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Realisation and acceptance....


Shelster1973

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....while I know I am only at the very beginning of my tentative steps in astrophotography, in these dark and cloudy days of winter have been sifting through all the data I have gathered over the last 12 months and have finally come to the realisation that it is 99% carp.

Despite best efforts with bodged together webcam guiders and the likes, the data that I have been gathering is not up to scratch and so I cam to the two big realisations.

The first (which I kind of knew anyway) was to bite the bullet and save up like crazy for a dedicated guide camera.  Was too much hassle trying to get a webcam to work.  Just was not cutting the mustard.

The second, which was kind of alluded too already, was that my data was pants so have deleted it off my hard drive and will start afresh when I get the correct hardware to do what I want to do.

Is kind of sad to see it go as these were the first photons I grabbed and have helped me no end of ways on the learning curve, but there is no way I can get anything more, so have wiped the  slate clean.

Kind of feels liberating.

Has anyone else been here, done this, got the t-shirt?

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Probably most of us who started imaging with less than prime equipment. Certainly I've dumped a lot of old DSLR subs that are rubbish. I've even dumped some CCD subs where the guiding and / or focus were off.

No point keeping rubbish data, as they say. Garbage in - Garbage out.

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Yeah, Rubbish data is worse than useless, because it costs you time afterwards trying to salvage something... Best just to chuck it.  Even with professional telescopes, it takes a few attempts to realise it's pointless trying to take data if the conditions aren't up to it -- it's a better use of time just to sit idle...

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No data is better than bad data. Get yourself situated and poised for success, then start anew. In the long run it will be less frustrating, more enjoyable and you will end up with gratifying images.

There is nothing wrong with dumping the bad data, just keep the "imaging fire" that you have going strong and don't give up. Better nights are ahead.

Clear Skies,

Miguel

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Not all bad data is useless. Suppose you have some out of focus subs or slightly trailed subs. They can still be used to help your background sky, so making a full stack including the bad ones and a second stack with only the good ones is the thing to do. Stretch them both, put the good stack into Ps as a top layer over the bad, use colour select to select just the background sky on the top level and then erase it with the eraser set to whatever opacity gives the best result. 

Olly

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Sometimes its inevitable that you have to dump data. Ive gotten halfway through a project, then just decided to kill it off and start again because I wasnt happy with the framing, focus or quality of the stars.

But, when you do get good stuff.... hang on to it, build on it, incorporate it into future projects. Its your data, youve paid for it (quite literally!), so get your moneys worth ;)

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As a variation on Olly's suggestion with poor data, especially with a one shot colour camera, I use the stack of 'good data' as a 'luminance' channel by converting it to greyscale and then processing it on its own - once you have a decent mono image, copy and paste it on top of the colour stack and set blend mode to 'Luminosity'. This allows you to get the very best out of the colour data that (although of poor quality) still cost you time and effort to capture!

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