Helix

[oska]

In an effort to curtail the manic desire to "shoot all the things" I've focused on the Helix. So pretty.

I'm coming to terms with the hardware (somewhat) but the processing is doing my head in :screwy:

I had 90x300s of dual band (ZWO) but it was average at best.
So I managed to get 39x300s of UV/IR cut (OPT) and then stole the red chanel from the dual band stack.


NINA, stacked & proc'd in PI.


Criticism welcomed!

[xelasnave]

It looks wonderful but you do have slightly oval stars so it seems you may benefit from shorter exposures or to cull any poor subs from your current data.

I still do only 30 second subs as not one of my rigs has it's auto guide running yet ( 3 all up) but by virtue of doing so much 30 second stuff now doubt that in the future I will go longer..the reason is I now notice how fast seeing fluctuates and you get maybe one good sub then two crook ones.not guiding just sky moves I guess...so you throw out two and have one good one..now if that was one 90 second sub you probably would not notice it was a ,little off...so the weird thing I find is the more I throw out invariably the better the final image.

Anyways the fact is your current image is really nice and I honestly am not critising it in the least but told the story hoping it may help in the future.

Really well done.

Alex

[oska]

Thanks Alex!

I find throwing out a "slightly" bad one painful :) - will cull harder in the future - cheers.

Only had one stumble setting up guiding, not calibrating properly (too much of a hurry).

I have tried experimenting a little with much shorter exposure time but my PC would either crash PI or the whole thing when I tried stacking big stacks and DSS didn't produce as nice an output as PI when I tested that. I have since got a better CPU 5950x and 64G RAM. As soon as the clouds are gone I'll give it another go at 30 sec increments.

[Anth10]

Very nice!

Cheers
Anthony

[oska]

Thanks Anthony.

[xelasnave]

A good computer is a worthwhile investment..my old one would take 12 hours for most of my stacks but my new lap top stacks in thirty minutes and I do a 3x drizzle and need to use an external drive because there is not enough space on the lap top drive.. It has said it needs 350 gig space more times than not...I think 750 is the most I have tried.

It is really hard to throw out any sub thats for sure so I think that I am going to throw them all out but out of kindness I will allow the perfect ones to live..I make it a game but it really pays off...try a huge cull and 3x drizzle if possible and an external drive which you need to tell DSS to use...folk say drizzle is useless but it seems to improve things ... there are no doubt better ways but that is what I have found works better and taken me up a bit.
Alex

[oska]

Cheers. I'll give drizzle a bash. I had a stack of ~350 and PI crashed hard. I had a little tanty... caved and got the cpu. At least now when it f's up it's quickly :) I'm a compter systems engineer by trade and have always resisted big fancy CPU's as they tend to mask or hide general performance (and other) issues when developing systems. Developing on peasant grade PC's means the issues get fixed immediately in the process and don't get to compound.

[xelasnave]

My Daughter just gave me her old gaming computer and says everything needs replacing except the case so I hope to get some help here in the appropriate forum section here and rebuild it. But I plan to make it as good as I can within a reasonable budget so keep your eyes open for the thread as I would welcome your input.
Alex
Alex

[oska]

No worries ;)

[Dave882]

Nice image that’s really well done!
I agree with Alex, being a bit more critical while analysing the subs can bring a good improvement. My preference is for slightly brighter (less black) background as I find you can loose some faint detail, but just my personal taste…
Nice job. :)

[AstroViking]

Hi John,

I like that image - lots of detail and you captured the shockwave / eyelid that's some distance away from the bulk of the helix. Nicely done.

Cheers,
V

[oska]

Thanks Dave.
I found myself all too often focusing on a particular aspect so much that when I stood back I noticed things like that and wasn't sure where they crept in, even after going back over the iterative saves. There still a whole bunch of "clicking on stuff" going on :)



Thanks V.

[Sunfish]

That is a great image.

The Helix is a difficult target and your version is well defined.

[oska]

Thanks Ray. I'm kinda obsessed with it at the moment.

[gb44]

Nice Helix there John.
You just about got the detail of the columns that point toward the central star. I suppose the transparency and seeing play a role.

How do you sort the bad frames out? I use ImagesPlus and the grade system can be a bonus culling the percentage of frames that you want.

I'd like to know more about the computer - where do you source it or do you just build it.

Cheers
GlennB

[oska]

Cheers Glen.

I'm getting snookered many "clear" nights by dew that turns into fog, like right now... To be fair clear outside said it would.

I used Subframe Selector in pixinsight. I relaxed the cull on eccentricity and shouldn't have evidently.

I built it myself. They're lego. I prefer Gigabyte Ultra Durable Motherboards, I've "stress" tested them in the most horrid conditions and they've all just taken it. Just upgraded the CPU to a 16 core (sweet!) and 64G Ram @ 3200Mhz. The system drive is a NVME M2 SSD - best thing you can put in a pc to make it feel fast(er). And an RTX2060 gfx card. I usually copy the current project to the SSD to crunch it and move it back when done. After upgrading I added 4 swap directories on the SSD for pixinsight and ran the benchmark - no overclock just memory boost - and got 26th. Pretty happy :) Umart are pretty good for parts.

[AstroBogan]

Very nice image John!

I really like the colours and the detail is very nice.

Well done :thumbsup:

Jacob

[Doogs38]

Hi John. Yep, it’s a beautiful target and one of my faves too :) In my very limited experience I’ve found that even short exposures result in rich colour and hints of detail (especially with a light pollution filter). Your image has beautiful colour and very strong hints of detail - well done mate. As someone explained to me in a post here; there’s much detail to be extracted in and around the core of the nebula but it can take some fiddling in post-processing to extract that detail. Looking forward to seeing this image develop as you get more data. Alex

[oska]

Thanks Jacob.



Cheers Alex. I get hints of it too while I'm processing but often lose it tweaking something else. I've started on 30 secs last night but the Helix didn't clear my horizon before the fog set in.