m33

[alacant]

Hi everyone. Probably overdone the denoise layer on this. What do you think? 

Thanks for looking.

About 1h 20, Canon 700d

[vlaiv]

I like it as is.

[GuLinux]

Well, probably a little less denoise would improve it (did you use a mask?), but otherwise, I like it a lot.

Very nice stars in there, tiny and coloured!

 

What equipment (and processing SW) did you use?

[alacant]

12 minutes ago, GuLinux said:

equipment (and processing SW) did you use?

Hi. ES 208, f3.9; gimp. Cheers.

[alacant]

Lighter denoise, lighter stretch, left the stars in place during... Dunno. Changing too much at a time!

[DarkAntimatter]

8 minutes ago, alacant said:

Lighter denoise, lighter stretch, left the stars in place during... Dunno. Changing too much at a time!

Both look great but I like this one best.  

Did you do stacking; did you do it in gimp?  I'm interested because I've been using the gimp a little (not photography stuff) and I like it so far so.  I'm curious if it is possible to do astrophotography with it.

[alacant]

Hi, Yes, you can use gimp for stacking but it's time consuming. Load each RAW as a layer, enlarge the canvas to give you space to float the layer and align subsequent layers as you load them. Then make the opacity of each layer proportional to the number of frames you have e.g. 4 frames would be 25% opacity per layer before you merge. Fortunately, there are dedicated stacking programs. The fastest I've found is siril. If you don't have Linux, there's an unstable windows version or DSS. There are others but I believe you'll have to pay for them. HTH.

 

[DarkAntimatter]

Thanks, yes I have linux.  Wonder if it would be possible to do an scm script for gimp to do that.  Probably still have to align by hand, though.  If Siril is available for linux, I will look into that. 

[alacant]

4 minutes ago, DarkAntimatter said:

still have to align by hand, though

The Siril source is available. Beyond me, but it may give you a clue as to writing an alignment algorithm. You'd be a very popular guy if you built a stacking plugin for gimp 

[DarkAntimatter]

2 minutes ago, alacant said:

The Siril source is available. Beyond me, but it may give you a clue as to writing an alignment algorithm. You'd be a very popular guy if you built a stacking plugin for gimp 

I'm no programming genius, just warning you.  I'm not sure gimp scripts provide the tools necessary to compare 2 images and align the common elements, but maybe can combine with an external program that does the alignment.  I think the astro case would be fairly easy to match some light spots on a mostly dark background.  In my case, I don't know anything about reading the images into code, from which can start applying the logic programmatically.

Maybe someone will see this and get inspired...

[lock042]

Why do you want use gimp for stacking image ?

Siril is dedicated to this task, and IMHO it does the job.

[Starwiz]

Very nice imaging.

John

[bobro]

8 hours ago, alacant said:

What do you think? 

Lovely image, especially as I've just imaged M33 for the first time with much inferior results. What #subs and exposure length did you use? (Quite surprised to see my GIMP stacking demo showing a noise reduction demo referred to here - someone must have looked at it! )

[alacant]

7 hours ago, bobro said:

my GIMP stacking demo

Hey, no idea it was yours. Excellent. It was that video where I finally understood what stacking did. I waded through the usual mush of photoshop noise before I found it. Thanks for posting!

[alacant]

9 hours ago, lock042 said:

Siril is dedicated to this task

Absolutely. Maybe to have a few more alternatives on Unix to play with? 

[alacant]

8 hours ago, bobro said:

exposure length did you use?

18 x 4 minutes.

[lock042]

1 hour ago, alacant said:

Absolutely. Maybe to have a few more alternatives on Unix to play with? 

Sure, but my opinion is that it would be more useful to help us improving Siril than redoing something else from scratch.

Of course, this is just my opinion. However, Gimp is very important for the last step in astrophotography process ans should be use for that.

[Star101]

Having recently imaged M33 myself and played with colours etc. I do like your M33. This is very similar to what I landed on. I see lots of M33 images that are strectched and pushed way beyond its limits and ends up looking like a cartoon. 

This image looks much more natural to me. Thanks for sharing.

I also like the video. Not so much for the stacking as that would be tediuos on 30 subs. But for the demonstartion on how stacking reduces the noise. Great work there. Thanks.

[alacant]

1 minute ago, Star101 said:

Great work there.

Hi. It's by @bobro. I must take no credit!

18 minutes ago, lock042 said:

help us improving Siril

Absolutely and I intend to do so. There's some publicity here. Maybe you/we could post on Astro Lounge, 'Native stacking and image conversion for Linux' perhaps, so that more Linux users could give it a shot? Cheers.

[lock042]

32 minutes ago, alacant said:

Maybe you/we could post on Astro Lounge

Feel free for doing that :).

Publicity is a sort of help.

 

Cheers

[DarkAntimatter]

6 hours ago, lock042 said:

Feel free for doing that :).

Publicity is a sort of help.

 

Cheers

What else can we do to help?

[lock042]

They're a lot of different way.

As Siril is opensource you can help us to debug or write new features : https://free-astro.org/bugs/view_all_bug_page.php

It is also possible to test and report all bugs encountered. Then, it is also possible to click on the donate button ;).

Anyway, as Siril is free and open, every possible ways are very helpful.

Cheers,

Cyril

[DarkAntimatter]

Thanks for the suggestions.  I need my scope to arrive before I can take any frames to practice on, but would be glad to help then.  Always glad to contribute with something that helps the linux community.