PK 119-6.1,M 57,NGC 40,NGC 7354,NGC 7008,NGC 1501 /asi224mc

stephane gonzales

Hello,

I photographed some planetary nebulae with short exposures.

Equipment utilised:

TN 300mm OO, and camera ASI224MC

PK119-6.1, I used barlow 1.5:

M 57, I used barlow 2x:

~~M57 by stef, sur Flickr~~

NGC 40, I used barlow 1.5:

~~NGC 40 by stef, sur Flickr~~

NGC 7354 , barlow 1.5:

~~ngc 7354 2016 by stef, sur Flickr~~

NGC 7008:

~~ngc 7008 2016 by stef, sur Flickr~~

NGC 1501:

~~NGC 1501 2016 by stef, sur Flickr~~

~~Stephane~~

tomr

Stephane, these are great images. It seems to me, that image processing is even more important that fancy hardware. What image processing software do you use and what are your processing steps to get the images sharpened without introducing artefacts?

Regards

Thomas

stephane gonzales

Hi Tom

thank you

I utilised AS! for the stacking, before Rawtherapee for the color and the saturation and sometimes Registax 6.1 for the wavelet.

tomr

Hi Stephane, that's interesting. So far I struggled to use Autostakkert for deep sky imaging with short exposure times. I thought this was due to a lack of sufficiently bright objects for alignment. Maybe I've missed an important point, sometimes my deep sky objets jiggle around during alignment in Autostakkert, whereas the bright planets remain rock solid at the center of the image. Since it works for you, I'll try again. Thanks for the information.

stephane gonzales

must use the surface function, and I utilised DARK .

this should facilitate the follow.

tomr

Stephane, using the surface mode of image stabilization in addition to increasing the Noise Robust field value solved the image stabilization issue (I already used dark frames, of course). Sometimes things are that easy, thanks for the hint.

Since my telescope is set up in alt-azimuth mode, I have to use Autostakkerts field rotation to derotate my image sequences stored in .ser video files. Most of the time this works, but some of the videos do not get debayered properly during stacking in Autostakkert with field rotation mode turned on. I haven't found out yet, what causes this problem with some of the videos, while others display the correct color. You mentioned RawTherapy. Maybe it would help to split the images in their RGB channels and then stack each channel individually. Is that the reason, why you use this software or do you want to have more control over the debayering process?

russm

Stephane, I very much enjoyed the photos you have posted here. Even more so the images you have on your website are wonderful. They inspire me to try my hand at some planetary imaging. Thanks so much for sharing.

Best Regards,

Russ

stephane gonzales

Tom: for to derotate, You have to sequencer the shooting and then with the software IRIS you summed up the whole.

This technique works well with me.

Russ, I'm glad you like it thank you

tomr

Stephane, the field rotation with debayering issue has been reported to Emil, the author of AS!2. Hopefully he finds some time to fix it, because in my view his program is well written and comfortable to use. In the meantime I decided to use Fitswork for the stacking because it can handle field rotation and delivers good results. However, it is not very well suited to handle hundreds or even thousands of frames, because there is no image quality indicator to get rid of the bad frames automatically and to controll this manually can be quite a task with so many frames. So I'll try IRIS then. Thank you for this tip!