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IC1396 - Elephants Trunk (first light with ASI533MC Pro)


peonic

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I've been absolutely itching to get out since I took delivery of @Pitch Black Skies 533MC Pro a couple of weeks back - but the weather has not been playing nice in this corner of the world.

A variety of issues and limited darkness means this was a VERY short session - but here's the product of 63 minutes worth of 180 second subs.

Awful framing - but I was just happy to get photons hitting the sensor! :D

SW ED80 DS Pro, HEQ5, ASI533MC, Optolong L-Extreme

Captured with SharpCap, processed in PixInsight with a couple of tweaks in Photoshop.

TIF file attached for anyone who wants to have a stab at doing a better job than my hamfisted processing!

Comments, criticism and advice greatfully accepted.

 

Chris

Elephants Trunk.png

1323666220_Screenshot2022-06-18021903.thumb.png.487164e42d0f7aa013d63e96bc4ed2ad.png

masterLight_BIN-1_3008x3008_EXPOSURE-180.00s_Optolong L-Extreme_RGB.tif

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Looks good for an hour. I tried this the other night for 2 hours with a DSLR so could fit the whole nebula in, it's great when it reveals itself after processing.

I've found with the lextreme however if there's any light hitting it at an angle (I did check the lens for stray light) you get a red/green division on the image, the same happens with the L-Enhance.

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Interesting Elp!

 

Plenty of stray light that could have encroached last night. I'll have to think about shielding some of it and getting a dew shield for the scope.

 

Was so hot last night I didn't need to retreat indoors with the laptop to monitor things, I just sat outside In a t-shirt til 4am!

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I had a go at the FITS version but it doesn't look as if the flats worked correctly.

This is a starless version after stretching and I've gone OTT with the histogram to highlight the effects. The colour banding looks like the effects of the L-eXtreme filter where the Flats either haven't been used or haven't worked correctly. There are a few threads on here where you can see this with ASI294MC but I've not seen it reported on the ASI533MC.

For 1 hour integration you've done well and you're starting to get detail in the background dust. If you can get the flats to work then it'll make post-processing much easier. ;)   

Starless.png.6c90d4ef7884438bf49ba26448e9c17c.png

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Thanks Budgie!

I just loaded the master flat into PixInsight to check, and it appears to have the bayer-matrix pattern over it!

I'll go have a poke around at the docs on the WBPP script and see if I can suss out what's up!

Thanks for looking - super useful yet again!

 

Chris

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3 hours ago, peonic said:

@Budgie1 Was it just a straight (albeit brutal) histogram stretch you did to illustate the flats issue?

No, I did the stretch and then removed the stars and started using Curves. It was at this point I noticed the rounded shaped colour bands left over from the filter, so I did another histogram stretch, just to highlight them. ;)

The re-stack is much better, no evidence of the bands and the flats have worked as they should. :hello2:

Here's what I got this time:

peonic.thumb.png.92fa5fca36f8e7edb66613f470f61966.png

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1 hour ago, peonic said:

Cheers Martin - you've pulled loads of extra detail out there!

I need to work on my processing skills more!

It all comes with playing around, watching tutorials and picking up tips from others on here! :)

I started using Photoshop but now use PixInsight as I found I could get much better results with it. I know PI isn't the cheapest processing software or the easiest to learn but I like the processing part, so I enjoy using it.

This time of year I have Twilight All Night up here and I don't do any imaging from mid-May until mid-August because there's just too much light in the sky. So processing images from others, like yours, keeps my skills up and allows experimentation. So thanks for sharing the data, Chris. :D 

Edited by Budgie1
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