DSS help

[prbirdo]

got a c6sgt advanced goto. 6.3 reducer and a d450 (or will have soon d300 upgrade) (prime focus)

its seems no matter how many exposures i take and load into DSS i can not get them to stack -- or actually it only uses one image from the load i put in.

i've tried it on M31, the orion neb, pledies, ring neb. -- got some great amazing single shots. But ive never done one successful stack. (managed to put darks and flats in!.

kicking myself and i must be doing something wrong. Think i struggle when selecing how many stara it should see in the registering part.

exposures loads of them vary from 30s, 1min's, 2mins. 4mins.

anyone got any RAWs i could practice with?????

[sick of being a dss retard]

[dark knight]

Try turning off the Drizzle function, that solved all my problems with DSS.

HTH

Carl

[SteveL]

Have you adjusted the star detection threshold downwards so it finds more stars in the images? How many stars does DSS say it find in each light frame?

[prbirdo]

I have not tried turning off drizzle, will gove that ago. star amoount wise i've used 10% all the way to 90%. i'll try turning off drizzle and get back. cheers

[SteveL]

take the star detection threshold *DOWN* (a lower percentage), not up...

[PhoenixRising]

Star detection treshhold, try around 10%, you can go as low as 5%, also, tell DSS to use the best 85% of your images as a start and only add your darks to begin with. And turn drizzling off. That should do it

[MishMich]

I select automatic - works for M42 & M45

[resonator77]

apologies for silly question

is DSS a software? is this for DSO only?

[MishMich]

Deep Sky Stacker - I believe so.

M.

[SteveL]

DeepSkyStacker for... err Deep Sky Images

(Use Registax for planetary stacking)

[prbirdo]

Guys your heros, managed to stack some images of M31.

now Im still suck. whats the best way to alter the histogram to release the detail? did ok with the great orion neb but M31 seems tricky.

know this is a whole subject in its self. Played around with the levels on DSS, what is the best approach?

For orions neb I reduced the red until it made a 'diffraction pattern' on the histogram this seemed to bring out the h-alpha and most detail ( a bit red!)

(also have corel paint, photo and draw i know will do it better once i know)

[dark knight]

Hiya, post the image of M31, I'm sure someone will help out.

Carl

[MishMich]

You are best saving it in DSS before doing any processing. Then you can use image processing software. I like Gimp, as I have used it on Linux for years (before I got interested in astro), but PS.E7/8 is about 60-70 quid and you can buy Carboni's astro plugins for about £12. If you get Greg Parker's 'Making Beautiful Deep-Sky Images', he has a walk-through chapter on what to do in PS.CS something - but it is easily transferrable to PS.E7. Only problem with PS or Gimp is that they convert images from 16 to 8 bit, so that is a loss - I don't know, maybe a package that costs several hundred pounds maybe doesn't?

I find Carboni's plugins helpful - but I tend to do as much as possible in Gimp. Like, I do all the things Parker describes in Gimp, then save and open up in PS.E7, apply the relevant Carboni plugins, then push it back to Gimp. I'd like to know what he is actually doing in his plugins and figure out a way of doing the same stuff in Gimp to streamline the procedures. I don't know enough about PS.E or image processing astro images to figure it out. I'm sure there's a way of getting some scripts into Gimp, but never looked under the bonnet.

M.

[prbirdo]

cheers guys, been a bit ill with that vomiting thing, getting round to it! here's a raw of orions neb (1x1min iso 800)-- still working with them. also me taking some pic's i took tonight. (11x15s iso 1600)

both on canon 450d unmodded, and the sc6cg5. first atempts at photographing anyhow.

[prbirdo]

as above! (can you guess which direction manchesters in???)

[prbirdo]

i'll be back with more soon once i've read up on that processing.

now question of the day... is it worthwhile to modify my camera, i know its good but is it really worth it?????

[dark knight]

I would say yes, it is worth getting the camera modded as it will make it more sensitive for night time astro use, just remember it will affect the cameras day time use though, CLS do clip in filters for Canon cameras.

Your M42 is looking great, what a fantastic start, just keep taking more pics and add them in DSS to what you already have... It's a fantastic feeling when those first images start appearing on your computer screen.

Your well on your way

Carl

[Tim]

Glad you got sorted out with DSS. Just take the saved 32bit file if you can and work with that in another program, even if you have to convert to 16bit.

There is a very helpful tutorial from MartinB on this site, which you will find useful.

Modded camera? What sort of thing do you wish to photograph? The mod only helps you gather light in the far red range, that is usually blocked by the filter. This leads to better results on emission nebulae, but will have neglible effect on galaxies, clusters, or reflection nebulae.

Cheers

TJ

[jgs001]

And even then, if you're willing to put the exposure time in, you can still capture emission neb (although not as well as a modded camera) with the 450d.

When you're adding data to a previous set in DSS.. make sure you use groups. Don't use the master group at all (as any correction frames in the master group will be applied to every image). So leave the master group empty, and add each nights image data, darks and flats to a new group, don't forget to save the file list, as you can keep on doing this to add more data.