OSC during full moon (Target suggestions)

[Iem1]

Yeah I might have a look at stacking in SiRiL, see if I can improve on it. I had a quick look but seemed a little confusing, I am sure I can find a guide online!

I think I might have over done it on the manual dithering, ever so slightly exceed the 'few pixels' required..

Night one data Stacked on its own;

Night 2 data stacked on its own;

 

combined data;

 

What I ended up with;

[CaptainKingsmill]

I had a similar debate as you this weekend with what to shoot being graced with clear skies.
Being fairly new to AP, most of the things I'm shooting at the moment are first time attempts for me. 

Just like you, I was thinking of the pleiades, despite their proximity to the moon. 
Initially tried a 16min run at 2min subs as a bit of a test on Sunday night and managed to get some reasonable nebulosity so last night gave it another attempt, this time for 1hr 30min thinking I should get some really nice nebulosity. and got worse results than the previous night!! 😆  Almost no nebulosity what so ever. no idea why.... I suspect it is the processing, and not the data itself. 

Such is the learning curve of AP.... I think I'll give them another go when the moon isn't a factor. 🤷‍♂️

 

[StuartT]

3 hours ago, CaptainKingsmill said:

Just like you, I was thinking of the pleiades, despite their proximity to the moon. 
Initially tried a 16min run at 2min subs as a bit of a test on Sunday night and managed to get some reasonable nebulosity so last night gave it another attempt, this time for 1hr 30min thinking I should get some really nice nebulosity. and got worse results than the previous night!! 😆  Almost no nebulosity what so ever. no idea why.... I suspect it is the processing, and not the data itself. 

Such is the learning curve of AP.... I think I'll give them another go when the moon isn't a factor. 🤷‍♂️

 

This may be helpful https://astrobackyard.com/m45-the-pleiades/

[Iem1]

I tried using SiRiL to stack the images as suggested, I somehow managed to stumble my way through making a Black and white stacked image with no calibration frames. I then did a little research and made an appropriate pathway to the folders containing lights/bias/flats and got the script for OSC with flats and biased but no darks, but I keep getting image dimension errors.

I am having to open images individually and covert them to .fits for it to accept. It was an issue with Bias, then flats, which was ok, 20 of each converted. But now it is taking the same issue with the 500 light frames. Not sure where to go from here.

The black and white image actually looked really good too!

[Turbocoo]

On 22/11/2021 at 15:56, StuartT said:

Ok, a Bhatinov mask should be giving you good focus if you're really zoomed in on the live view.

Get more data and post what you get . Not sure where you are, but it's looking like another crystal clear night in southern England...

What monitor are you guys using (besides dslr lcd screens) to view and focus etc? 

ATM I'm using a 21 inch TV via hdmi from the pc. My canon 250d displays focus on the Canon eos software on x5 or x10 zoom 

Problem is the view on the TV looks very pixelated with the mask on 

I've seen lots of bahtinov focus screeshots with really sharp display. 

Any help appreciated 

[Iem1]

1 hour ago, Turbocoo said:

What monitor are you guys using (besides dslr lcd screens) to view and focus etc? 

ATM I'm using a 21 inch TV via hdmi from the pc. My canon 250d displays focus on the Canon eos software on x5 or x10 zoom 

Problem is the view on the TV looks very pixelated with the mask on 

I've seen lots of bahtinov focus screeshots with really sharp display. 

Any help appreciated 

Just the lcd screen on my 600D  

[Iem1]

Finally figured out how to stack in Siril! Though not separate flats, so I have used the flats from night 1 across all the data. Not ideal, but I will take what I can at this point  

What Siril spat out;

Much better field of view! Bar my exceptionally dodgy processing, an improvement. Thank you for the suggestion @StuartT!

Struggled to process this as the tif was a lot different than I am used to, the green channel was exceptionally strong and the red weak, the opposite of what I usually get.

Not entirely happy with my finished product, will revisit and keep tweaking the processing. It has a bit of an overcast I need to get shot of.

Here is the new raw data from Sirils stack if anyone wants to have a play 

result.tif

 

Edited November 23, 2021 by Iem1

[Turbocoo]

2 hours ago, Iem1 said:

Just the lcd screen on my 600D  

Yeah can do that easily on my 250d but not so on my 450d..... No tilt. 

It's much easier to do both cameras on my pc screen in the obsy but like I said, my monitor seems poor 

[StuartT]

8 hours ago, Iem1 said:

Finally figured out how to stack in Siril! Though not separate flats, so I have used the flats from night 1 across all the data. Not ideal, but I will take what I can at this point  

What Siril spat out;

Much better field of view! Bar my exceptionally dodgy processing, an improvement. Thank you for the suggestion @StuartT!

