It is 12 months since I found I had cancer but even further back to doing any astro.
So after all the cancer drama, ruptured gal bladder, kidney failure and all those close calls with death I went crazy and started spending money I had set aside for a house or good caravan and I bought flash new gear (RASA 11, EQ8R, ZWO 2600 OSC and MONO and filters EAF and a neat cloak ..and a sports car which is dumb for a 75 year old guy who is near cripple...anyways thats what I did...but have not been able to use the Astro Gear at all due to health and weather....but I bought a new lap top, installed new programs so I thought I would reprocess some old data just to learn again really...I am so sick of the rain I cant even go for a drive with the top down...AND as I have finished setting up my van etc and run out of microscope projects I thought to re learn Startools etc.
I found some HA, O11 and S11 data of the Spider, all one minute unguided subs thru the 115 mm triplet refractor but I am not sure which mount the EQ5 or EQ6.
The camera ZWO 1600 mono with 7 spot filter wheel and all the subs were at very high gain (350
) because at the time I was pushing things and seeing how Startools could cope..no darks flats etc...I cant find the old image but I bet this new one beats it.
So to get a Luminance I stacked the lot (HA,O11 andS11) approx 200 subs
(three hours just there) then individual stacks for each of HA,S11 and O11 ..60 to 70 frames each...so maybe you could say the image represents six hours???
I stuffed up saving the perfect group having spent hours to go thru and throw out the rubbish so I loaded everything (rubbish and all) into Deep Sky Stacker and told it to pick the best 80%...it was late and I was slack because there were subs that half of the thing was just lines as the camera spat the dummy..lots of them..it would tick me off but I would not let it worry me back then...anyways DSS presumably threw the rubbish out although I did get some terrible stuff in two of the stacks that I have hidden...so I paid a price for not doing it right...but at least it made me figure out how to manage a mess...so it was good thing
I used 3x drizzle which is supposed to be useless unless you dither but I really think it helps...anyways my new lappy stacks them in a flash even when using 3x drizzle so why not.. whereas the old DSS on the old lappy would take 12 hours..and the final files were so hard to handle...now its a couple of minutes..And whereas the old Startools near died with the final stacks the new Startools manages well.
I binned at 25% because the stacks were near a gig each and because polar was way out for the captures the stacks needed a big crop to remove the stacking artifacts.
I put the four final proceeded images in Startools Composite and tried various mapping and honestly I cant remember what I finally selected...I am colour blind so why worry
The noise was managed well by Startools for each image but I ran the final image thru again and given the over the top gain the noise I find acceptable...in fact it is sheer magic how Startools manages...350 gain remember..not real flash subs.
I played around with the Composite image in photoshop as I like to do and fiddled with the dodge and burn tool, haze reduction and the colour adjustment to reduce the saturation...My daughter says its yellow and blue which is ok by me as I just want to avoid purple and green... and who is to say my colours are not representative of reality..yes someone who is not colour blind I guess
So now I will practice on more old data so as to be ready for the night I can use my new stuff.
Thanks for listening.
Edit...I added a second image coloured up a little so I can see what it looks like here...
Alex
