Another try at processing Horsehead

[Stu Wilson]

Ive tried again to process this horshead.

i never seem to get the same result twice lol.

.TIFF attached if anyone wants to try.

Its 37 x 3mins with only darks added.

 

Stu

Autosave006.tif

[geeklee]

2 hours ago, Stu Wilson said:

.TIFF attached if anyone wants to try.

That's come out well Stu - with a very clear horse head against the Ha and the flame nebula showing good detail.  It's stretched quite hard with a little saturation so some noise elements are coming through quite strong.

Did you calibrate with flats as this could make your life significantly easier when processing - perhaps some of the processing decisions were made to hide the doughnuts?

A simple stretch of the basic TIF shows doughnuts and some other typical flat field stuff that flats should help tidy up.

The raw stack looks nice, you have some super colour & detail in the horse and flame.  Possibly some of this subtlety has been lost is the processed image?  No special tools run on the below - just star removal.

 

If you can calibrate the doughnuts out, I would only suggest to compare to the raw stack as you go, ensuring you've not lost anything along the way.  If you're happy with the changes as you go, that's all that matters and you'll be onto a winner.

[Stu Wilson]

It's a new ota and I've not done any flats on it yet. Just darks.

I normally use fast newts. This is a ED80 PRO outfit.

It's getting good results tho.

[Elp]

It's a good start. You'll find with the flats applied and star removal applied you can push the data far harder and reveal more faint detail.

[SamAndrew]

Gave it a quick bash in PI, can't do too much with the dust bunnies, need someone to make an AI tool to fix those

 

 

Edited January 29 by SamAndrew

[Elp]

You can usually apply synthetic flats manually to clean up dust issues, I do it all the time.

[Stu Wilson]

45 minutes ago, SamAndrew said:

Gave it a quick bash in PI, can't do too much with the dust bunnies, need someone to make an AI tool to fix those

 

 

Nice tho. And you've tamed altinak.

 

:-)

[SamAndrew]

57 minutes ago, Stu Wilson said:

Nice tho. And you've tamed altinak.

 

🙂

Thanks, basically applied no stretch to the stars 😆 if I spent more time I would have a sparate workflow for the other stars to bring out some of the colours.

 

1 hour ago, Elp said:

You can usually apply synthetic flats manually to clean up dust issues, I do it all the time.

Would be interested to see your technique, I don't see a way to do a synthetic flat given the dust bunnies are coving the nebulosity.

[Elp]

I tried it, didn't quite work. It sometimes does and sometimes doesn't, as you suspect it's more difficult if its covering nebulosity across the FOV: