IC1396 First Light with Esprit 100ED

[oymd]

Good evening everyone

Have been on a hiatus from imaging for over a year, having started the hobby in March last year, so pretty much a nebie.

On receiving my Esprit last month, I decided to start using NINA.

Here is IC 1396 imaged over 2 nights.

I reframed on the same area the following night using NINA's framing assistant. NINA is REALLY intuitive!!
 
I also watched Cuiv's Flats video about NINA.
 
Today I took all the calibration files, and stacked in DSS.
 
Followed a PixInsight online tutorial by Cuiv, but I think my processing skills are WAY lacking.
 
Please feel free to have a look at the actual RAW data, and please feel free to have a go at processing it properly.
 
I feel it could be processed much much better than what I did. I think I BLOATED the stars badly.
 
Attached is the calibrated stacked file, before doing anything to in in PI.
 
https://www.dropbox....tosave.tif?dl=0
 

294MC Pro

L Enhance filter

Lights: 90 x 300s -5c
Darks: 50 x 300s -5c
Flats: 50
Darkflats: 50
Attached Thumbnails
 

Autosave.tif

Edited August 5, 2021 by oymd

[david_taurus83]

Looks good to me! Did you sort out your connectivity issues then?

[oymd]

1 hour ago, david_taurus83 said:

Looks good to me! Did you sort out your connectivity issues then?

YES!!

I ditched APT, and watched some online videos of NINA.

I changed ONE thing though. I used a different USB3 cable.

The surface Pro has ONE USB3 port only, and it is connected to an UN POWERED 4 port USB hub. AZ-EQ6 Pro mount and 294MC Pro are connected to the hub.

Everything worked perfectly the second night.

I think the main issue was using the ASCOM ZWO ASI driver.

Ever since I switched to the NATIVE driver in NINA, I have had zero issues the following 2 nights. Even the hub surprisingly worked fine, even though I ordered a POWERED USB hub from amazon, just in case, but never used it.

Thank you for your comment regarding the image, but I felt that I made it worse. PI is just so deep and I need to do a LOT of processing to get to grips with it. I have the book, but it's not enough really.

Please feel free to have a go at the TIFF file.

Since it's my very FIRST image with the new Esprit, and also my FIRST attempt at guiding, I am very interested to get some feedback on the quality of the optics of the scope and my guiding

Best regards

Ossi

Edited August 5, 2021 by oymd

[oymd]

This time I used WBPP in PI, and followed another tutorial on PI processing...

Is this any better?

 

[simmo39]

Second one is a lot better to my eyes.

[Sterrenland]

You'll probably hate it, but I was bored not being able to get out and do some imaging as it's cloudy...again, so had a play with your data in Pixinsight just to practise some bits and bobs. Very much at the start of my Pixinsight learning curve 🙄

Hope you don't mind?

 

[oymd]

14 hours ago, Sterrenland said:

You'll probably hate it, but I was bored not being able to get out and do some imaging as it's cloudy...again, so had a play with your data in Pixinsight just to practise some bits and bobs. Very much at the start of my Pixinsight learning curve 🙄

Hope you don't mind?

 

Like it a lot!

How do you get the colors to look like that?

Is that the hubble palate?

[Sterrenland]

5 minutes ago, oymd said:

Like it a lot!

How do you get the colors to look like that?

Is that the hubble palate?

Well, it's a pseudo SHO/Hubble palette as it's created from a OSC image - Luke Newbould who is on this forum has posted an excellent tutorial video on Youtube which shows how to do it. Basically it involves using the red channel as a Luminance channel, creating a new blue channel with less noise...etc etc. Probably easier to watch the video!

He also covers using Starnet++ in Pixinsight...it's a great way to remove the stars so that you can process the background. I find reducing the stars using Morphological Transformation before recombining stars and background is a good way to allow more focus on the nebula, etc. without having too much star-distraction.

I quite like this type of colour palette as I think it often shows more contrast/detail particularly in the bright areas of nebulae.

[oymd]

1 minute ago, Sterrenland said:

Well, it's a pseudo SHO/Hubble palette as it's created from a OSC image - Luke Newbould who is on this forum has posted an excellent tutorial video on Youtube which shows how to do it. Basically it involves using the red channel as a Luminance channel, creating a new blue channel with less noise...etc etc. Probably easier to watch the video!

He also covers using Starnet++ in Pixinsight...it's a great way to remove the stars so that you can process the background. I find reducing the stars using Morphological Transformation before recombining stars and background is a good way to allow more focus on the nebula, etc. without having too much star-distraction.

I quite like this type of colour palette as I think it often shows more contrast/detail particularly in the bright areas of nebulae.

I like it!

Can you pls point me in the direction of that video?

Thanks

[Sterrenland]

12 minutes ago, oymd said:

I like it!

Can you pls point me in the direction of that video?

Thanks

The links are in the discussion above.

[peter shah]

always nice to get the first light out of the way....nicely done too

[oymd]

12 minutes ago, Sterrenland said:

The links are in the discussion above.

Many thanks

If you don't mind, I'll add it to my astrobin page.