For the past year I've been doing video astronomy, so all camera work has been with shorts subs (5-30sec) over short periods, and no post-processing.
Now I've sort of got guiding going so took some longer subs on the weekend (backyard in suburban Sydney). Before I get too excited could I get some comments.
This was taken on my GSO 8" F5 newt with an ASI071-MC OSC cooled camera.
Guiding PHD2 with an ASI290MM with the 200mm guidescope I just got from Pete (thanks).
Its 28x 5min subs captured with sharpcap, then stacked in DSS with flat/dark correction (I rejected 3 of them cause of low score).
Then I've fumbled around with it in StarTools.
I also took some subs before the meridian flip but they made the stacked stars have weird fuzzy shapes.
Hi,
I'm a new person on this forum wanting to eventually get into astrophotography. I've noticed something called 'DSS' mentioned. Is it a piece of software? I have Photomatix and Registax. Are these similar?
Just saw Chris's later post. Will download Deep Sky Stacker and assess.
Last edited by ziggystardust52; 03-05-2017 at 09:52 PM.
Thanks all for the comments. I'm loving the newt Glen, its a nice complement to my refractor.
Does this process in startools seem sensible ? After stacking flat/dark corrected subs in deep sky stacker (DSS)
1. Opened the fits file and cropped slightly to get rid of uneven edges from stacking.
2. Binned 71%. Seemed a good compromise between smaller files size and enough to give unblocky stars.
3. Autodev it to see what the detail looked like. Selected an ROI until I got a bit of background glow so I could see if there were any gradients.
4. Then used the wipe function to remove gradients.
5. Redid the autodev & ROI to get it at the right level of exposure.
6. stopped tracked and de-noised.
7. Then I did (overdid) the colour adjustment. Turned up the saturation to ~160%.
I haven't worried about other features like HDR, contrast, deconvolution yet.
In the end it looked like a lot of red was clipped when I did the colour balance. I don't know if this was me clipping stuff above the noise floor, or whether it was the way I set up my OSC camera?
To set up the camera I adjust the colour level controls in sharpcap so the RGB histograms overlap when shooting a bit of white paper during the day (or a clean bit of black road in the shade). Does this sound right?
