PixInsight Calibration Error

[Scooot]

I’ve realised after reading a thread on the PixInsight forum that I’d been making what turns out to be an important calibration error before integrating my lights. I’d followed a tutorial which suggests calibrating the darks with the master bias before integrating them. It transpires I should only integrate the raw darks to create the master. This is the thread https://pixinsight.com/forum/index.php?topic=11968.0

I’ve reworked my latest IC1396 image from scratch. The resulting Flats were much better and the new Darks resulted in much less noise. This made processing it much less of a fight. Anyway here it is again, taken with my canon on the star adventurer.

[wimvb]

I guess that's what they mean when talking about a "learning curve".

Nice image, btw

[Scooot]

35 minutes ago, wimvb said:

I guess that's what they mean when talking about a "learning curve".

Nice image, btw

Indeed and thank you  

[wimvb]

Looking at your image on my mobile phone, the background seems to have a green cast to it. Scnr would clean that up. Otoh, it may just be my screen.

[Scooot]

2 hours ago, wimvb said:

Looking at your image on my mobile phone, the background seems to have a green cast to it. Scnr would clean that up. Otoh, it may just be my screen.

Thanks Wim, I did try a run of scnr and it gave it a slight blue cast on my screen so I took it out. Interestingly  when I look at it on my iPad it’s much darker/blacker than the PC. 

I used photometric colour calibration for the colour balance. Despite this the fainter stars nearer the nebula have a slight pinkish tinge on my screen. I only boosted the colour slightly on the stars so I’m putting this down to my bad skies and the use of my Astronomik CLS filter as this seems to be recurring issue I have. Or it might just be that it’s because they’re nearer the nebula on this occasion.

[wimvb]

There's a lot of weak Ha in the background, which affects the colours of the stars. I wouldn't worry too much about it. If you callibrate the colour of the brighter stars, and let the small ones be, you're fine, imo. You can of course create a star halo mask (ring mask) and use that to desaturate the small stars, if their colour bothers you too much. This is the same kind of mask you would use for star reduction.