Southern pinwheel

[bugeater (Marty)]

So I requested a trial of pixinsight. Definitely not straightforward to use, but I can see it could be very powerful once you learn its functions. So I've been practising on a stack of 10 minute subs I've got of the southern pinwheel. I think there are 10 of them - I'd have more but the battery in my camera ran out of juice. No darks (hence the hot pixels), but I've tried a few techniques on it. Clearly I haven't removed all the ringing from a deconvolution, but I'll work it out.

[sil (Steve)]

great start, you should be able to bring out the spiral so much more using pixel math. its amazing the techniques some people have come up with using an iterative approach of fine adjustments instead of single steps of large adjustments. I'm still struggling with something as simple as noise reduction with PI. Still I am happy with my workflows for various targets, I can reliably combine shots and get a photo i am happy with in PI and over time as more is added to it and more tutorials come out the more i learn and can go back over old data and get even better results. Its worth sticking with PI though its not the easiest program to get into, its so much more powerful than anything else i've got (and i've pretty much bought them all).

[bugeater (Marty)]

The thing I struggle with is how much you need to mess with the settings in each tool. What works great for one image will completely destroy another. Like one of the noise reduction algorithms worked great on an image of Eta Carinae (in fact almost too well) with the default settings, but was almost unusable on another (admittedly noiser) image.

Plus with things like deconvolution, it can be very hard to find a setup that works well in some situations, but you can see it could be hugely powerful if you could just control the ringing.

I'll stick with it though, because you have so very many tools at your disposal, its just a case of learning how to use them.

[sil (Steve)]

i agree it can be a struggle decon and noise still bug me too. I gave up trying to do any planetary disc stuff in PI and went back to registax for those or AS!2 but I came across a video tutorial where someone used atrouswavelets and something in my mind went click (wasn't my stroke) and now I've reprocessed jupiter and saturn shots and get as good or better than registax. There is a German (?) called Gerald who has some great vids. Using his technique for enhancing nebulosity works to bring out galaxies nicely and part of the process i was able to adapt to suppress or round stars. Its worth going through tutorials to get familiar with tools that can help you when you encounter "a problem" and give you a way to tackle it. There are no rules really and yes to make the best each shot will probably be processed differently but i have a couple of workflows I go through depending on what I shot and with which camera that I am confident of getting a pic i'm not too ashamed of. I have been starting to make use of the output values and statistics tools to help with getting optimal values to use in some of the tools and scrapped my old notebooks, started a new one to keep track of my notes on using various tools . its very satisfying to get results.

[rustigsmed (Russell)]

hi marty,

good to see you getting out there having a crack. the next couple of nights look good too for melbourne. looks like you have got your guiding down pat pretty well also smashing out 10 minute subs.

I'd give varying times some experimenting, with a light pollution filter I can only really push to about 3 minute subs. only with narrowband can I consider going close to 10 minute subs, even with the light pollution filter it can wash out the sky still with sky glow and make it really difficult to process (especially with the moon around). here is an example of M83 I did with 20 second subs (40x20secs) on my old goto dob https://www.flickr.com/photos/803366...ream/lightbox/ (which I could probably process better now I have more experience).

So don't be afraid to try shorter

Cheers

Rusty

[bugeater (Marty)]

Yeah I'm planning on getting out there tonight. Plan is to get everything aligned and setup, then set the alarm to get up at 2 am when the moon sets. I think the Triffid nebula or something might be near the meridian early tomorrow morning?

I have considered the short subs versus long subs thing. I don't think I've found the balance yet. But I do want to see if I can get some 20 minute subs down