Quote:
Originally Posted by rcheshire
Eta Carina.
Preprocessing in Pixinsight, thought I would try my hand at post processing in StarTools, which has meant a new learning curve.
I am satisfied with the result, but I'm sure that Ivo would do much better, and I am happy to upload the cropped .fit file out of interest.
I did have a little trouble with colour saturation which improved with the application of a full mask. But it's not quite what I was after.
Cooled 1000D @7C - Astrodon Inside filter, 200mm, F/6.3, iso400, 25 x 3.5 minute subs, with bias, darks and flats.
I wanted to replace the stars. Get rid of the spikes and replace with spikeless ones, but came unstuck with that and gave up?
Synth > Refractor > 200mm (should I add the crop factor), aperture 72mm, after that, no idea 
Thanks for looking |
Great widefield - great framing, heaps to look at and (at this scale) not a hint of problems with your gear, tracking, etc. Textbook stuff!
Happy to help where I can - you got my e-mail address
Rescaling your image for publication, for example on IIS, can sometimes mess with your composition and detract from the main object you're trying to show. What looks good 1:1 (e.g. unzoomed/unscaled) can look busy when scaled. To avoid 'busyness' due to aliasing, try to bin rather than scale your image - it should keep the 'busyness' constant. For those who don't have a binning function available, you can apply a Gaussian blur before scaling. The more you scale the image, the larger the blur.
Failing that, in StarTools, an extremely convenient way of toning down a distracting star field in a rescaled wide fields like this, is to use the 'Life' module's 'Isolate' preset. No parameter changes or masks needed. But season to taste if you feel like it of course...
In this instance, it does a nice job of 'isolating' the nebula and toning down the stars (attached, no further processing done) with 0 effort. Of course there's heaps of other ways of achieving the same thing, but StarTools is all about automation and reducing tedium...
Cheers,