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Old 13-03-2008, 10:24 PM
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avandonk
avandonk

avandonk is offline
 
Join Date: Aug 2005
Location: Melbourne
Posts: 4,786
The only way to get all the star colours is to have a high dynamic range. The sixteen bits of an astro CCD will give you 64k levels. The meagre twelve bits of a DSLR will give you about 4k levels. Both will saturate very quickly with the brighter stars if you are trying to collect dim nebular data with a reasonable signal to noise.

The pixels just outside the brighter stars have their colour information as a 'ring' of colour. This method may help if you don't want to go the HDR track. This would work better with larger image scales ie about one second of arc per pixel.

http://www.waidobservatory.com/tutor...tar-color.html

I have found that using HDR gives me 20+ bits of dynamic range ie 1M of levels before converting to LDR. This handles most star colours even with widefields where there is a very wide dynamic range. Just check out

http://members.optusnet.com.au/~avandonk1/rho.jpg

or any of my last few posts in deep sky at IIS.

Bert
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