M8 - joint effort.

[netwolf]

Hi All,

Its been many moons... to long.

This is data I got from a night at my good friend Peter (apoman's) home observatory. Peter and Andrew (kal) did all the hardwork getting the data while i lounged about and ate pizza. But then that is normal.

Equipment
ST-8300mono with filters on AP 130 EDFS wiht field flattner on GM-200/Argonavis. Guided by Qhy5 on a Borg 77ED piggy backed on the AP. Captured with CCFSoft.

Luminance done first: 6x5min subs unbinned.
RGB: 6x2min subs binned 2x2.

After much research, i decided do go with Pixinsight for the whole process flow. I used the tutorials by Harry which were invaluable in getting me started as well as the ones on the Pixinsight site. I thin Harry should get paid by Pixinsight for his work. I really learned a lot and am still learning.

But I had to go back and forth quiet a bit as M8 and M106 are so very diffrent. While this stuff looks easy its anything but. Hats of to you guys who regularly do this, because whered do i begin..

I am not sure I did everything right, and hence I am really open to all you masters for your criticisim and tips. While I am still getting my hardware ready to setup, my goal is to reprocess this untill i have it right and have a workflow i can repeat.

First challenge was with the Dark frame subtraction as it seems hot pixels are not completly removed by PI by design. But after reading there forums I learned you can use Cosmeticorrection script to fix this up. Initally we did not have the dark frames, Peter suplied this just the other day to us. So when we intially ran through it individually, we all seemed to be getting these Red Green and Blue pixes clumped together all over the place in the image. Anyway even after applying the darks and running all the way through I was disaapointed to see those crummy RGB pixels show up again. But I noted Peter was not getting this issue with CCDSoft. But luck for me google pointed me the the fix mentioned above using the CC script.

Next challenge which I still am not sure I have mastered was using DBE on the Luminance frame. I just could not reduce the gradient in one hit, after hours of hair pulling I decided to try doing it twice and even then it was still there, so tried diffrent combinations and manually setting samples, i finally got something that was satisfactory, well at least it was similar to Harry's videos. This is where I think the diffrence beween M106 and M8 was affecting my judgement on how best to recreate Harry's workflow. I am guessing that he must have also doen many iterations to work out what is jusr right for him.

But what can I say I really like PI and I am forever in Harry's debt.
http://www.harrysastroshed.com/index.html

If your still here and not fallen asleep, then here are the pictures.

Edit: Current version V4a.
http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6009/...a92fe8a1_b.jpg

Orignal Size 4mb+
http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6009/...7b70eb82_o.jpg


My thanks to Peter for inviting us into his home and being a gracious host. And to Andrew for helping me eat the pizza, no i mean for helping Peter with all the work you did. Hope we can do it again soon.

[Ross G]

Hi Netwolf,

Looks really good.

Tracking and focus look perfect.
There is lots of detail and nice colours.


Ross.

[RickS (Rick)]

Nice work, Fahim! I've been playing with PixInsight too and really like it.

Cheers,
Rick.

[DavidU (Dave)]

Just beautiful Fahim,,super effort.

[John Hothersall]

Thats a fine effort and good write up, good to hear the struggle involved.

John.

[h0ughy (David)]

a fellow PI user - congratulations. Going well - need to use your starmask and your luminance extraction(inverted) to apply as a mask through pixel math then apply a HDR to the image to bring out the detail of the swamp area then use the curves to bring up the colour to suit. like most things trial and error is foremost and as for Harry's videos - priceless. i wonder how many more people will have a go with PI after the imaging conference this weekend

[netwolf]

Thanks everyone for your kind comments, very encouraging.

Houghy I will give that a try, I did that for Luminace using Maths luminance_clone+~starmask but did not know we needed to do that for RGB. I see what you mean now about that though I will give this a go.

I have had the program since last night, its been great fun to learn it. After seeing Harry's videos i just bought it. Did not bother with the trial. Got the license in less than 1minute, and then i found out about the yahoo bug. But i was not affected by this came through no problem. I am still waiting for my Forum access to be aproved. I wonder if you could put in a kind word for me .

