M81 with a 250pds / 1h 40min of data

[azure shoal]

I for the life of me cant process this well.
250PDS
EQ8R
294MC
60MM GUIDESCOPE
485MC
About 1h 40min of data.
https://wetransfer.com/downloads/b8a9ebedacbc03cfd8d7a2a9bdd7e6f620230201161825/41836b5ca383fd8395c9da692f5545a420230201161838/e72e7c?trk=TRN_TDL_01&utm_campaign=TRN_TDL_01&utm_medium=email&utm_source=sendgrid

@charred sail

[charred sail]

Nice I’ll give it a go in a min

[azure shoal]

Thanks man, I'm stumped with this data

[azure shoal]

Best I could get

I hate the color and noise

[charred sail]

Nice! How long was the subs?

[azure shoal]

60s subs

Its probably lacking integration time right?

[charred sail]

Nah but longer subs means more faint stuff

But only 60s

Well you are F/5 but

[azure shoal]

F4.3

[charred sail]

Bruh I was doing solid 10m subs last night

Still barely got some extra stuff on M51

[azure shoal]

at 2000mm

[charred sail]

Joys of being guided 😎

[azure shoal]

well im guided as well

[charred sail]

OAG or Guide scope?

[azure shoal]

guide scope

[charred sail]

Damn that may do it as I was guiding at 2032mm fl

But defo try push longer subs your using a EQ8 and are guided

You should be doing 1h subs

[azure shoal]

Will do. Im surprised by walking noise considering I dithered every 3 subs

[charred sail]

Most people dither every other sub tbf

I don’t need dithering it’s strange

Maybe cos my cam isn’t modded but

[azure shoal]

I also don’t understand why the galaxy is so yellow for me

[charred sail]

Try a PCC maybe you can do it in pixinsight and siril

[azure shoal]

Dosent work for me in siril. Cant solve the image

[charred sail]

What focal length and pixel scale?

I could possibly send you a PCCd image that’s linear

[azure shoal]

1080mm and 4.63um pixel size

[charred sail]

K I just gotta wait for my little brother to get bored on my pc then I can process and send you a PCCd linear image if you want

[azure shoal]

That would be awesome thanks!

[charred sail]

K just got my pc back ill send it in a sec

[charred sail]

@azure shoal I cant seem to plate solve but what colours for bodes do you like? Purple or blue or something else?

[azure shoal]

yes blue

[azure shoal]

Hows the edit coming along @charred sail?

[charred sail]

So far got colours but my little brother wants to play roblox but im doing it everytime i die

[azure shoal]

Ah great, thanks

[charred sail]

Here it is atm

will look better soon

[azure shoal]

looking nice

[charred sail]

@azure shoal Here was a short run on it i will try a more indepth process later but for now this is what i got (: Not great but takes awile as your image size is nearly 12000 pixels 😅

[azure shoal]

Oh wow that looks nice. How did you bring out the blue?

[charred sail]

It’s really not great the data is amazing though but I do a channel extraction into separate RGB channels then mask the galaxy and stretch the blue slightly more than the other channels then create a mask around the core and do the red then use the first mask that I used on the blue on the green and do a even smaller stretch to not make it overly purple or red in the core

For a light blue a normal cc worked fine though

I’ll try again in a few hours when I have time as I didn’t think I’d be so busy today 😅

[azure shoal]

Thanks, im really sad I didn’t dither more and get a few extra hours. Ill try to reprocess mine later.

[charred sail]

It’s fine tbh if I had NoiseX i probably could’ve gotten rid of all of it but iirc it was your first time guiding last night aswell? So for a first image it’s great!

[azure shoal]

Thanks! I really need me that PI

[charred sail]

Lol I need me a mono cam lol

[azure shoal]

I also have a problem with color blotch. Those patches of bright and dark all around the image.

No idea how to fix

[charred sail]

Did u take flats?

I had the same issue last night when stacking and loads of dust spots cos I forgot to clean my sensor and flats corrected everything near enough

[azure shoal]

Yeah, they didnt do a good job

[charred sail]

Could u send me a flat?

[azure shoal]

Sure gimmie a min

[charred sail]

Thx

[charred sail]

Can’t check it on my phone but I’ll look when I am using my pc again

[azure shoal]

ill convert it

[charred sail]

K thx

[charred sail]

Hmm very dark? Did you do this early morning with a white T shirt or like a white screen over the front?

[azure shoal]

middle of the day with a white tshirt but the value was at 38k so even a little too bright

[charred sail]

Was there dew while shooting M81 and during flats? Looks sorta like when dew was there and wasn’t for the calibration frames (or other way round)

[azure shoal]

nope

[charred sail]

Hmm strange but a good background extraction will fix it for the most part luckily

Sirils background extraction with smoothing at 0.00 is usually better than pix

[azure shoal]

That’s exactly what I did

[charred sail]

Ye your BE came out better than mine I lost like half one of the spiral arms

[azure shoal]

Yeah I saw that. Still very nice edit. I tinkered with the BE in siril for a few hours

[azure shoal]

Oh yeah, the 3x drizzle produced a 77MP bomb

[azure shoal]

@charred sail

[azure shoal]

Your colours are much smoother. Ill try to reprocess today

[azure shoal]

Do you just trace around the object by hand to select it or do you use a tool to make a better/smoother selection?

