, it's more of a compatibility layer) but at this stage it's a matter of choices

I'm currently using a nice Mac (also at work) and the Windows software (exclusively Astro tools) are generally running flawlessly through Parallels VM, but I reckon that some software, when handling huge amounts of data, does not / cannot behave as it should (some memory / resources allocation issues with large AVI's, especially with Registax) so I will also be (re)installing Windows in a secondary partition just to take advantage of those good tools as running natively should still be better then in a VM. So if you have no issues with Windows why change it at all?

There are several things that I'm missing in the field of graphics manipulation, but I believe that depending on the way you want to process your stuff, so depending on your real needs, you might not need to spend money on commercial software though.

I have a little "pro-GIMP" story: I remember when I was 13 (and a full time nerd, wannabe unix / linux developer) my parents spent something like 200 euro to fix two ruined 60 years old B/W family pictures: the photographer was a well regarded professional and used a lot of commercial software to do the job, we had to wait one week to get the pictures back. Then, I took the original pictures, I scanned them, and fixed them up via GIMP in a few hours (Slackware Linux on a Celeron 300 mhz ) . The results were better, quicker and obviously cheaper then the "professional" ones. Not because GIMP was better then Photoshop or whatever the fella used to manipulate the photos, but simply because for our expectations (and for the passion I put on it) the results were actually perfect and looked better then the professional ones. So, using free software or commercial software (or operating systems) it's really all a matter of what you need to do, what results do you expect, what are the key features that you need more then how a software is ranked, or even a matter of feelings and chemical attraction, and how much passion / knowledge / trial by error you are up to

But if you are heading to do some really "pro" astrophotography and produce great things as the ones we often see on this forum, the commercial software might actually be a must as others suggested.

By the way, investing in some good hardware is highly recommended, especially some good amounts of RAM Memory, fundamental when doing video or image editing.

Clear Skies and sorry for the OT

[Gina]

I am a strong supporter of Unix based systems like Linux and Mac but have resigned myself to using Windows software for capturing and processing astro images. To that end I bought a second hamd desktop with an Intel Core i5 with 4 processors, running Windows 7 Pro 64bit which runs PS very well. I bought a so called "used" netbook to run Windows capture and control software - the netbook uses XP. I fact I find W 7 quite acceptable and user friendly - MS have adopted a lot of the better bits of Linux for version 7.