First post of a fuzzy image here, so please be gentle
Southern Cross, the Coalsack, eta Carina and the Southern Pleiades from a single 10s exposure using a Canon 1100D and Canon 50mm f/1.8 lens, ISO1600, on el cheapo tripod so there's a little trailing on the full size.
Question: I took 20 of these, all pretty much the same (besides the rotation of course), and when I try stacking these in DSS (with darks and bias) I seem to loose all the lovely colour information that I see hints of here any ideas what I'm goofing up?
Just to add to my confusion, I fiddled around a bit with the sliders in DSS and saved with settings applied, then tweaked a little more in Pixelmator and got this one.
Too bright and/or too much red? Now eta Carina nebula and the Running Chicken nebula are much more obvious, but there's a background pink hue to the MW
The images you have posted look good mate, great start.
Are these your exposures from Lostock? Most of the time the resulting stacked image which is produced by DSS looks shocking. You will just have an image that looks black/grey and nothing else. I personally never do any processing in DSS and only use DSS to stack the image. I then use Photoshop for stretching, white balance, colour enhancing etc.
Good work Dunk. Maybe stop down the lens a bit and reduce the exposure even a little more and take more subs - should clean it up. I think you're definitely on the right track.
I make adjustments in DSS too then post-process in PhotoShop. If you don't want to pay for PS (which is expensive) then two free image processing tools are ImageJ and GIMP. If you care to splash $60 on dedicated astronomy image processing software then Startools is an option too. Everything else I'm aware of is fairly pricey.
The images you have posted look good mate, great start.
Are these your exposures from Lostock? Most of the time the resulting stacked image which is produced by DSS looks shocking. You will just have an image that looks black/grey and nothing else. I personally never do any processing in DSS and only use DSS to stack the image. I then use Photoshop for stretching, white balance, colour enhancing etc.
Good work Dunk. Maybe stop down the lens a bit and reduce the exposure even a little more and take more subs - should clean it up. I think you're definitely on the right track.
I make adjustments in DSS too then post-process in PhotoShop. If you don't want to pay for PS (which is expensive) then two free image processing tools are ImageJ and GIMP. If you care to splash $60 on dedicated astronomy image processing software then Startools is an option too. Everything else I'm aware of is fairly pricey.
Cheers,
Cam
Thanks Cam - interesting, so it's possibly a little over exposed? This was using a non-tracking alt az tripod so my stars aren't round at anywhere near full size, and no doubt I've overcooked it during processing too (I'm trying to learn Pixelmator) But got to start somewhere, and I've only got a small number of subs so far. More dark sky needed
I tried DSS as well for the first time and the same thing happened to me! Im pretty sure were missing something...
Hey Ed, I've narrowed the grey down to one of two things...firstly I was saving compressed TIF files, and I read somewhere about having to use uncompressed. The second change was dialling up saturation in DSS before saving. Neither really makes sense as even with my earliest attempts I couldn't seem to get anything like colour out of the files, so I can only suspect it's a bug related to the file format.
Been playing with the colours so that the whole MW doesn't look so pink...but still wanted to retain as much of the nebulosity as possible...better or worse? What colour should the MW be
I like that latest repro - feels "natural". I only suggested reducing the exposure to help keep the stars from trailing, but I think what's happening in your image is coma, rather than trailing.
The images you have posted look good mate, great start.
Are these your exposures from Lostock? Most of the time the resulting stacked image which is produced by DSS looks shocking. You will just have an image that looks black/grey and nothing else. I personally never do any processing in DSS and only use DSS to stack the image. I then use Photoshop for stretching, white balance, colour enhancing etc.
+1 for dougs tutorials. Very good for beginners. Has some pretty cool images on his flickr page too...
Quote:
Originally Posted by Camelopardalis
Been playing with the colours so that the whole MW doesn't look so pink...but still wanted to retain as much of the nebulosity as possible...better or worse? What colour should the MW be
Went through Doug's tutorials which were very useful and have gone through my images from IISAC and posted them in the other thread I'm using Pixelmator as it's cheap and has many of the functions of PS, albeit lacking the non-destructive adjustment layers.
That's looking great Dunk, you're increasing the brightness and not clipping your blacks. If you're using photoshop now give this technique a try (because we didn't take flats) which should help brighten the corners of your images. I think you could increase the colour as well by using Match Colour (In Photoshop its under Image > Adjustments > Match Colour) its more subtle than just a standard saturation adjustment.
any ideas what I'm goofing up?
