DSS help for a beginner

[stefski]

Hi All,

Recently decided to give the 'dark art' a go. I thought I'd just dip my toe in the water a take a few subs (see, already using the jargon:p) of M27. My camera's b/w, so I just took a few unfiltered and then a few with Halpha. It was unguided so the subs are short - but as I say I'm just practising:). I took some darks too.

Anyway, like a good boy, I downloaded DSS loaded onto it my picture files and darks and just did a 'register and stack'....Hey presto (see below). I then did the same with my Halpha shots...So far so good. I then decided I'd try and combine the two:icon_eek:...Yes, I know it's adventurous, but it's the crazy sort of guy I am. It was at this point the DSS told me to get lost!

I looked up 'DSS Help' and was immediately bewildered with words & phrases like 'calibration', 'FITS', 'compute offsets', 'Kappa-Sigma Clipping:eek:' etc.....

Is there anywhere I can find out what all this means (and does). Preferably in English.

Any help would be much appreciated.

Stef:)

1stprocesslum.TIF

1stprocessHalpha.TIF

[Paxo]

Stef,

In the Register settings, go to the advanced tab and lower the star detection threshold as low as it will go, I think you may have had problems as the Halpha requires much longer initial exposures and hence there aren't as many stars in the image and DSS needs a certain number to work properly, lowering this number allows fainter stars to be used. Give that a go.

What camera did you take these with?

Steve.

[adamsp123]

Hi Stef, as well as Steve suggests you can't go far wrong using DSS recommended settings, I tend to use Kappa Sigma Clipping for my subs which works well so far, satellite trails disappear with this setting.

I spent a bit of time playing with different settings to see the outcome when I first started out.

[stefski]

Cheers for the response guys:)

What camera did you take these with?

Steve.

I used my watec astrovid camera. It has a sort of 'manual override' setting so you can make the exposures as long as you want:).

I'll keep fiddling around with settings I suppose and see what happens:icon_scratch:.

Stef

Stef