What the 'L' have I done

[Beyond_Vision]

Who said this LRGB malarky was nearly as quick as OSC

Despite several attempts I still havent managed a complete LRGB session without something conspiring against me either clouds, dew or bad flats techinical hitches etc.

So here's my mono version only of the Leo Triplet form the SGL5 Star Party.

20 x 5mins with no calibration





Regards

Kevin

[Sam]

That looks great Kevin.

Sam

[anthony]

beautiful picture. A lovely little grouping, always enjoy seeing them!

[NickH]

Exactly the rig I am using...nice, and thanks for the image!

[Paxo]

Kevin,

What I tend to do if the weather may possibly play havoc with the subs (which is often), is to Use MaximDL for capture and cycle the automated filter wheel to take L,R,G and B then L,R,G and B and so on rather than doing all the channel before switching filter (easy with parfocal filters). At least if it goes wrong you have some data for each channel.

Luminance is looking good though, you must be happy with the new setup.

Steve..

[barkis]

This a fine Image in itself Kevin. This trio look fine to me in Mono.

Anyway, you will get the ccolour data at another time and come back to it I'm sure. Just call it WIP.

Ron.

[MikeD]

I never get a compleat LRGB image in one night, In fact I usualy spend two or three nights on just the L data.

You have a great mono shot there and it will be a fantastic LRGB image

when it's done.

The more time you put into a shot the better the final result.

Mike.

[ollypenrice]

'Who said this LRGB malarky was nearly as quick as OSC :)'

Uh-Oh, I did...(exit stage left.)

In fact I said it was quicker - and I'll be saying so again in Astronomy Now quite soon! For a given mage quality is is quicker, too, and by quite a large margin if your object is faint.

Anyway the lum is great, smooth and gradient free across a large swathe of sky. Binning the colour is a big time saver when you get the chance.

Looping LRGB is something MartinB suggested when he was down here, confirming Mike's suggestion. I'm afraid it hadn't ocurred to me but that's cos I'm gormless.

Great result anyway.

Olly

[Beyond_Vision]

Thanks for the tips guys. I was aiming to get the Luminance first at 1x1 binning then cycle through the RGB at 2x2 binning. One problem I found is that DSS needs all image files to be the same size so if you bin the lights the calibration frames need to be the same size. This either means batch processing the files to resize them or taking a set for both sizes. With fixed point cooling a couple of runs would be enough to create a library of 5min 10 min etc exposures for the darks and also bias.

The other option as some people have suggested is to not bin the colour and therefore avoid the frame size issue. I also found AstroArt seemed to cope fine with the different frame sizes but had difficulties trying to combine images which were from different runs (although it more likely to be finger trouble on my part )

Regards

Kevin

[ollypenrice]

I just have a darks library of Bins 1 and 2. Then it is dead easy, as you say. I don't know but I guess that reducing the master flat to bin 2 size would work okay. Anybody know?

As for stacking in AstroArt, if it is reluctant that will probably because either the search radius around the stars has been exceeded (you can change it in Preferences, I think)

or because there has been some field rotation. It can't handle that at all in the auto align mode. This often happens. For a very long run you really do need near perfect polar alignment to be able to stack the lot in AA's preprocessing auto align. I usually have to co-register separate runs if they span a long period.

Olly