[charred sail]

Technically I used a tool but it basically just speeds up the process and that’s about it as you can get equal results manually making a mask

[azure shoal]

Yeah with just marking with mouse, the edges are very sharp and ugly.

[charred sail]

Honestly it’s not bad maybe a stronger stretch for the spiral arms but apart from that it really isn’t bad

[azure shoal]

The color is blocky and full of artefacts but I imagine thats from poor color stretching and saturation adjustments.

For my first image Ill call it OK.

[charred sail]

First image it really isn’t bad I mean it beats my first image when I got my HEQ

[charred sail]

See lol

Absolutely stunning

[azure shoal]

My image is already very noisy. That would ruin it

[charred sail]

@azure shoal Still not perfect but decently happy with it/them (Again the DBE is just awful on my part)

[azure shoal]

Very very nice. Ill give processing it another go. I found out Siril is much more efficient than I thought.

[charred sail]

Siril is defo a good and reliable free processing software and even people like 200p use it with his pix work flow mainly for that BE as Sirils is so much better than pix if u can do it right

[azure shoal]

This is my latest process. Didn’t want to over stretch it because of noise. I also fixed walking noise

[charred sail]

Nice colours i can understand why u dont wanna over stretch cos siril doesnt even have any form of noise reduction which if it did would make it one of the best softwares ngl but next time try pull longer subs for more time so the SNR is alot higher cos the spiral arms are slightly hidden

[azure shoal]

I will try to pull 5min

[azure shoal]

@charred sail Im seriously starting to think, PI is only really good because of noiseX, blurX and gradientX

[charred sail]

lol how come?

[charred sail]

What makes u believe that lol?

[azure shoal]

Ive seen pretty much same quality of processing done in siril + photoshop. Look on astrobin

[charred sail]

Ahh ok photoshop is the only software i think that competes with pi if you can learn it correctly

but the reason i think pi is generally best is

Pi is the software where everything is a click away you can even add other external things such as NoiseX and BlurX gradientX etc. Pi even if learnt correctly has got better noise reduction, Deconvolution, Gradients removal techniques than the externals just the externals arent far off and are much easier too use

but Pi is basically Siril gimp darktable and more just not Ps

Pix can platesolve stack align and (imo) has the most accurate colours when doing a PCC and in the end Pi is cheaper than Ps and has more dedicated processes than Ps has for astro

It basically can do anything and more than siril gimp darktable but the reason Ps is also really good is because it can have NoiseX but i feel that if it couldnt have that it wouldnt be much of a competition cos when ive used Ps i cant really see a noise reduction at all

and (Stefan told me) that NoiseX has alot of imperfections which is why Pi is good cos you can do it and more without imperfections it just takes more time lol

Not to say as you said the processes with just Siril and ps are really good but ps is using pi plugins (Well was made for Pi anyway) which is imo the only reason why it competes and dont get me wrong Ps has great saturation tools etc which is why its used in alot of people works flows such as Astrobackyard Nebula photos and even the god of processing on this server (200p) but his processing insists of Siril PixInSight and Ps which is probably why

The only thing siril has over Pi is its background extraction works way better for some reason lol

[charred sail]

Lol have fun reading i guess

[azure shoal]

jesus gimmie a min

[azure shoal]

Lets tackle this one first. PI cheaper than PS? 🏴‍☠️ 🪝 🦜 IYKWIM

[charred sail]

Ok fair but saying u was gonna pay for it

[azure shoal]

I mean sure, I don't doubt PI is fundamentally better but the 450EUR price for the "standard package" seems outrageous

[charred sail]

holy! Its 200gbp here only

[azure shoal]

PS is also oveerpriced affffFor me its 305eur for PI, 50for noise x and 100 blurx

[charred sail]

yeahhhhhh

and ps isnt a 1 time payment

[azure shoal]

For me its 305eur for PI, 50for noise x and 100 blurx

[charred sail]

I dont even consider BlurX as manual decon is really easy to get equal results

I do like NoiseX though cos im a little lazy with that

[azure shoal]

Thats still 355eur

Ill buy it later on, make no mistake but I really belive results can be matched with a lot of work in sieil and ps

[charred sail]

yeah buttttt

[charred sail]

"a lot of work"

in pix it wouldnt take long to recreate that process

so imagine spending that hour or 2 in pix?

All i say is id rather be able to get everything in 1 location and rather quick to process

i do spend time processing but its alot quicker with pix

I do like to take my time in pix though to get best results

But i think optimal results (200p results) would generally be Siril, Pi, Ps

but thatd take soo long to learn and alot more effort imo

I do see where your coming from though

[azure shoal]

@charred sail manual deconvolution in PS is very good. You can almost get blurX results if you know that you are doing

[charred sail]

Yep i do the same in Pi and u can actually get better than blurX if your patient and precise enough

[azure shoal]

Do you use unsharpen mask?

[charred sail]

after decon yeah

[azure shoal]

how do you do decon though?

quick run up plese

[charred sail]

Theres a thing in Pi called Deconvolution then u can either use a PSF mask (you need to download something for that) which basically zooms heavily on a single star and uses that to get a idea of seeing conditions and accuracy but after that its about getting the right amount of iterations and doing the other settings correct

it sounds alot more complex than it is