M 33 - 70 hours

[naive fox]

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1iPUwjYqMtDwPR0wrAcxLouRTMZjsfDSY?usp=drive_link

70 hours of M 33
31 hours of broadband from bortle 3
39 hours of narrowband from bortle 8/9

This project is a bear to process and it really requires a lot of patience. The stars are super janky. I was able to fix them using a separate stack of the unaffected frames but that is a grueling process. I am personally not done with it, I have a few things I'd like to go back and do, thing I plan to initiate later in the week. I just want to see what other people would be capable of doing with this data. I would suggest doing your setup work in Siril or Pixinsight, and then taking it into a layer based editor like photoshop or Affinity photo to make the most of the data. Otherwise, it might be extremely difficult to process in a manner that looks good. (The stars are because my secondary kept dewing up and my only solution at the time was to put a strap dew heater around the secondary shroud, which cause nasty flaring on all of them. A problem I am not used to dealing with at home.)

This data was shot with this stuff:
Decoupled TPO RC8
Starizona Apex-L 0.65x Reducer/Flattener
Touptek ATR2600M
2" Antlia LRGB-V Pro
Hypertuned Skywatcher EQ6-R Pro

Focal length: 1078 mm
Pixel size: 3.76 microns

This data is excellent for if you'd like to see what a very serious rig will do in the right conditions.

Oh I totally forgot about the files being XISF, I will update tomorrow if I have time.

@waxen apex

now you can play with your single H-alpha sub

[waxen apex]

It ain't much, but is honest work

[drifting pebble]

i requested access

[naive fox]

i just realized i made the mistake of not making that available right away

i accepted it and changed the access restrictions

[drifting pebble]

@naive fox what did you use to correct gradients, DBE, MSGR?

[naive fox]

dbe

[drifting pebble]

alr

[flint crane]

Woah!!

[tender zinc]

am i dreaming or all nerds just decided to send cinema level data?

[hollow skiff]

??

meme stolen?

[tender zinc]

HMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM

this gonna turn out an infinite loop lol

[tender zinc]

actual cinema data

might give a few adjustments later tho

@naive fox

[naive fox]

Holy

Not bad

[tender zinc]

tkxx

took quite a while

[tender zinc]

i'm quite some adjustments rn

this data is juicy af

but what happened to the stars?

like

there is some buggy things

[waxen apex]

Dew on secondary 😅

[tender zinc]

yepyep

way better

[naive fox]

I literally said in the description lmao

[tender zinc]

yeah ik but like why?

was it a sensor error, seeing?

[waxen apex]

Dew😂

[naive fox]

On reflectors, a rough central obstruction or messy primary mirror edge will cause crazy flaring.

Having the dew heater on the secondary mirror shroud essentially made the central obstruction incredibly messy and variable because it didn't stay totally still every single night and I took it off and put it back on a few times.

Then some periods of some nights I ran without it until the secondary dewed up again and then I'd put it back on.

During atacking, rejection saw the vastly different halos and flaring of the stars as pixels it needed to reject and the result is the weird swiss cheese starburst looking flares in the final stack.

As for the 2 images in here already, yall didnt continuum subtract the narrowband so your results are out of wack and messy.

The stars are essentially HOO stars and not the broadband stars I spent 30 hours capturing.

Plus all that broadband signal captured in the narrowband channels is throwing off the color balance in the galaxy.

So if you thought the galaxy looked very red or cyan after you added the narrowband to it, that is why.

Most of the small stars in M 33 are missing from both images too

Or are wildly incorrect, color wise.

[tender zinc]

hmmm i'm pretty sure i did. but i'll try again anyway i'm not satisfied

[pale lily]

time to give this a process

damn yea these stars are a pita

[pale lily]

decent process, bg on the lum was wierd but i tried to fix it as best as i can

and yea the stars are cooked but i cant be arsed to fix them

[naive fox]

yes that's the issue I've been troubleshooting all this time

you cant fix it.

the best you can do is cut out the corners

[pale lily]

i slightly cut the corners but a strict dbe took a lot of it out

[naive fox]

i found it helps to avoid placing samples on those corners recently

[naive fox]

yup

it eats the evenness of them and makes them worse

[naive fox]

yup

I tried replacing them but I couldn't fully dissolve the halos/flares

theyre deep fried into the data

the best I could do was suppress them

[pale lily]

i didn’t even try touching them

i like to maintain my sanity

[naive fox]

that's the right course of action for this data alone

it's not worth touching them

[pale lily]

lmfao

[naive fox]

trust

i tried

[pale lily]

the cont sub Ha looked nutty

when m33 comes back around i’d like to try it

[naive fox]

that it does

I think im going to dump more H-alpha on to it when it returns

I want to pull out some more

you saw all of the little H-alpha highways and stuff right?

that's what I want to pull out some more

in my official process you can see hints of them but they're really faint

they're somewhere between inside the noise floor and just above it

[pale lily]

I think i know what your talking about

don’t think i payed much attention to keeping them though

[naive fox]

makes sense

they're super faint

you got some of them around NGC 604

[pale lily]

i see

interesting

[naive fox]

meh

i didnt touch the corners and it is still deep fried

there's an embossed dust mote in the top left

hey good news though!