Its worth every dollar. Spend more on accesory plates (that auspost wont deliver on time argh.. ) and equipment, this is a great piece of software. I am always lost with Photoshop, tried books, dvd's but most of the help out there is for non-astronomers. With PI I do a search for a function or process and most of the time i get a direct hit to somone using PI or PI forums.

I would really like to get my hands on more data to try out.

[netwolf]

Ok Houghy gave it a go they way you said.

What do you all think is this right?

Large
http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6009/...a315ac23_b.jpg
Full Size 4mb+
http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6009/...70fc5f87_o.jpg

[h0ughy (David)]

a tad green - go to the noise removal area and use SCNR to remove some. maybe over bright fluro colours but hey season to taste

[netwolf]

Thanks David, btw I see i got my forum access for PI. So thanks if you had a hand in that.

The SCNR yes I skipped that did not seem to make a diffrence, will try some more settings with it.

[Kal (Andrew)]

Hi Fahim.

Here is my effort using the same data, processed with CCDStack and photoshop.

M8 50% size

[netwolf]

Andrew,

Great job mate, that look nice. The deconv brought out some of the faint stuff. I need to try this next.

David,
Got rid of that green sorry did not realise you meant the stars were green.

Current version V4a.
http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6009/...a92fe8a1_b.jpg

Orignal Size 4mb+
http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6009/...7b70eb82_o.jpg

Still reworking this data set to see what I can get out of it. Mostly its just to practice.

[Harryianpage]

Hi

See you are getting on well with Pixinsight , practice makes perfect

Regards harry

[Octane (Humayun)]

Fahim,

Mate, that looks pretty damn nice! Very electro-fluoro.

Top stuff!

I'm starting to begin my own PixInsight journey and hope to be able to achieve results as pleasing as this soon.

Cheers!

H

[gregbradley]

Great to see you post an image Fahim.
That's great.

And wow what a start!

That's a beauty mate. Love the image, perhaps a tad colourful but hey I can't comment on that as I do that often

I think PixInsight will take off as Rogelio did a comprehensive demo of it at the FLI AAIC.

You know a lot of it can be done with Photoshop and its another way to China so to speak. But there were a few tools that caught my attention as being uniquely valuable.

The Dynamic Background Extraction seems to be one that is worth mastering and yes as I recall Rogelio said he may do several times through (Gradient Xterminator can be done multipe times). The other was the background adaption tool for mosaics that makes the backgrounds the same.

The other tools perhaps no real gain if you already know PS. But if you are not familiar with PS then PI may give you a different look in your images like it does for Rogelio who brings a new look to images.

Greg.

[Kal (Andrew)]

It's been great following your progression of images as you learn new processing techniques Fahim, I must say I like your latest rendition!

[RBA (Rogelio)]

Originally Posted by gregbradley

Great to see you post an image Fahim.
The other tools perhaps no real gain if you already know PS. But if you are not familiar with PS then PI may give you a different look in your images like it does for Rogelio who brings a new look to images.

It's not just about adding some tools to your toolbox. The workflow is usually different as you go along, also meaning that in order to solve a particular problem, in Photoshop you'd use some technique (not just some tool) and in PixInsight a very different approach.

Of course, a person who's already using Photoshop successfully will be more comfortable adding the use of this or that PixInsight tool to their workflow, rather than completely changing the workflow from day one (that can be done, but it takes some commitment), but in the end it will all be about the workflow. And sure, you can define a workflow that involves both applications - this would happen as you experiment more with the "new" program (regardless of which one is the new program) and become more and more familiar with it.

One big difference between both applications IMHO is that PixInsight is mainly driven by a multi-scale approach, while Photoshop is more "selection driven".

Cheers,
Rogelio

[RobF (Rob)]

Wonderful image all right. Looks a bit fluoro to my eye too, but heck my last effort was all over the place in that dept so who am I to judge. Difficult to get all the detail AND the subtle colours. You must certainly be doing something right in PI.