M57 with bin4

[Datalord]

After some heated debate in another thread with @vlaiv , I wanted to try out whether I could get anything useful out of bin 4 at a pixel scale of 2.08"pp. So yesterday I found that M57 was in a good position and I started a run.

I will say that I used everything I could on this data. I drizzled, cropped, PI, PS, back to PI, then Topaz Gigapixel to enlarge, before some more PI and PS.

Decent result. Processing was a bit harder than I'm used to because I had to readjust all settings to a different pixel scale, so more trial and error on that side.

Some further comparisons on the drizzle vs non-drizzle in the R channel:

I had intended to process both to compare the final result, but I simply didn't bother to process the non-drizzled version. I find the drizzled much better for me to gauge further processing steps that would be impossible in the other version.

Here's another fun one. This is the combined RGB before stretching! There's SO MUCH information in these bin4 pixels:

Conclusion on it for me is that I managed to get an RGB result with quite a lot of detail on a tiny object in just 3 hours. I doubt I'll make bin4 my goto mode in the future, but I do appreciate that I have this in my toolbox now. Thanks Vlaiv!

[MarkAR]

Nice one.

[Tom OD]

Pretty cool

It does seem weird to bin 4 x 4 then drizzle. As opposed to shooting in Bin 3 for example.

But it certainly seems to work.

Tom

[Datalord]

7 hours ago, Tom OD said:

Pretty cool

It does seem weird to bin 4 x 4 then drizzle. As opposed to shooting in Bin 3 for example.

But it certainly seems to work.

Tom

The idea is that that no matter what you do, you can't beat the seeing. In my case I seem to have a seeing of 2.5-3, so imaging at 2.08arcsec per pixel in bin4 is still lower than my seeing. Adding higher resolution on the gathering side will not actually add more data on the individual sub. Drizzle on the other hand will add the data all the slides and produce more resolution out of the "knowledge" of multiple frames that have been carefully dithered.

Will bin4 be my goto for all my images? No. But I think it is pretty cool to be able to gather so much data in such a short time.