First Proper Light QHY168C

[old_eyes]

First attempt to use the QHY168C I realised I had the field flattener to chip distance all wrong. Now corrected. It is still off a bit and slightly tilted, but much better.

Had some clear sky Saturday night so thought I would try the North America Nebular to see what it gives in the red.

This is the result of 45 x 120 sec frames at -10C on Equinox 80 Pro with darks and flats. Stacked DSS, processed in PI - just cropped, DBE, stretched and SCNR to reduce green.

More processing would help, but it is pleasing to get a first image. I think this is going to be a good camera. Not as good as this image with the same camera and an Ha filter, but a good start.

 

 

 

[bottletopburly]

very nice indeed 

[old_eyes]

Yep! I reckon this could be a very good camera when I get to grips with it.

[wimvb]

That's a good start. I think you can pull out more with gentle processing. (You could try masked stretch in PI, or Mark Shelley's new arcsinh stretch.)

[old_eyes]

Wim,

i am sure I could do better. Just need to find the time to practice. I am reading the”Inside PixInsight” book at the moment looking for further ideas.

 

[wimvb]

That's the good thing with data; you can always reprocess and learn new tricks.

One trick I've learnt is to extract the luminance from an rgb image, and process that more aggressively. Then use lrgb combination to recombine it with the original, stretched rgb image. This works like a colour booster. I'm sure it's in the book somewhere.

Good luck

[old_eyes]

Oh! Got to try that one. Ollypenrice showed me something similar using LAB space when I visited.

of course one reason for practicing processing is that the clouds in the western part of the UK tend to stop you getting data in the first place!

[wimvb]

You can do it in lab in PixInsight also. Extract l, a, and b and replace the l with your version. Just make sure that the average brightness is close to the original, otherwise you can get weird effects.

You can even do a histogram stretch on a and b. Very gently pull the black point and white point in just a little, taking care not to move the central peak. It's delicate, and doesn't always work. But as you noted, too much cloud to prevent you from going out to get data, so enough time to fool around testing things.