It's been quite a long while since I used a proper OSC CCD but I bit the bullet recently and bought a QHY10. On the face of it, a decent enough CCD although it does have some iniosyncracies but that's not the concern here.
I image with Maxim mainly so I can easily do plate solving and move from object to object quickly. So my images are saved as FITS and are saved in raw format. In Maxim they're greyscale and have a marked grid-appearance which I understand is the Bayer Matrix.
I've been trying to process these images and getting some unhappy results. I've been using DeepSky Stacker and have been using the full suite of darks, flats and bias frames.
But getting some decent results out of that is where I'm coming unstuck.
I have Photoshop CS6.
Could anyone suggest a process flow to deal with these images please.
DSS is useless for OSC CCD's, unfortunately. Seems OK for DSLR, but never got any meaningful result out of it with an OSC CCD.
The only one I recommend is CCDStack - it instantly recognises the camera based on the FITs header, and asks some questions.
You then need to debayer the FITs, BEFORE registering/stacking them. That is important - you MUST do it prior (but if CCDStack auto-recognises your camera, it seems less of a problem). CCDStack has a debayer button on the toolbar, top right.
Then calibrate, register, normalise, data reject and then final combine - Mean, Sum, Median, Maximum, Minimum...
CCDStack is WELL worth the money. I only use OSC now (SBIG ST-8300C), and it handles the files impeccably, even including H-a files made using a filter on the face of the OSC.
I have used and still do, CCDStack, it's a good program.
Also I'd recommend Images Plus, another good program.
Gary
I think that most of the available commercial options do a decent job and fit a niche (or they wouldn't still be around.) It's a matter of picking one that does what you need and suits your processing philosophy. In terms of ease of use I think CCDStack does a great job.
peter i am very raw at this processing stuff too and i have only the raw basics like dss
i too have the qhy10, lewis is correct that qhy10 (or all osc), images do not like dss one little bit!
look what dss did to my first light of my qhy10! (besides awful colour etcetera)
i downloaded a trial nebulosity and that just worked
pat
I don't use a QHY, but I just retried the technique above but selected an SBIG ST2000XCM - not my camera, but DSS only offers 2 SBIG options (maybe they have anewer program since I have not used it in 2 years).
It took 6 minutes to process the subs. In the end, I have STRONG horizontal banding in the pixel rows of bright stars. Destroys the image. You can see the detail, but MASSIVE black banding. I redid it with a generic bayer matrix (my first matrix arrangment was correct for a change). Exact same banding. See image below (these are all H-a filtered OSC, so just ignore the histogram)
I don't get any of that if I do it inCCDStack, MaxIM or PI. DSS still does not handle OSC very well at all. Maybe QHY - you might get lucky!
The second image is what CCDStack puts out (all files debayered prior to stacking). CCDStack embeds the channel profiles, so it will appear grey scale. You can extract the colour information in PS etc.
Just remembered, I also got the same banding issue with an FLI ML8300 in DSS as well as an Atik 4000. Images from an SXVR M25C also didn't work well in DSS.
Here is the result with the SAME data, but telling DSS NOT to interpolate the matrix.
Since we're into "You show me yours and I'll show you mine" here's what I'm getting using DSS with the settings recommended in the other thread referenced below.
Red is blue, Blue is yellow and everything else is green.
Peter
Yes, try using the Generic bayer matrix (top of the selection drop downs). Try them all. I wrote to SX about the issue I was having, and Terry Platt said to try ALL of them because there is no set matrix.
At least it does a better job on yours than my SBIG stuff Peter.
For the qhy10 If you tell dss that it's a nikon d200 you will be right on the money as it's the same sensor
Unfortunately, the Version of DSS I'm using (3.3.0) doesn't know the Nikon d200. But setting the Bayer to Generic2 (BGGR) seems to produce a usable image. I can't see any difference between the Interpolation methods so I've stuck with straight Bilinear and the result is, at least, recognisable.
I just downloaded 3.3.2 and it does see the NikonD200 BUT it assigns it a matrix the same as Generic1 (RGGB) which doesn't produce correct colours at all (Red is Blue and Blue is Yellowish). So another mystery to ponder.