that can't happen anymore

[pale lily]

[naive fox]

i love stretching this data

you see the galaxy starting to punch through

looks excellent as well

[naive fox]

I mean, maybe you did, I forgot the spikes will remain after continuum subtraction, but with how pink the core is, it looks a lot like when broadband signal that leaked into the narrowband channels gets added to the broadband data

I do highly suggest that everyone does decon to this data

even if it's the old fashioned way and not BlurX

because RC data benefits very well from decon

it's the secret superpower that unlocks these scopes

of course the painful part about processing such high resolution data is all of these unresolved stars

that just show up as a weird looking pattern, makes it look like a bad noise pattern but they are stars and not noise

I don't think I ever will be able to fix the corners/ the embossed vignette though because of how aggressive the cut off is from the Apex-L

mono is crazy like this

you get all this H-alpha without having to go for it on its own

[tender zinc]

Is this any better?

[naive fox]

The H-alpha is over saturated relative to the rest of the galaxy but it generally looks better subtracted.

The color balance in the core is intact as well.

[tender zinc]

yeah idk how to not oversaturate Ha when adding L to the image, still gotta learn how to do LRgbHa properly to this day

[naive fox]

Well this is a pretty good set of data to learn with.

Though im not sure how you are over saturating it.

Add the H-alpha in after doing the LRGB part of the image then and see what happens.

That's how I composed the original image.

Screen it in though.

[naive fox]

this is a fairly lazy run

there's a lot I'd do differently for the final image

[hollow skiff]

if most of the stars are red dwarfs then why is the galaxy blue?

[tender zinc]

hmmm i'm combining Ha before Lrgb

i do RGB-Ha-Oiii composure

then i process everything

then i process L separetly

then i do Lrgb composure

what should i do instead?

[naive fox]

we can barely see the red dwarf stars right next to us in our own neighborhood

if you scale that way up, there's no way you would see those super dim stars with all of the blue giants that outshine them to an exponentially higher degree

it's quite simple

red dwarf stars are incredibly dim, blue giants are extremely bright

they outshine the sun by 10 to 1 or something

baseline

[hollow skiff]

ohhh

makes sense

fr

[supple ore]

Saving for later

[waxen apex]

How about adding IR data for the red giants?

[naive fox]

I was hoping to @ you for this or my M16

[naive fox]

I maybe could possibly

You can already see a ton of red giants though

All of the tiny red dots are red giants.

Doing more work on the RC tonight because my test last night was a failure.

[waxen apex]

I really need to invest in a Baader i' filter

[naive fox]

Id like to get one a lot better in quality than my current 2"

I really like the antlia 685 ir pass

It doesnt have much of a focus shift from luminance

[supple ore]

How about both

[hollow skiff]

my take on it

[tender zinc]

seems like something went wrong while adding ha

[naive fox]

Ngl for you guys using Siril, I dunno if you do everything in there or what, but I can tell you that Siril does a pretty poor job as far as adding to or mixing up channels goes. If you take your RGB work into something like Gimp, Affinity Photo, or Photoshop, learn the layout a bit, and practice, you can layer narrowband into your broadband seamlessly without the problems that Siril will cause.

I think the only option you have in siril is pixel math and I think that without a well thought out equation being used to add narrowband to broadband, the results will always be sub par, leaving more to be desired.

[tender zinc]

i've never ran into a problem while narrowband composing rgbha images

well

only when i was bad at it

then i got used to most things

[hollow skiff]

oh yea fr

but there are some scripts tho

[naive fox]

Ive looked through all of them and they're all OSC oriented.

They dont vibe with mono data at all.

[hollow skiff]

yea fr

i use pixel math tho

but it converts the file to 16bits

[tender zinc]

i'll probably try again

[tender zinc]

now thats muuuch better to me

@naive fox thoughts?

[drifting pebble]

Ha is clipped still

[tender zinc]

way too much stretched?

[drifting pebble]

looks oversaturated rather than overstretched

that oversaturation could be a product of overstretching the continuum substracted Ha but idk

[tender zinc]

hmmm i did in fact unsaturate the ha separetly so that it didnt have this issue

mb wasnt enough

and i see what u mean now

next atempt i'll try to make it better

again lol

[naive fox]

this sort of stuff and the overall color balance is extremely sus

these look like theyve had the luminance sucked out of them and had too much color injected

[tender zinc]

bruh yeah fr, but like how do i fix it?

[naive fox]

how did you combine the narrowband with the broadband?

[tender zinc]

continuum sub

then pixelmath to add it

[naive fox]

yeah pixel math is why

pixel math is a flat blanket solution

you have no control over how it gets mixed into the broadband aside from whatever parameters you use

that's why I say screening is the best option

ive always hated my results with pixel math

i gave up on it after my first m 33 project

[tender zinc]

hmmm like the photoshop right?

i think i can use it but i'll look for alternatives.

