NGC 6992 in Narrowband (Eastern Veil Nebula)

[tooth_dr]

This is an image I took over the past two evenings.  I took Ha the first night as the Moon was out, and the last night I took some Si and Oiii before the Moon was too high, and finished off with Ha until it got cloudy.

Equipment: EQ6, Takahashi Epsilon 180ed, Atik 383L+, 2" Optolong Ha.Oiii.Sii filters, finderguider with ASI120MM

Ha = 39 x300s / Oiii = 9 x 300s / Sii = 8 x 300s with a total integration time of 4 hours and 40 minutes

 

As I've progressed through the processing, things have a got a little out of control as usual.

Here it is anyway:

 

CS

Adam

 

EDITED to add revised version, using Starnet++ (BOTTOM IMAGE)

 

 

Edited November 16, 2019 by tooth_dr

[alan potts]

Very nice indeed, sound like you had the same sort of weather we got, managed 3 hours though.

Alan

[kirkster501]

I like that a lot, very nice Adam. I love the colours and well done grabbing the SII in our skies....!  If I could be super critical, it looks like you have overdone Morphological Transformation (or whatever star reduction) method you use.  The stars look a bit odd and blurred to my eyes. 

[tooth_dr]

10 minutes ago, kirkster501 said:

I like that a lot, very nice Adam. I love the colours and well done grabbing the SII in our skies....!  If I could be super critical, it looks like you have overdone Morphological Transformation (or whatever star reduction) method you use.  The stars look a bit odd and blurred to my eyes. 

Thanks Steve. I think it looks a bit of mess now I see it again. I used straton to remove the stars and added them back in at the end. The background started to go awry and it never recovered! The Sii was surprisingly clear. I think the almost full moon might explain the excess background noise. 

[kirkster501]

If you have Pixinsight try using Starnet.  It is a free plugin module and does a better job than Straton or Annie's Actions.

[tooth_dr]

5 minutes ago, kirkster501 said:

If you have Pixinsight try using Starnet.  It is a free plugin module and does a better job than Straton or Annie's Actions.

I downloaded Starnet but couldn’t work out how to use it/load it. But if reading to do now. Cheers. 

Edited November 16, 2019 by tooth_dr

[kirkster501]

You download it from Github, extract, copy a the files to the bin directory where PI is located then load the new module.

Just use default settings.

[tooth_dr]

1 hour ago, kirkster501 said:

You download it from Github, extract, copy a the files to the bin directory where PI is located then load the new module.

Just use default settings.

Thanks again Steve for encouraging me to give it another go with Starnet++.  I dont have PI, but managed to get it working via the CMD prompt menu and some fiddling around.  I'll update this post when I get the data processed.

[tooth_dr]

@kirkster501

Wow Starnet++ is a lot better than Straton.  Here is the original image, straton image and starnet image as a gif.

 

[Adreneline]

4 hours ago, tooth_dr said:

Wow Starnet++ is a lot better than Straton.

I've played around with Starnet++, Straton and AAA and the success with the latter two seems to be a function of just how non-linear the image is when you extract the stars. Starnet++ works really well as a module in PI on a PC but needs to be used in Terminal via a command line prompt on the Mac.

I really like the gif - very revealing.

Great job with the Eastern Veil - looks like your Epsilon is working out really well.

Adrian

[Hallingskies]

20 hours ago, tooth_dr said:

Thanks again Steve for encouraging me to give it another go with Starnet++.  I dont have PI, but managed to get it working via the CMD prompt menu and some fiddling around.  I'll update this post when I get the data processed.

That is really good.  What “fiddling around” did you do to you get Starnet to work without PI?  I tried it a while back and got nowhere, and assumed Starnet wouldn’t run without PI.

[tooth_dr]

3 minutes ago, Hallingskies said:

That is really good.  What “fiddling around” did you do to you get Starnet to work without PI?  I tried it a while back and got nowhere, and assumed Starnet wouldn’t run without PI.

