How to convert FITS to colour

[blinky]

I took around 50 images of the moon last week with my QHY8 and MaximDL. I have stacked them in Registax but this does not debayer so when I open in Photoshop it is in greyscale and if I zoom into 100% you can see it's all messy (as you would expect!). I then thought I would open the image in MaximDL and choose the convert to colour command, I did this and selected MX25c as the Camera (I believe this is the same CCD Sensor as the QHY8) but the colour is a complete mess - I cannot even seem to correct it in Photoshop. What am I missing here??

STACKED-colour-small.tif

[ollypenrice]

Don't stack before you deBayer because the colour data is damaged.

It may also be the offset. As you know, a Bayer matrix just has RGGB pixels in a pattern but the software needs to know which colour the 'first' pixel is or it may read the red as green, the greens as blue etc. I don't know Maxim but AstroArt has a dialogue box for deBayering called RGB colour synthesis and this gives you a trial and error system for choolsing how the pixel array will be interpreted. Once you know which pixel is which colour you leave it at that forever. I used a daytime image to get the offset right but I think any would do.

My OSC workflow is

- Dark, flat and hot pixel each sub.

- Debayer...

-Stack.

Olly

[blinky]

Thanks Olly, I will do a batch convert in Maxim and then restack. Even if I do though, I expect the colour to be more blue. I can never seem to get it correct in Maxim (Deep Sky Stacker does it all for you!) but I think I may be able to correct properly if I do as you say by converting to colour before the stack

[MartinB]

As Olly says. Maxim has the offset options and you can do a full screen preview of each option and choose the best looking colour. Make sure you adjust the auto screen stretch because harsh clipping can cause all sorts of colour oddities.

Maxim has a batch process function, in V5 it's found under the view menu. Open one of your images that you want to debayer. Press the record button and do the debayer. Then press stop. Select the all the files you want to debayer using the batch process window and press play. These will then automatically debayer your images. Make sure you use the right option for saving the debayered files. One option is to overwrite your original files and you might not want to do that!

Have you tried the planetary alignment option in Maxim?

[blinky]

I never knew there was a planetary align function in Maxim! Will go check that out as well...

[Tim]

Craig, in DSS you can see a visual clue as to the pattern in the qhy8, just go to RAW/FITS settings and choose the QHY8 and tick the box at the top.