gradients please!

[Ags]

I have been working from time to time on a software processing chain for my images... my goal is to build a processing robot that does all my image manipulation for me, with only a little advice from me.

I've got some of the blocks in place, like background extraction... or as I like to call it, the nebulae killer. My program can automatically find and remove the background from an image as long as the areas of interest are small. Any large nebulae are terminated :-) So my robot can currently only process widefield images shot with 50-100 mm lenses.

I'm looking for some TIFFS with all sorts of targets and gradients so l can refine the tool. Let me know if you can give me some data and I will PM you my contact details.

[Ags]

So here is a gradient (kindly donated by my upstairs neighbors, who belong to an obscure cult that has declared curtains forbidden to the faithful):

dss_03 by Ags!, on Flickr

You can even see they are not using energy saving bulbs ;-)

Here is the gradient calculated by my application (might be a bit dark):

dss_0399_background_triple_blur2 by Ags!, on Flickr

Here is the image after gradient subtraction:

dss_03100_subtracted by Ags!, on Flickr

Here is the image streched by my app (showing we need another gradient subtraction cycle):

dss_03101_subtracted_stretched by Ags!, on Flickr

I managed to get some traces of M45 nebulosity - not bad for 30 second subs :grin:

While doing this I realized I can write a processing stage to restore star color, and I can also do a low pass to remove noise :-)

[Ags]

I made a start on extracting a star mask...