I took a screen shot of the dos window as I would never remember it tomorrow never mind next week or month! I’ll post my screenshot later, I’m not on my pc atm. 

[Xiga]

Very nice Adam. Great to see the Epsilon working so well!

For those looking to use Starnet++ as a standalone package without P.I, it's actually really simple, and doesn't require any knowledge of DOS commands. Basically, after downloading and extracting the files, you should have a folder that looks like this:

If this is NOT what you have, then you haven't downloaded the right package.

In the example above, i copied in Ha and Oiii images, ready for star removal. They originally had very long file names, having come from APP, so i always rename them as just Ha and Oiii at this stage just for simplicity. Then you just need to Right-Click the run_mono_starnet.bat file and choose Edit. It should open in Notepad, and all you then need to do is check/edit the coding so it looks like the one below:

So all you need to do is reference the exact filename of the file you are removing the stars from (Ha.tiff in this case - and be careful, make sure you get it exact, as sometimes tiff files can have 1 or 2 f's), and then immediately follow it with the name you want the starless image to have, in this case just exactly the same but appended with -s

Save the batch file and close it. Now all you should have to do is double-click it to run it. 

Now, for future Ha images you shouldn't need to edit anything, and for Oiii and Sii, all you need to amend in the batch file are a few characters. 

The method works exactly the same with an RGB image, except you have to edit the run_rgb_starnet.bat file instead. 

HTH

CS.

Edited November 18, 2019 by Xiga

[MartinB]

Have you tried blending the starless image with the normal one in photoshop using screen as the blend mode.  It can be very effective in helping pull out the faint wisps which show so clearly in your starless image.

[Ryan_86]

On 18/11/2019 at 01:35, Xiga said:

Very nice Adam. Great to see the Epsilon working so well!

For those looking to use Starnet++ as a standalone package without P.I, it's actually really simple, and doesn't require any knowledge of DOS commands. Basically, after downloading and extracting the files, you should have a folder that looks like this:

If this is NOT what you have, then you haven't downloaded the right package.

In the example above, i copied in Ha and Oiii images, ready for star removal. They originally had very long file names, having come from APP, so i always rename them as just Ha and Oiii at this stage just for simplicity. Then you just need to Right-Click the run_mono_starnet.bat file and choose Edit. It should open in Notepad, and all you then need to do is check/edit the coding so it looks like the one below:

So all you need to do is reference the exact filename of the file you are removing the stars from (Ha.tiff in this case - and be careful, make sure you get it exact, as sometimes tiff files can have 1 or 2 f's), and then immediately follow it with the name you want the starless image to have, in this case just exactly the same but appended with -s

Save the batch file and close it. Now all you should have to do is double-click it to run it. 

Now, for future Ha images you shouldn't need to edit anything, and for Oiii and Sii, all you need to amend in the batch file are a few characters. 

The method works exactly the same with an RGB image, except you have to edit the run_rgb_starnet.bat file instead. 

HTH

CS.

Hi Xiga,

I hope you don't mind me asking, I have followed your instructions to process a starless image of my stretched 16bit tif mono and rgb images. However after I edit either in their respective notepads, the programme fails to process with the following message. Do you have any idea what I am doing wrong?

Thanks

Ryan

 

[Xiga]

18 hours ago, Ryan_86 said:

Hi Xiga,

I hope you don't mind me asking, I have followed your instructions to process a starless image of my stretched 16bit tif mono and rgb images. However after I edit either in their respective notepads, the programme fails to process with the following message. Do you have any idea what I am doing wrong?

Thanks

Ryan

 

Hi Ryan

Your batch file isn't quite right. You've specified the input file ok, but you haven't specified a filename for the starless image to be output. 

You just need to add a filename before the '64' in the batch file. Sonething like mono_HaHDR-s.tif  should be fine.

Good luck! 😃