Have a go at my Andromeda

[Space Oddities]

Hello everyone  

I'm slowly learning PixInsight, but it's quite a complex software, and I think it will take me months, if not years, to feel more comfortable. I don't find the UI particularly intuitive, to be honest, but I'll probably get used to it.

However my first tests are encouraging! I've gathered some tutorials and bought a book to help me, so right now I'm mostly doing what smarter people tell me to do   But I think it would also help me to see what more experienced users could achieve with the very same dataset. That would set some kind of goal, I suppose!

Here is my first try! It's 28 x 180s luminance from a Bortle 3/4 zone, taken with the ASI1600MM-Pro & ZWO's UV/IR block filter. I stacked and calibrated in DSS (darks, bias, no flat). Sadly, clouds thwarted my plans to make this a colorful picture...  

You can download the TIFF file out of DSS here (~60 MB): https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Mzk40Wz_BywO5sizmKNBy_S24EnXxHJ5/view?usp=sharing

Have fun, and please let me know what you think of the data I acquired, it really helps! I already noticed some halos and distorted stars in the corners. I wonder if my UV/IR filter isn't upside down somehow, or if it's just because they're entry level...

Thanks!

Pierre

 

Edited December 10, 2020 by Space Oddities

[Luke]

Very nice image!

[Space Oddities]

Thanks Luke!  

[geeklee]

On 06/12/2020 at 16:24, Space Oddities said:

Here is my first try! It's 28 x 180s luminance from a Bortle 3/4 zone, taken with the ASI1600MM-Pro & ZWO's UV/IR block filter. I stacked and calibrated in DSS (darks, bias, no flat). Sadly, clouds thwarted my plans to make this a colorful picture...

It looks great already Pierre!  Look forward to seeing some colour when you get more clear skies!

[AKB]

On 06/12/2020 at 16:24, Space Oddities said:

I don't find the UI particularly intuitive

I was with you, there, until I realised that all the drag-and-drop rubbish that you get fed with the online tutorials is totally unnecessary.  Most processes simply apply to the front most window (which is almost always what you want) by just pressing the ‘square’ button, instead of dragging and dropping the triangle every time.

[Space Oddities]

31 minutes ago, AKB said:

I was with you, there, until I realised that all the drag-and-drop rubbish that you get fed with the online tutorials is totally unnecessary.  Most processes simply apply to the front most window (which is almost always what you want) by just pressing the ‘square’ button, instead of dragging and dropping the triangle every time.

Thanks! I'll give it a try, but that makes sense  Also I'm a keyboard guy, I need to learn the shortcuts, rather than these tiny buttons...

50 minutes ago, geeklee said:

It looks great already Pierre!  Look forward to seeing some colour when you get more clear skies!

Thanks a lot Lee! To be fair, I also used Photoshop to polish it and make it pop, I don't know everything PixInsight can do yet. But good old Photoshop always has my back  

[tomato]

I agree with the other posters, that’s a very fine mono M31, I’m afraid I don’t have any suggestions on how to improve it. 👍

Good luck with PI, I’ve had the software a while now but I still tend to stay with the software I’m more comfortable with.

[MartinHiggins]

Hi All,

Thanks Pierre for making this file available, your image of M31 looks really good.

I downloaded SharpCap 3.2 pro recently but due to back problems and clouds I've not been able to do any imaging. I've been playing about with SharpCap with the camera pointing around a room to get an idea of the controls.

 I've downloaded the file, transfered it to SharpCap captures file, in SharpCap I've clicked on  Cameras>Folder monitor camera, The camera controls dialogue on the right opens and I can see a source file and browse files box showing the M31 file in png and tif but I can't get further than this. Any advice would be very welcome.

Cheers

[wimvb]

I downloaded your data, and it seems to me that the image is already stretched. Unfortunately that makes it a lot harder to do anything more with it. Can you post the unstretched image from your stacking program. Ie do not apply the stretching that DSS suggests.

[Space Oddities]

4 hours ago, wimvb said:

I downloaded your data, and it seems to me that the image is already stretched. Unfortunately that makes it a lot harder to do anything more with it. Can you post the unstretched image from your stacking program. Ie do not apply the stretching that DSS suggests.

Sorry for that! I restacked everything, I hope this is going to work this time   

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Mzk40Wz_BywO5sizmKNBy_S24EnXxHJ5/view?usp=sharing

[Space Oddities]

7 hours ago, MartinHiggins said:

Hi All,

Thanks Pierre for making this file available, your image of M31 looks really good.

I downloaded SharpCap 3.2 pro recently but due to back problems and clouds I've not been able to do any imaging. I've been playing about with SharpCap with the camera pointing around a room to get an idea of the controls.

 I've downloaded the file, transfered it to SharpCap captures file, in SharpCap I've clicked on  Cameras>Folder monitor camera, The camera controls dialogue on the right opens and I can see a source file and browse files box showing the M31 file in png and tif but I can't get further than this. Any advice would be very welcome.

Cheers

Thanks a lot! I'm not sure why that happens, to be honest I don't know SharpCap very much.

Perhaps this will be interesting for you. Deep Sky West observatory, in the US, provides free data that you can play with: https://www.deepskywest.com/free-downloads-v2

It's very clean data and easy to work with, most likely a much better option than my stack  

[maw lod qan]

I have a desire to go to the dark side, but dont have the equipment. 

All I can say is in my eyes, that's a very nice image.

[Space Oddities]

Thanks a lot   I'm pretty happy with my progress, just wish I had my own garden... But that's something that hopefully will come later in life, so you make do with what you have  

[wimvb]

13 hours ago, Space Oddities said:

Sorry for that! I restacked everything, I hope this is going to work this time   

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Mzk40Wz_BywO5sizmKNBy_S24EnXxHJ5/view?usp=sharing

Much better. I played with your image in Pix, and got about the same results as you. Differences are only in the details. I will post my results later.

I noticed that the core was blown out, so you might test shorter exposure times, maybe 90 or 120 seconds, or a lower gain.

[Space Oddities]

Thanks Wim!

Yes I also had the problem of blown out core, and couldn't bring it back. I'll keep that in mind for the next time, and try to make a HDR version!

 

[wimvb]

1 hour ago, Space Oddities said:

Thanks Wim!

Yes I also had the problem of blown out core, and couldn't bring it back. I'll keep that in mind for the next time, and try to make a HDR version!

 

That may not be necessary. The essence of cmos workflows is to gather many short subs. Because of the low read noise, this allows you to gain dynamic range while keeping bright areas (stars and core) from blowing out. Beware this comes at a cost of many Megabytes or Gigabytes of data.

[wimvb]

Here's my attempt. As I wrote before, there's not much more to pull out of the data.

[bottletopburly]

Bored self isolating so had a play in Startools 1.7

 

 

Edited March 17, 2021 by bottletopburly
blend core

[bottletopburly]

[Space Oddities]

Well done! So much details near the core I didn't suspect, I certainly need to learn how to do bring this out