Monochrome M51 (mono Canon 550D)

[Luis Campos]

Hi guys,

 

Been on a little vacation and only on the last night I got some good weather to make the annual M51 image It was already late whe I finished setting up so not much data but still I'm pleased with the result, seeing was bad and with some wind gusts in the mix, stars were a bit "fat" due to this and detail on the galaxy suffered some impact.

 

This is only 16x8 min. subs at 1600 ISO and 3Cº on the sensor, the tidal tails are showing well with just a bit over two hours worth of exposure

 

 

Cheers,

 

Luís 

 

 

[michael.h.f.wilkinson]

Very nice. A lot of the faint halo and tidal tails around the companion captured nicely

[Barry-Wilson]

Lovely Luis.

[Ruud]

Hi Luís, it's awesome in monochrome!

Love it!

[laudropb]

Very nice image Luis.

[seo]

That's a nice final image Luís. Well done.

[Thalestris24]

Hi Luis

Good to see you posting an image!  Can I pick your brains please? I've taken quite a few images with the mono 550d now  but I'm still a bit unsure about how you convert them in IRIS. Obviously I want to do a batch convert i.e. multiple files. IRIS is a bit vague. I need to just convert the raw .cr2 files to .fit but without debayering but it's not clear which option to use to make sure the output is still linear. Grateful if you could point me in the right direction. I posted on the debayering thread in the diy section but didn't get an answer (the forum is very quiet now...).

Thanks

Louise

[Luis Campos]

Many thanks to all the friends for the kind words

Louise,

No problem, more then glad to help out

It's simple to make a batch conversion with Iris, do the following:

-Open your image browser with all your raws

-In Iris first you need to set up your images folder (working path) and image type, here choose "PIC" as file type

-On the small camera icon on the top row choose you camera model, for the 550D choose "50D, 5DMKII, 7D"

-In Iris click "digital photo" and then "decode raw files", a smaller window will show up

-In your image browser click all the files and just drag them into the new small window that showed up, here just give the raw files a generic name (IMG for example) and click "CFA", when finished click "done"

Now you have all your subs ready for callibration and stacking in Iris

I'm not sure if you know how to do the full callibration with Iris? If not just let me know and I'll drive you through in detail so you can get the most of your camera just remember to dither your subs and do at least a flatfield and bias callibration, you can bypass darks when using cooling.

Cheers,

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Thalestris24]

23 minutes ago, Luis Campos said:

Many thanks to all the friends for the kind words

Louise,

No problem, more then glad to help out

It's simple to make a batch conversion with Iris, do the following:

-Open your image browser with all your raws

-In Iris first you need to set up your images folder (working path) and image type, here choose "PIC" as file type

-On the small camera icon on the top row choose you camera model, for the 550D choose "50D, 5DMKII, 7D"

-In Iris click "digital photo" and then "decode raw files", a smaller window will show up

-In your image browser click all the files and just drag them into the new small window that showed up, here just give the raw files a generic name (IMG for example) and click "CFA", when finished click "done"

Now you have all your subs ready for callibration and stacking in Iris

I'm not sure if you know how to do the full callibration with Iris? If not just let me know and I'll drive you through in detail so you can get the most of your camera just remember to dither your subs and do at least a flatfield and bias callibration, you can bypass darks when using cooling.

Cheers,

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hi Luis

I was doing what you've said above but doesn't the cfa option treat the files as colour ones? Maybe I'm misunderstanding what Iris is actually doing... My aim was to convert the files to fits then stack them in dss as mono files. I'll maybe have to have another go with Pixinsight...

Thanks

Louise

[Luis Campos]

Good morning Louise,

Nope...when hitting "CFA" you get a true mono image with no interpolation in IRIS (that's what we want) only if you are using a "normal" RGB camera you need to make an extra step to convert the data to colors, here is were the trick is as we skip this step and align and stack the true mono data with no debayer and no interpolation

I really incourage you to stick with IRIS for this as it really handles the mono data exceptionally well, IRIS seems very complicated at first but with a little pratice it becomes natural.

I will make a more detailed step by step tutorial for IRIS maybe during this week, I will let you know as soon as I have it ready, this will be cool to help out people using the mono cameras as we do, stay tunned

Cheers,

 

 

[Thalestris24]

2 hours ago, Luis Campos said:

Good morning Louise,

Nope...when hitting "CFA" you get a true mono image with no interpolation in IRIS (that's what we want) only if you are using a "normal" RGB camera you need to make an extra step to convert the data to colors, here is were the trick is as we skip this step and align and stack the true mono data with no debayer and no interpolation

I really incourage you to stick with IRIS for this as it really handles the mono data exceptionally well, IRIS seems very complicated at first but with a little pratice it becomes natural.

I will make a more detailed step by step tutorial for IRIS maybe during this week, I will let you know as soon as I have it ready, this will be cool to help out people using the mono cameras as we do, stay tunned

Cheers,

 

 

Ah, ok, thanks Luis  Pixinsight can handle the raw files in a linear manner also but dss is easier to use. I'll convert to cfm in Iris and stack in dss. Hopefully the images I have should look a bit better than treating them as colour

Cheers

Louise

[swag72]

That looks really nice Luis

[Luis Campos]

Many thanks Sara

Cheers,