Struggled to process this as the tif was a lot different than I am used to, the green channel was exceptionally strong and the red weak, the opposite of what I usually get.

Not entirely happy with my finished product, will revisit and keep tweaking the processing. It has a bit of an overcast I need to get shot of.

Here is the new raw data from Sirils stack if anyone wants to have a play 

result.tifFetching info...

 

Hey, great that you got to grips with Siril. I must say, I totally love it and can’t imagine using anything else from now on. Prob slightly simpler for me as a) my camera generates FITS files, b) I don’t shoot any calibration frames. So I just use one of the available scripts. It’s a question of pressing a button and bingo! A few mins later I have the stacked image.

note: Siril generates a huge folder called “process” which you should remember to delete when it’s finished stacking. So you do need quite a bit of spare disk space for it to work in (especially in my case as I’m not guiding so I’m stacking several hundred, short exposures).

I then have a standard workflow post stacking;

1. crop

2. Background extraction 

3. color balance (photometric) - this really is like magic in Siril!!

4. Simple stretching

5. remove green noise (not always necessary)

6. Color saturation

7. save as TIFF

[Iem1]

38 minutes ago, StuartT said:

Hey, great that you got to grips with Siril. I must say, I totally love it and can’t imagine using anything else from now on. Prob slightly simpler for me as a) my camera generates FITS files, b) I don’t shoot any calibration frames. So I just use one of the available scripts. It’s a question of pressing a button and bingo! A few mins later I have the stacked image.

note: Siril generates a huge folder called “process” which you should remember to delete when it’s finished stacking. So you do need quite a bit of spare disk space for it to work in (especially in my case as I’m not guiding so I’m stacking several hundred, short exposures).

I then have a standard workflow post stacking;

1. crop

2. Background extraction 

3. color balance (photometric) - this really is like magic in Siril!!

4. Simple stretching

5. remove green noise (not always necessary)

6. Color saturation

7. save as TIFF

Yeah that I noticed! I had to delete a bunch of 'in process' images several times and restart it several times before having enough space for it to complete, as well as converting from 32 bit to 16 bit and using RICE compression I think it was called. Also had to scarp half my calibration frames, each light frame was being duplicated at 300 mb a pop...and I originally had 50 of them alone, plus the 50 bias and 500 light frames

but I got it done in the end and the result was definitely worth the hours of tweaking!

The photometeic calibration is amazing, and worked with most of the other stacks I did previously, but I couldn't get it to work with the new stacking! Had to do it manually as best as I could 

[Lee_P]

10 hours ago, Iem1 said:

Here is the new raw data from Sirils stack if anyone wants to have a play 

result.tif 103.14 MB · 3 downloads

Just five minutes of editing on your version 2. The longer integration time has really helped! 

[Iem1]

1 hour ago, Lee_P said:

Just five minutes of editing on your version 2. The longer integration time has really helped! 

Nice job Lee!

I am going to try a little stretch before attempting to remove the stars, see if I can get them a little smaller. Might also try split the RGB channels to remove noise separately, if I can remember how. Think PS has updated since the last time I did it, throws me off  

[Iem1]

Final completed image.

Best I could do, basic soft initial stretch while masking stars incrementally, removed stars completely in Starnett and isolated the dark clouds and the core, saturated and stretched separate, then blended with the stars.

Then I split channels in Siril into rgb and opened up each in PS and did my best to remove noise before recombining back in Siril.

 

Thank you again for the help guys, always appreciated. Quite pleased with the result considering the situation in which the images were acquired, lows of -2 degrees (with a cheap USB Dew heater) and ~90% moon  

[ONIKKINEN]

I noticed that the raw stack you posted above is in 16 bit mode while still linear. Its very likely you have lost a not insignificant amount of signal to this! Stacking in 32bit mode takes a lot more processing time and power but you should still always do this.

I have noticed that stacking my 26 megapixel frames takes around 1 gigabyte per sub with SIRIL. Easier and less straining on your PC to do in DSS, but SIRIL stacks a bit better IMO. If you have no extra harddrive space to free up, try stacking in DSS to get the 32bit result as i think it would be better?

[Iem1]

1 hour ago, ONIKKINEN said:

I noticed that the raw stack you posted above is in 16 bit mode while still linear. Its very likely you have lost a not insignificant amount of signal to this! Stacking in 32bit mode takes a lot more processing time and power but you should still always do this.

