jonathancd Posted July 31 Share Posted July 31 I have had a Seestar since April but this week has been my first chance to use it under darker skies. I am on holiday in Norfolk where it is Bortle 4 compared to my Bortle 8 East London home. ik have used the darker skies to image objects low in Sagittarius impossible from home. Total integration for these images varies from 10-20 minutes. M8 - Lagoon Nebula M20 - Triffid Nebula and M21 M22 M24 Sagittarius Star Cloud 13 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recretos Posted August 2 Share Posted August 2 I reprocessed my M16 Eagle Nebula, with 11.5h of integration, and tested some detailing workflows on the Pillars of Creation. First is the original image and the second is the comparison to the famous Hubble picture, not for actual quality but to see how many features the Seestar actually captured. Stacked and processed in Pixinsight. 14 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John_D Posted August 3 Share Posted August 3 14 hours ago, Recretos said: I reprocessed my M16 Eagle Nebula, with 11.5h of integration, and tested some detailing workflows on the Pillars of Creation. First is the original image and the second is the comparison to the famous Hubble picture, not for actual quality but to see how many features the Seestar actually captured. Stacked and processed in Pixinsight. That's amazing, how much work did that take in Pixinsight? This is my version after 10 minutes exposure and no further processing. I guess that extra 11 hours does help 4 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ags Posted August 3 Share Posted August 3 17 hours ago, Recretos said: I reprocessed my M16 Eagle Nebula, with 11.5h of integration, and tested some detailing workflows on the Pillars of Creation. First is the original image and the second is the comparison to the famous Hubble picture, not for actual quality but to see how many features the Seestar actually captured. Stacked and processed in Pixinsight. This picture is making me reconsider my life choices 😆 Love it! 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
happy-kat Posted August 3 Share Posted August 3 Cuiv did a recent interesting YT comparing Seestar M16 to Hubble 1 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CheshireChris Posted August 3 Share Posted August 3 (edited) Oh dear, this sort of image really does test my resolve to not buy a SeeStar s50. Fantastic work. Chris Edited August 3 by CheshireChris Typos 2 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recretos Posted August 3 Share Posted August 3 7 hours ago, John_D said: That's amazing, how much work did that take in Pixinsight? This is my version after 10 minutes exposure and no further processing. I guess that extra 11 hours does help Actual processing from start to finish took around 15-20min max. And yes, M16 is a rather high SNR target, almost like the M42, so having several hours of data makes a big difference. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LaurenceT Posted August 3 Share Posted August 3 It never occurred to me that I would be able to capture the Veil Nebula or any part of it from my garden, I don't really know why but it just seemed a bit to exotic! For some reason I opened Stellarium on my PC the other night and on a whim searched for the Veil for it's position that evening, to my surprise it was visible to the East for a relatively short period before it would be obscured by surrounding trees. With the night skies being what they are at the moment I didn't really want to set up my main rig as from it's optimal position for PA the Veil might be obscured very quickly by the trees so I thought I'd have a go with the Seestar this evening. The image below is just the jpg directly from the Seestar with literally 10 minutes in Microsoft Photos and DXo Photolab, I'll do some "proper" work on it tomorrow. 9 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LaurenceT Posted August 4 Share Posted August 4 (edited) I've had a play around with stretching, mostly in Siril but also DXo PhotoLab and MS Photos. I tried Affinity Photo which is supposed to be like Photoshop but couldn't get much out of it. 29 minutes of total integration time. Edited August 4 by LaurenceT 5 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Geoff Lister Posted August 4 Share Posted August 4 17 hours ago, LaurenceT said: It never occurred to me that I would be able to capture the Veil Nebula or any part of it from my garden, I don't really know why but it just seemed a bit to exotic! For some reason I opened Stellarium on my PC the other night A couple of nights ago I did the same, on the offchance that I could image something. This is the result for 27 minutes, without any post-processing, as downloaded from my tablet. Geoff 5 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recretos Posted August 4 Share Posted August 4 (edited) The Pacman nebula, with 3h of integration from Bortle 3 last night. Stacked (no Drizzle) and processed in Pixinsight in a HOO Hubble palette. Edited August 4 by Recretos 8 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LaurenceT Posted August 4 Share Posted August 4 Superb image, do you actually do 3 hours in one go? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recretos Posted August 5 Share Posted August 5 20 hours ago, LaurenceT said: Superb image, do you actually do 3 hours in one go? Yes, the nights are getting longer so its quite easy. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LaurenceT Posted August 5 Share Posted August 5 1 minute ago, Recretos said: Yes, the nights are getting longer so its quite easy. So how do you cope with field rotation? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Elp Posted August 5 Share Posted August 5 It's a cropped image isn't it? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
