Comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF)

[fwm891]

Imaged last night (05:50 - 06:20) ish.

Altair 102 ED Ascent refractor on an iOptron CEM60.

Camera: an uncooled ASI585MC with a Baader UN/IR cut filter and Baader MPCC Mk 3 coma corrector.

Image made up of 22x 60 second subs. Gain setting at 252 offset? (low single figures)

Processing has been the difficult part today. The sub set were stacked initially to provide the star field. This was extracted using StarXTerminator followed by curves transformation and colour saturation.

PI's comet stacking routineworked fine but first I had to remove all the stars from each of the sub frames using StarEXTerminator - thankfully there's a batch processing mode which slowed my old PC down a gear or two.

I struggled with the tail I think mainly  because captures were undertaken through a veil of high thin cloud which has washed the colours out somewhat.

Tomorrow morning I hope to have another go, hopfully without the cloud cover.

Thanks for looking.

 

 

Edited January 17, 2023 by fwm891
Text added

[Gweedo]

That's really nice

[tooth_dr]

12 hours ago, fwm891 said:

I had to remove all the stars from each of the sub frames using StarEXTerminator - thankfully there's a batch processing mode which slowed my old PC down a gear or two

Lovely photo Francis, nice and close!

Can I ask how you did this?

[fwm891]

1 hour ago, tooth_dr said:Lovely photo Francis, nice and close!

Can I ask how you did this?

How I did it!

 I went through the process: debayer and star align for all subs, then ran the debayered subs through PI’s comet alignment to register the comet head. Next I used StarXTerminator (batch mode) to remove stars from the comet registered frames. These were then integrated to give me the comet only half of the image.

Next the star only image. Here I integrated the original set of debayered subs and ran BlurXTerminator on the integration followed by StarXTerminator and kept the star half of the image.

Each half then processed using curves and saturation before adding them together in pixelmath. Final tweaks on the final image.

Next: I think I’ll try using StarEXTERMINATOR on both registered sets whilst they’re still single subs, integrate each set then run BlurEXterminator one each half before colour corrections and pixelmath…

Francis

 

[tooth_dr]

17 minutes ago, fwm891 said:

StarXTerminator (batch mode)

I wasnt aware of this just, I've some comet data but didnt fancy running SXT on 250 subs one at a time.   Is Batch mode PI only?

[fwm891]

53 minutes ago, tooth_dr said:

I wasnt aware of this just, I've some comet data but didnt fancy running SXT on 250 subs one at a time.   Is Batch mode PI only?

???? Don’t know sorry.

[tooth_dr]

36 minutes ago, fwm891 said:

???? Don’t know sorry.

How did you use batch mode 

[fwm891]

11 minutes ago, tooth_dr said:

How did you use batch mode 

Select to use StarETerminator which opens a box on the desktop. In that box is a button marked Batch ?

When you click on that it asks you to create 2 folders - one for starless one for star images it then places the individual subs into the folders.

You then treat them as ordinary subs and integrate the subs as normal...

[tooth_dr]

13 minutes ago, fwm891 said:

Select to use StarETerminator which opens a box on the desktop. In that box is a button marked Batch ?

When you click on that it asks you to create 2 folders - one for starless one for star images it then places the individual subs into the folders.

You then treat them as ordinary subs and integrate the subs as normal...

Thanks so much Francis, much appreciated.

[tooth_dr]

On 18/01/2023 at 11:42, fwm891 said:

Select to use StarETerminator which opens a box on the desktop. In that box is a button marked Batch ?

When you click on that it asks you to create 2 folders - one for starless one for star images it then places the individual subs into the folders.

You then treat them as ordinary subs and integrate the subs as normal...

Cheers again, I started removing the stars from the subs at 9:30am. It’s still churning away at the 250 subs and I’ve a fairly decent PC! Should be done by tomorrow afternoon sometime.  

Edited January 22, 2023 by tooth_dr

[fwm891]

2 minutes ago, tooth_dr said:

Cheers again, I started removing the stars from the subs at 9:30am. It’s still churning away at the 250 subs and I’ve a fairly decent PC! Should be done by tomorrow afternoon sometime.  

I think there are 3 versions of the AI module for star removal, the largest file is the slowest but it makes the best repairs to the background image once stars are gone. The smallest file is fastest and good if your denoising  the background image. The middle one is a halfway house version…

[tooth_dr]

8 hours ago, fwm891 said:

I think there are 3 versions of the AI module for star removal, the largest file is the slowest but it makes the best repairs to the background image once stars are gone. The smallest file is fastest and good if your denoising  the background image. The middle one is a halfway house version…

Just got an email from PI last night, looks like they have created a new version of the comet alignment tool that does this all automatically 

[Ouroboros]

1 hour ago, tooth_dr said:

Just got an email from PI last night, looks like they have created a new version of the comet alignment tool that does this all automatically 

That sounds useful. I only used the manual system once - book in one hand, going through it step by step. 

[maw lod qan]

Great image!