I keep failing to get a decent image, what am I doing wrong

[waroffice]

Here is my setup.

William optics ZS61 MK1
HEQ5 Pro with rowan belts
50mm guide scope
Astronomik L2 UV+IR Blocking Luminance Filter
ZWO ASI183MC main camera
ZWO ASI120 Guide scope
ZWO ASI Air mini
ZWO EAF

I align it all successfully according to the processes in the ZWO ASIAIR app, pick a target and capture what I can, I get 50-60 5 minute exposures depending on the night

sounds ideal but other than Orion nebula or andromeda I get nothing out of DSS or Siril stacking, I've a few dark and bias frames to chuck in too

Do I need ot be more ruthless with selecting which images to include?

[Elp]

I presume the image after stacking looks black? Have you tried histogram stretching the images to make it brighter? DSS has it's adjustment slider at the top right of the screen, Siril you have to change the preview method in the bottom centre from linear to auto stretch or histogram to see the very faint stuff. Both these methods are previews only, you have to physically do the histogram stretches or do them in Photoshop/gimp/affinity by opening the stacked file in tif format and doing the stretches. This is basic AP post processing in its simplest form.

[carastro]

A few questions.

Are you in a LP location?

Are you just looking at the DSS result as that is always dark - needs processing to bring out the target.

I am no expert on colour cameras but have you selected the correct Bayer matrix for your camera?

Finally do you want to post up the stacked result on here for us to try to process.  Preferably in TIFF format. 

Edited March 7 by carastro

[Elp]

Or post a jpg here or a screenshot of your monitor of what you're seeing after stacking.

[waroffice]

Ah I was only preprocessing in Siril, I found a tutorial and got an image!

I feel so stupid!

NGC 1499 is the target

My slow DSL is taking ages to upload the image to google drive, I'll post it once its done

[waroffice]

I RTFM'd Siril and got this out of it!

Guess I need more tea in the mornings

[AKB]

Ooh, that's really nice – you certainly do have a 'decent image'.

I just tweaked it a bit more, with some noise reduction and a few other things in PixInsight... not sure if you can do this in Siril ??

Hope you don't mind me posting this...

Tony

 

Edited March 7 by AKB