why no colour?

jimmyh1555 (James) · #1 10-09-2018, 01:36 PM

I had a go at imaging Joop last night with BT200 f4 scope, ASI224-MC colour with 3X Barlow. Shot in Sharpcap, (.avi) . Took about 2000 frames. then pipp with debayer RGGB, (.avi) then Autostakkert 2 to stack, (.FIT} then into Registrax 6 (now a .FIT file) for wavelets, and no sign of colour - looked just like a black & white photo. Where has the colour gone? There was the GRS looking splendid, but black n white? There must be some settings I am not doing?

I also took a shot a week ago of DSO (40 frames, 30 sec each) and not a trace of colour either. Got lots of stars, but no red or blue ones. Any ideas??

sharkbite · #2 10-09-2018, 02:27 PM

Hi Jimmy -

i had the same problem with the same camera and s/w.

First thing to check is what you output from sharpcap -
i use RAW16 and it works ok.

in pipp, When you hit the 'test options', does the sample look like its in colour? If not - play around with the debayer settings until it looks right.

I save autostakkert output to a .TIF file - i don't know if this makes a difference, but my registax wont read it if i output a FIT...

jimmyh1555 (James) · #3 10-09-2018, 10:59 PM

Thanks Sharkbite.....Just had another go at Joop. When I put in RAW 16 in sharpcap, it wouldnt let me do .avi files - only .png, .fit, or .tif. Can I do these files when the exposure is so short?
When I looked in test options in pipp, they all looked like slight colour! Could it be the Newtonian telescope? Maybe the mirror does not transmit the colour frequencies

I guess the 3XBarlow might be too extreme. I'll try 2X tomorrow

Will keep trying

sharkbite · #4 11-09-2018, 11:20 AM

hmmmm....dunno....never had that issue - occasionally I screw up and capture a sequence of images rather than avi, but pipp can stitch them all togther anyway, so no real problem,,,

as it happens the skies might be worth pointing a camera at in sydney tonight, so i'll take note of my workflow and post it here.

The problem is not your scope - a mirror should reflect all frequencies of
light.

If you can see even slight colour in PIPP you are on the right track -
you might just have to do more image manipulation at the back end.

Any how - i'll post what i do tonight.

cheers,

sil (Steve) · #5 11-09-2018, 12:01 PM

Its a debayering issue, you see b&w until you debayer. use PIPP to centre object and debayer and save to a SER file and process from that , it'll not need debayering again, it should be in RGB now. you might have to manually setdebayer setting, try them all one at a time and check yje preview which should give you colour. the pipp site has a SER player which will tell you the bayer filter in the data.
the output ser file you can dump into autostakkert to get a final colour image

sharkbite · #6 11-09-2018, 08:23 PM

It was a bit windy tonight, so the scope didn't come out, but i checked some of my old captures...

i checked my raw16 output - i have captured in .SER.
(there is no avi option for raw16

This is read by pipp and converted to .avi ready for consumption by
autostakkert. It looks b&W in the autostakkert preview, but the output TIF is in colour.

this tif is ready easily by registax - i did wavelets in that, and stretched the histogram a bit.

jimmyh1555 (James) · #7 11-09-2018, 10:19 PM

Thanks, guys, I will try all your suggestions. Must have a winner one day!