First up, as Cassie is high in the sky was M52. I grabbed 80x30 seconds, darks, flats and dark flats. But I managed to get something wrong with the darks... Typical. Anyway I went ahead and stacked the subs anyway, and was surprised to find that I'd caught the Bubble Nebula. I then saved the resulting image with DSS adjustements embedded. I then tweaked the DSS adjustements to pull out more stars and saved that too. For some reason the DSS tweaks always lose colour and I end up with a B&W image. I loaded both images into PS and after making some adjustments to both, layered them as a Colour layer and tweaked a bit more. I processed both the combined and the non adjusted one and saved both. I thought the bubble looked better in the non adjusted one.
The combined image
The non DSS adjusted one
I then slewed around to grab some data on M45 as the sisters had now cleared the roof. I setup for 90x60s and fired away. I went to stack these, again with darks (correct ones), flats and dark flats, and I was going to include the 60 or so frames I'd captured previously. Only when I went to the image archive, the archive was bare. Not a sign of the M45 data.... NO... My bad, I must have deleted them to save space GRRR.. Ah well. Processed as the M52 once the stack was completed. The scope dew'ed up on me mid way through and I had to stop to use the OH's hair dryer.
Finally, Auriga had cleared the roof, so I slewed across to M38 and repeated. I had been intending on getting a load of subs. I used the hairdryer before starting, and within 25 minutes, the objective was dewed up again. Anyway, processed in the same way.
I gave up at that point, but the scope had been out capturing data for 4 hours, and I had a lot of data to process.
Thursday 23 October 2008
The images from Oct 21st
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2 comments:
Hi again, John.
Nice pics!
What you say about DSS stacks coming out in B&W... I've found it best to just take the autosaved copy and use that, I never bother with the on-screen version. Colour-retention is much better.
Have you installed Noel's Actions into Photoshop yet? I grabbed it recently and I was amazed at the difference that it made to my Andromeda pics ( http://beardedgit.com/?tag=andromeda ). It's well-worth the $19.95 asking-price.
Thanks BG. I've not come to a conclusion on the various DSS options as yet. It's bad enough in processing anyway.
I do have Noels Tools but I've found that they can be a bit generalised and have had worse results on occasion using them than not. Could just be me though. I do use one or two from them on most images just for refining things a little
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