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Cheers Steve,
you raise some very valid points to which I will answer thus:
Planetary & Lunar
1. Generally happy with planetary/lunar imaging & processing. Equipment wise I generally use a ZWO ASI224MC or my Canon 1100d at prime focus.
2. I have a Bhatinov mask for both my scopes.
3. I shoot video for planetary & lunar, use Autostakkert, Registax & some final tweaking in Affinity photo & providing the footage is good, my results are generally pretty good. Always searching for improvement though.
4. Still learning the in's & out's of both Autostakkert & Registax but, don't generally find them too hard to use.
Deep Sky
1. Very new to this & producing some mixed results.
2. Now using predominantly an 80mm Triplet on a Celestron CG5 Adv GT EQ mount, unguided at this stage imaging with an unmodded Canon 1100d at Prime focus.
3. Getting my PA's down to under 10 arc seconds in both axis & working to get them as tight as possible.
4. Still learning the in's and outs of my equipment & imaging routine but, I think generally getting better in this department though, haven't got past 90 second exposures as yet.
5. Processing is through stacking in DSS; learning more & more about that program, starting to understand it better & recently learned how to do group stacks with different exposure lengths, ISO's and associated darks.
6. Haven't started doing flats as yet
7. Image processing is then done with Startools at present & this is where I feel a little lost & unhappy. I'll be completely honest & say that I don't fully understand what it is doing at each step, I don't feel as though I have any real control & I have been struggling to find good information to allow me to fully understand it & gain proper control over what I am doing. It always seems to be very aggressive on it's stretches & it takes me a number of attempts to try & tone it down to an acceptable level by trying various things I don't understand properly I just don't feel if it is possible even to gain proper control of what it is doing.
8. I am a bit lazy though... it's not that I don't want to learn new things it's just I find it easy to make excuses to not learn new things or at least not learn them properly. I have read that Pixinsight is very difficult to learn but, very powerful once you have learnt how to use it & as you describe, grows as you grow...
9. Whilst the price is substantially higher than startools that's not the main 'put off' factor... Just how hard is this program to learn?? How good are the tutorials, guides, etc... does this make it easier to learn to use if one bothers to take time to learn through the tutorials, etc.. or, because I can be a little lazy, will it just frustrate me more at a higher price?
Hope that makes it clearer what I am trying to establish with my question & helps to make it easier to answer my questions... if not, let me know & I'll try and add more detail..
I'm not looking for a quick fix persay (although, that would indeed be nice) I'm just looking for something that with a reasonable amount of effort I can become proficient at using & feel like I have control & some sense of knowing what I am actually doing/achieving at each step.
Cheers
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