My first imaging rig issues

[Elp]

In Siril you could also try the one button press banding removal action on the existing stacked image to see the immediate effect. I usually just do it on the final stack rather than each sub.

[AstroDab3k]

I'm lost again

I tried Siril (even PixInsight) and on stacked (or even raw fits) it doesn't do much unfortunately. Some very minor improvement.

Below is the stacked image without calibration frames. Same result

I have also attached the raw data, if someone wants to give it a play.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1gEaTDUTd687oGtpiHEd_auysU8_WqxPT?usp=sharing

[alacant]

Hi

Maybe there is something wrong with the camera bias.

Using the method I outlined, there is no banding, but there is streaking (you didn't dither) and a light leak which renders the frame difficult to process, even after a heavy crop.

My advice would be to reset the camera to factory values or get it serviced, eliminate the light leak, dither and shoot again. But this time loads more frames..

Anyway, here are the steps I took applying the banding routine to the sequence. I did not use your bias or dark frames.

 

 

Edited October 1, 2023 by alacant

[Stuart1971]

The noise levels in the images are way too high, the banding is one thing which can be dealt with, but the noise is just too much and drowning the image, you need to lower the gain, or in your case the ISO if it’s a DSLR, also much more data is needed to sort the noise, much of the banding issue comes from walking noise…which could be sorted by dithering while imaging…

[AstroDab3k]

On 01/10/2023 at 11:37, alacant said:

Hi

Maybe there is something wrong with the camera bias.

Using the method I outlined, there is no banding, but there is streaking (you didn't dither) and a light leak which renders the frame difficult to process, even after a heavy crop.

My advice would be to reset the camera to factory values or get it serviced, eliminate the light leak, dither and shoot again. But this time loads more frames..

Anyway, here are the steps I took applying the banding routine to the sequence. I did not use your bias or dark frames.

 

 

Thank you for the steps.

Yeah I failed miserably with the second session and this light leak, but I'm glad to see that this banding is removable. 

[chewie]

IS0 800 should be fine for the camera but try it at 400 first, a 600d may well be hurting from the 3 minute exposures, that's quite a long time for an uncooled camera sensor and it will be getting quite hot, try a run at 1 minute exposures with a decent 10-15 second gap between each frame if possible and see how they turn out, dithering will help clean up images too but baby steps first.

 

[AstroDab3k]

Thank you, I will try that too.

In the meantime I decided to buy dedicated astro, but I'm thinking I will keep this camera and prime lens with low FL for some milkyway or extra wide field AP

[AstroDab3k]

Ok, so I tried different software to stack and process it.

The best results were coming from Pixinsight stacking and some basic processing, like ABE and MLT (I just started using this software ...and I'm loving it ) then Starnet2 and PS. 

In the final version I combined sessions with (where banding occured) and w/o filter (no banding, but still bad noise) with flats and darks, but I did not add bias frames (as suggested before). It seems that the bias frames were causing the banding issue. 

I'm yet to try the lights and flats only stacking to see if maybe there will be less noise also as suggested here.

Here are the results so far. Can't decide which one I hate less