Serious First Light with QHY8L

[peeb61 (Paul)]

Originally Posted by marco

Very nice Paul, you got a remarkable color balance from a single color shot camera, this is a very promising first light! keep it up

Marco

Thanks Marco for your kind words, I sure am' enjoying this camera! And I haven't even pushed it yet!

[Ross G]

Hi Paul,

When I bought the camera from Theo, he recommended a starting point of GAIN=1 and OFFSET=133.
I haven't gotten around to fine tuning these values for my particular camera as I'm happy with the output so far.

Ross.

[peeb61 (Paul)]

Hi Ross,
These are different values to what I am using...GAIN=0 OFFSET=125. I'm going off the manual here so I might try uping' the values on the next clear night. This could be the reason to why I couldn't frame/locate the helix after a 2 min exposure using Ezcap. In MaximDL this was done after a 10 secs exposure and I have not adjusted the Gain and Offset just left them as the default values.

Paul

[gregbradley]

Nice shot there for a first light.

I can see a need for flats there. The corners are quite a bit darker than the middle areas of the image. Flats even out the illumination across the image.

Also a gradient handling is needed to get rid of the reddish/brown background. Gradient Xterminator is good for that amongst other processing approaches.

It would increase the colour contrast of the image quite a bit.

Flats can make quite a difference to an image and I think it is worth keeping it in your routine. In your case it will be a subtle improvement but an improvement nonetheless.

Greg.

[peeb61 (Paul)]

Originally Posted by gregbradley

Nice shot there for a first light.

I can see a need for flats there. The corners are quite a bit darker than the middle areas of the image. Flats even out the illumination across the image.

Also a gradient handling is needed to get rid of the reddish/brown background. Gradient Xterminator is good for that amongst other processing approaches.

It would increase the colour contrast of the image quite a bit.

Flats can make quite a difference to an image and I think it is worth keeping it in your routine. In your case it will be a subtle improvement but an improvement nonetheless.

Greg.

Thanks Greg,
Flats a going to be a big plus, as mentioned in my first post, this is a crop of the original, I have attached the original uncropped version which clearly shows it needs flats. I will apply the Gradient Xterminator on my working image and see how this turns out.

Many thanks for your input as its desperately needed.

Paul