M40 Posted August 5 Author Share Posted August 5 3 hours ago, Recretos said: Yes, the nights are getting longer so its quite easy. A pleasure looking at your images and what you achieve with the seestar 👌 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Soupir94 Posted August 6 Share Posted August 6 M51 - 920 x 10s over three nights between February and May. Stacked in Siril then followed Cuiv's tutorial on youtube using Graxpert, Siril and Gimp. Still new to processing so would be grateful for any tips, comments, etc. Thanks 5 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Elp Posted August 6 Share Posted August 6 20 minutes ago, Soupir94 said: tips Looks okay, the main issue is it's a bit out of focus by the looks of it, maybe the routine didn't nail it. Apo refractor optics give very sharply defined views, and the SS is apo. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Soupir94 Posted August 6 Share Posted August 6 I might restack the subs for each night seperately and see what each is like. Perhaps that might indentify out of focus subs. Then run through the routine again. My eyesight is not the best 🙂 Thanks Elp Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LaurenceT Posted August 7 Share Posted August 7 (edited) Pelican Nebula (well, part of it), last night. 212 subs. I tried processing this in Siril and Affinity Photo and the results were horrible so I simply stacked in ASIStudio and did a bit of further processing on the jpg in DxO Photolab and MSPhotos. Much much quicker. Edited August 7 by LaurenceT 4 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recretos Posted August 7 Share Posted August 7 (edited) On 05/08/2024 at 18:32, LaurenceT said: So how do you cope with field rotation? The most important is a good-quality stacking process, which Pixinsight does provide. Then, it helps to have a good reference frame selection to mitigate some of the field rotation in both directions. What's left can be slightly mitigated by processing and, in the end, with a crop. Even full-frame targets usually don't need much crop, depending on their location, of course. Below is my Crescent Nebula example. The first image is full-frame/uncropped, and the second image is the stacking pattern from Pixinsight, with obvious field rotation as I was recording over different parts of the sky over two sessions. Edited August 7 by Recretos 5 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recretos Posted August 10 Share Posted August 10 2h of Helix nebula, captured at a low angle (15-20°), so with a lot of disturbance and dropped frames. One image is normal integration and one image is 2x Drizzle. Also added is a crop onto the main central star. The 2xDrizzle file shows a fainter "eyebrow", due to the SNR reduction of the Drizzle process. 11 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MonsterMagnet Posted August 11 Share Posted August 11 (edited) 80 minutes on the Fish Head nebula from Bortle 9 central London. Stacked in Siril, processed in PI. MM Edited August 11 by MonsterMagnet 5 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recretos Posted August 11 Share Posted August 11 1h40min of M33 Galaxy, stacked and processed in Pixinsight, without the use of Drizzle. 9 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recretos Posted August 13 Share Posted August 13 (edited) For all the Pixinsight & Seestar users: I did a test of Pixel Rejection to remove satellite trails and even hot pixels in stacking. Basically, what this does is it rejects the satellite trails at the pixel level during stacking, removing only the satellite trail but keeping the rest of the frame in the stack. This means that you don't need to remove/delete your whole subs with satellite frames, but thanks to pixel rejection, you get to keep all the frames and reject the pixels of the satellite trail. As the satellite trails usually only appear individually on certain subs, removing them causes no visible artifacts or "dents," as the data from other frames covers that up. Below is an example I created when testing 4h of M33 data. All images are raw stacks, unprocessed, with a preview stretch only. The left image is the original stack without pixel rejection. The middle image is the pixel rejection result, showing what has been removed during stacking with Pixel Rejection activated. You can see it removed satellite trails that were not even visible, like over the core, and it did not remove any real galaxy signal, keeping the galaxy data intact. It also removed some patches that look like hot pixels. The right image is the final stack run with pixel rejection, looking much cleaner. If you own Pixinsight, this is just one more reason to stack with it. You can stack and keep all your frames with satellite trails and remove them at the pixel level, keeping the rest of the data in the frame. Pixel rejection did not increase the stacking time meaningfully or at all, tested on 1500 subs. Edited August 13 by Recretos 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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