I have noticed that stacking my 26 megapixel frames takes around 1 gigabyte per sub with SIRIL. Easier and less straining on your PC to do in DSS, but SIRIL stacks a bit better IMO. If you have no extra harddrive space to free up, try stacking in DSS to get the 32bit result as i think it would be better?

Thank you for the suggestion!

I just restacked in 32bit, but with compression. No way I could do without it. And I was getting pretty horrendous results in DSS, not sure what I was doing wrong but it was coming out a bit of a mess in comparison to SiRiL

result.tif

Il have a play with this too and see if I notice any improvement  

[Iem1]

the original fit file

result.fit

[ONIKKINEN]

10 hours ago, Iem1 said:

Thank you for the suggestion!

I just restacked in 32bit, but with compression. No way I could do without it. And I was getting pretty horrendous results in DSS, not sure what I was doing wrong but it was coming out a bit of a mess in comparison to SiRiL

result.tif 206.25 MB · 2 downloads

Il have a play with this too and see if I notice any improvement  

I think there is a pretty big difference between the 16 and 32 bit versions. I don't see nearly as much "separation" of values in the 32 bit (not at all really) whereas the 16 bit version has clear lines where one brightness part of a nebula jumps up to the next one. You have really good data here and i would be very happy to have captured this! I threw this through my processing routine, which changes every time so this might not apply for every project, but it goes like this:

Siril: 1)crop, 2) background extraction, 3) Photometric CC with a manually set star magnitude to something that i believe is reasonably well captured in the data. In this case i just chose mag 14 as these stars are still pretty good in your shot. Export to 32bit .fits while still linear.

Astap: Bin 2x2 to improve signal to noise ratio. Not sure if this was necessary or beneficial. Still, i see ne obvious negatives so hey why not.

Siril round 2: Asinh transformation, full 1000 whatever units they are. Histogram transformation with the autostretch function and then dial it down a bit to preserve stars. At this point the data is stretched and the precision is no longer needed and i convert to 16 bit.

Photoshop: Create starless and just stars layers with StarXterminator. Stretch the starless layer, saturation on the starless layer (just the iris blues pretty much in this case with the select and mask tool). Camera raw adjustments to texture/clarity/dehaze on the starless layer. TopazDenoise denoising and sharpening to the starless layer. Then on to the star layer which requires usually less work: Saturation until star colours are nice but not nuked, slight stretch to brighten a bit (i did not stretch enough in siril round2, ohwell) and then finish the layer with just sharpening to the only-stars layer with TopazDenoise. Combine stars and the nebula layers and done! Im just about to turn into my second year of astrophotography so not an expert so these might not be the best tips or methods but thought i would "think aloud" on what i did.

Here's what i got:

As a mainly galaxy imager i had to scour the image to find at least one faint fuzzy and i found just one: UGC 11678 in the top left, close to the "tail" of the Iris!

[Iem1]

Wow @ONIKKINEN, that is a brilliant effort! And thank you for detailing how you did it and what you used, helps me with direction on ways to progress my own data handling skills.

I also noticed a big improvement between 16bit and 32bit, especially when I removed stars in StarNet, there was a lot more of the dark dust clouds clearly visible. Thank you for pointing that out! Learnt a lot from this imaging session.

I would post how I got on with my own 32bit attempt...but It is shambolic compared to your work, so il save myself the embarrassment 

And thank you again to everyone who gave me pointers. 

[StuartT]

On 24/11/2021 at 08:52, Iem1 said:

The photometeic calibration is amazing, and worked with most of the other stacks I did previously, but I couldn't get it to work with the new stacking! Had to do it manually as best as I could 

Just a tip on getting this to work, make sure you click the "Get metadata from image" button. I find this works every time. It basically has to do a platesolve to identify the stars and adjust for their actual colours. So accurate metadata (particularly the focal length allowing for any cropping) is crucial.

[powerlord]

I'd be interested in seeing a video of this process in Sirl - as the app and the manual make about as much sense as a chocolate fireguard. Seeing someone actually doing it make it much much clearer where esoteric options are, etc. please ?

[StuartT]

1 hour ago, powerlord said:

I'd be interested in seeing a video of this process in Sirl - as the app and the manual make about as much sense as a chocolate fireguard. Seeing someone actually doing it make it much much clearer where esoteric options are, etc. please ?

this is the one I based my workflow on. I use the script OSC_Preprocessing_withoutDBF

 

Edited November 25, 2021 by StuartT