SharpCap Forums

Equipment: Celestron AVX mount, Altair 66ED refractor, Altair 0.8x reducer/flattener, Altair 183C V2.
Capture: 80x90s, 50 darks, 90 bias, 90 flats, unguided. Focus with Bahtinov Mask.
Software: SharpCap 3.2, FITS Liberator (to inspect test frame), Siril (calibration, registration, stacking, crop, colour calibration, green noise removal), Gimp (Curves, Saturation, Contrast).
Capture settings were RAW12, gain 200, black level 30 (black level established by using lowest value which gives centralised histogram for bias frame at gain 200) .


Last 10 M45 discarded due to cloud rolling in. I will probably re-process these after some sleep, there are no easy targets

Dave

[ALTAIRH183C]
Debayer Preview=On
Output Format=FITS files (*.fits)
Capture Area=5440x3648
Binning=1x1
Pan=0
Tilt=0
Colour Space=RAW12
Fan=On
Temperature=12
Black Level=30
USB Speed=1
Auto Exp Target=120
Frame Rate Limit=Maximum
Analogue Gain=200
Exposure=90000
Timestamp Frames=Off
Banding Threshold=35
Banding Suppression=0
Apply Flat=None
Subtract Dark=None
#Black Point
Display Black Point=0
#MidTone Point
Display MidTone Point=0.5
#White Point
Display White Point=1
TimeStamp=2019-08-31T22:07:38.1956848Z
SharpCapVersion=3.2.6097.0

Same great shots Dave. Like the color you were able to capture in M31, well done!

Thanks Wikkett. That was back home at Bortle 6, it will be interesting to see what the same capture settings achieve at my Bortle 4 site.

Just emerging from 2 hard days wrestling with Astro Pixel Processor. I think I am making some sense of it now. This is the same dataset displayed above. APP was used for calibration, registration, stacking and the majority of the post processing. Use was made of the frame quality estimate to stack only 60 out of 80 frames. The image was lightly processed in GIMP - black point adjustment, 'S' Curve, contrast. The stack output from APP was colour aligned according to the histogram - no adjustment of the RGB histograms needed. Using 32-bit floating point TIFF output, which GIMP can handle, was interesting. I think the last 2 months of working with LRGB imaging has provided some useful insight into image capture/processing and probably moved me along the road to enlightenment. Still a few things to sort out in the application but a good start to year 4.



Dave

Nice images, Dave. Great wide field captures.
Bruce

Nice images Dave.

Thanks Wickett.