A new field of astrophotography?

[Ags]

@vlaiv i was doing a simple "maximum" stack. I wonder if my random noise got corrupted by debayering, which I thought I had disabled?

I realised today I have a whole heap of ash in the ash vacuum machine we use to clean the pellet heaters. As combustion is much more complete in a pellet furnace, I am hoping that that ash will be a good, purer addition to Radiological Test Source A. Also the pellets come from scandinavian pine, which is the best location.

I will shoot an hour each of darks, control and ash shots tonight. I'll also not be an idiot and make sure the camera is set to mono!

[Leo S]

My cameras (3x a7SII) pick them up from time to time. Here are a couple of them (from different dates) which I've combined into a single image. These are very heavily enlarged/zoomed in.

[vlaiv]

2 hours ago, Ags said:

@vlaiv i was doing a simple "maximum" stack. I wonder if my random noise got corrupted by debayering, which I thought I had disabled?

Maximum will produce similar effect as it will pick up maximum pixel values when electrons spill into potential well.

[Ags]

I think I found the reason and it is human error. I had forgotten Planetary Stabilization was enabled, meaning the images were randomy dithered.

[Ags]

I repeated the experiment with more ash and an hour of exposure. The camera and sharcap settings were right this time too.

I counted 8 streaks and 4 possibles with the ash, and 5 streaks and 5 possibles without the ash... There is an element of judgement of course, and I am hardly experienced at streak counting... Anyway here are the two images - what I consider definite streaks are marked with a green dot, and the more uncertain ones are given a red dot.

Control:

With Ash: