Hi,
Last weekend we went out to a dark site for the Perseids, I counted 37 smile emoticon
Since it was new moon, I brought my portable AP equipment, a Tak FS60.
This is my render of the Sadr region. A 2 tale mosaic.
Image details:
– Telescope Takahashi FS60 with reducer. FL = 255mm
– Camera SBIG STF-8300M
– Takahashi Epsilon 160 for Crescent Nebula Image details (taken 3 years ago)
– Filters Astrondon RGB + 5nm Ha
– 2 panel mosaic
– 9 x 5m per filter RGB
– 8 x 30m Ha per panel (taken from the city)
– Mount Atlas
– Image acquired with Sequence Generator Pro
– Image processing Pixinsight
Very nice Jose! I’m always amazed how some people can get such vivid
color with such a short integration time. I’m assuming that’s the value
of a dark site. Great job!
Another fact that contributes to the color is the fact that I don’t shoot LRGB. I exclusively shoot pure RGB, it produces reacher colors and smaller stars.
When I first got started with PixInsight and read Juan’s comments on the
matter of LRGB vs. pure RGB, I experimented with just RGB. Perhaps it is
because of my particular sky conditions or because I’m not processing
the synthetic lum properly, but I found that I couldn’t seem to get the
same detail and general resolution with the RGB as I could with a
traditional LUM. At the time I was working on an image of M81 and the
real LUM clearly showed more detail, was “crisper”, and showed more
faint nebulosity in the spiral arms than the synthetic lum made from the
RGB.
This is getting quite off topic, but if you’d care to share your
processing steps regarding the creation and processing of the sythLUM
from the RGB, I would appreciate it. Or if there is a resource you can
point me to…
I agree, if you shoot LRGB the L channel will be deeper, but the tradeoff is washed colors. Since these zone is HA rich I compensate shooting some Ha frames.
I don’t create any synthetic L channel out of RGB, I mix the RGB channels at the very beginning of my pipeline and process the image until I get a colorful image then I mix it with the processed Ha channel.
This is a pure RGB image before adding the Ha. The processing was very basic, histogram stretch and color balance. The only fancy processing was star reduction on the B channel to reduce the chromatic aberration of the FS60
You ever see James Morse’s PI cheat sheet? He has a 37 page document that spells out how he does processing. My other suggestion would be the Light Vortex blog. It’s really helped me too.
And, buying a Tak makes a big difference . I love how vivid my images are from my 106n. It’s completely different than my ED80 was.
Yeah, I’ve got Jim crib sheet. Inspired by that I have created my own
based on IP4AP’s videos. There’s a lot of good resources out there, but
there is also so much to learn about PI.
. I love how vivid my images are from my 106n. It’s completely different than my ED80 was.