Tadpoles

[Kaptain Klevtsov]

Got lucky again with the sky last night. Pointed at IC410 I managed to get a nice image of the tadpoles.

Ha filter, Atik 16HR camera with Artemis capture softeware on 200mm f/5 Newt guided by ST80 and SC3 camera using K3CCD tools for guiding.

8 subs at 8 minutes binned 2X.

Subs combined and stretched in Maxim then final levels and curves and pretty spikes added in Photoshop.

Captain Chaos

[MartinB]

Those tadpoles are showing up very nicely CC. There just seem to be some sharpening artefacts in some of the softer nebulosity. Think if you eased of the sharpening a bit it would be an absolute belter.

[Kaptain Klevtsov]

This is the unsharpened, straight out of the stack, image Martin, are they gone in this one?

What's the artefacts that I'm looking for?

TIA

Captain Chaos

[CELESCOPE]

Heck , i,m trying to think what is wrong here CC , something a miss big time , plenty of data there for sure , so no prob there , whats the image look like after combining in MAXIM , IS IT THE SAME , or a more natural image , what format are u saving in when exporting out of maxim , are u using the instructions as i wrote down , does look very artifact, needs some more info on this me thinks

Rog

on reflection maxim takes care of rotation , so personally i think its a guiding problem ,

ok prove that wrong CC if clear tonight do a 2x2 binning 45 secs or 60secs x40 sub ,thats all u need for anything up there ,that camera is so sensitive , it will pick anything up , as i have proved , do the same neb , and see if it cures the problem

i think it will ,

Rog

[MartinB]

Yes you have lost the reticular patterning effect which was especially prominent down at the bottom right of the image. However the untreated one now looks clipped compared with the first image for some reason. If you have a look at the first one you can see some very nice faint nebulosity extending out from the left of the nebula which is lost in the 2nd one.

[Kaptain Klevtsov]

Heck , i,m trying to think what is wrong here CC , something a miss big time , plenty of data there for sure , so no prob there , whats the image look like after combining in MAXIM , IS IT THE SAME , or a more natural image , what format are u saving in when exporting out of maxim , are u using the instructions as i wrote down , does look very artifact, needs some more info on this me thinks

Rog

on reflection maxim takes care of rotation , so personally i think its a guiding problem ,

ok prove that wrong CC if clear tonight do a 2x2 binning 45 secs or 60secs x40 sub ,thats all u need for anything up there ,that camera is so sensitive , it will pick anything up , as i have proved , do the same neb , and see if it cures the problem

i think it will ,

Rog

Rog., I'm doing a "histogram specification" in Maxim to brighten it all up again, maybe that's not it. I'm saving then as a TIFF because it tells me that some bright stuff will be lost if I save as a PNG.

WRT subs length, I'm trying to get the histogram full. By this I mean that I'm using the autostretch and upping the time until the white point gets well over half way up. 2X2 binning needs around 8 minutes to do this.

Just tried stacking them again and I found a nasty trailed looking one that had slipped in. Now that's gone and I gaven't messed about with it too much its like this:-

I still got the message about the clipping effect and Maxim told me that it would scale the image to fit. What do you think chaps?

Captain Chaos

[MartinB]

Looking much better CC. Best to save as a FIT using the floating point option. Download the FITs liberator plug in for photoshop so that PS can use these. TIFFS are ok though but for some reason Maxim defaults to 8bit. Make sure you select 16 bit. Also make sure the auto stretch box is checked.

Whilst DDP can work very nicely on some images I do like doing my own stretching using the methods I outlined in the histogram primer. It does give you a lot of control and avoids any excessive sharpening which can be done later.

BTW if all your subs are very clean you can do an average combine, if not go for sigma. This is brilliant at eliminating artefacts from dodgy subframes without compromising the rest fo the data

[CELESCOPE]

thats a whole lot better CC , now all i see is a tad out of focus , other wise i think thats it

great

Rog

[Kaptain Klevtsov]

thats a whole lot better CC , now all i see is a tad out of focus , other wise i think thats it

great

Rog

Hope you didn't intend that dreadful pun Rog?

Captain Chaos

[CELESCOPE]

oh god lol no hells bells , tipical rog always puts his foot in it eheheheh