[naive fox]

yes or gimp or affinity photo

plus you can use masking to preserve the background

[tender zinc]

ngl tho i really like what pixelmath does. not this tho

[naive fox]

you can use curves and histogram to control how much, and where the narrowband is introduced

[tender zinc]

wdym? like mask the screening? didnt know this was a thing

[naive fox]

pixel math doesnt give you that power, you are left to guess and often something goes wrong

[tender zinc]

yeah fr

[naive fox]

I dont know exactly what is going on here

did you add the narrowband to the individual color channels before RGB combination, or after RGB combination, before you added luminance?

maybe i know

[tender zinc]

neither do i, maybe its a Ha-Oiii artefact that pixelmath creates when its strong in both

[naive fox]

you can screen using a mask to determine what gets put in and what doesnt

i masked out all of the background noise in my original process because i couldnt get denoise to play nice

then i used curves to control how bright the nebulae were

[tender zinc]

RGB combination then pixelmath to only R then only to B, and only at the end i added the L, usually the last step

[naive fox]

i masked out the brightest parts of the brightest nebulae too to preserve the detail inside

so NGC 604 and the other bright ones were still crystal clear and not blown out

[tender zinc]

yeah fr

[naive fox]

ohhhhhhh yeah

[tender zinc]

might try it

its gimp u use or photoshop it self?

[naive fox]

first you need to add H-alpha to red only

Oiii to both green and blue

but adding those before adding luminance is why they look drained

mix them in after the broadband is an LRGB image

[tender zinc]

but how do i do this? do i need to process Ha and Oiii before adding then to a processed LRGB image?

[naive fox]

the reason why all of the nebula are a dark blue/magenta is because you are leaving green out completely

[naive fox]

yes

[tender zinc]

aaah

[tender zinc]

geez

[naive fox]

another reason why pixel math for this sucks imo

[tender zinc]

but should i continuun sub before or after process?

[naive fox]

adding it in the linear phase is a disaster

[tender zinc]

yeah fr

[naive fox]

continuum sub after youve done the DBE and other prep work but before you do any denoising or decon or sharpening or stretching

you need the rawest form of the data for an accurate subtraction

[tender zinc]

ok man

i'll try it just now

ty

[naive fox]

oh and if it helps

i like to make an HOO image of the galaxy using the continuum subtracted channels BEFORE i do any stretching and adding to the broadband

that way it makes it a little easier to tell how far you've stretched the narrowband, and you can make blanket adjustments if your pixel math and/or screening adds too much or too little of the narrowband

it's a little tedious, somewhat time consuming, but the results speak for themselves.

[tender zinc]

do u know what i did wrong? seens like the core got some ha in it

[naive fox]

closer but it looks flat

did you dbe this?

[tender zinc]

yeah

[naive fox]

hmmmm

it might have been over aggressive on the BG

[tender zinc]

yeah, i kinda stoped the processing after i saw there was ha in the core

[naive fox]

it introduced splotches that arent there

[naive fox]

i think the core was under subtracted or something

[tender zinc]

mb it was pointers at stars mb

i wasnt carefull enough to check 1 by 1

[naive fox]

are you adding the Oiii or only H-alpha?

[tender zinc]

both

[naive fox]

hmmmm

the Oiii is definitely under done

[tender zinc]

but just a lil oiii cuz it was blowing up some of the narrowband nebulas

[naive fox]

the H-alpha doesnt seem to have been subtracted correctly

[tender zinc]

mb the ha was overstretched

[naive fox]

could be

you sure there are no DBE samples on or near the core of the galaxy or the galaxy in general?

[tender zinc]

no i use a border only method

samples only in the sides of the image

[naive fox]

hmmmm

i think the other problem is that the galaxy is flat

theres no contrast

the H-alpha may have more contrast, brighter core dimmer outer arms

enough to where the H-alpha is over powering the core

[waxen apex]

@naive fox Any thoughts?

don't say anything about NGC604... i can see that i messed it up XD

i forgot to subtract the Ha from the R channel

[tender zinc]

did u denoise it?

looks quite good but i see many noise

[waxen apex]

I did, but didn't go overboard with it

[tender zinc]

hmmm ok

[naive fox]

Bruhhhhh

[waxen apex]

[naive fox]

Did you remove the stars?

[waxen apex]

Yeah

[naive fox]

You killed the entire galaxy by doing that.

I dont see a single star in M33

The colors are a bit deep fried but I dont know how to explain it.

[waxen apex]

Yeah, imma redo it

I'm not happy with the reaults

[hollow skiff]

imma reattempt it lol

[slender egret]

hmm

atleast this is clean

[slender egret]

more blue

[hollow skiff]

how do u get the background so dark?

[slender egret]

wdym

just increase the black point

[hollow skiff]

how to do that in GHS? 💔 💔

[hollow skiff]

ur using pix or siril?

[slender egret]

pixinsight

and for siril you cant do it in ghs

just use histogram transformation

id suggest only using ghs for the final stretch for some extra hdr and not the entire stretching process

[naive fox]

https://tenor.com/view/monster-versus-vs-alien-monster-vs-alien-gif-16037253809360562033

[slender egret]

what is it

[hollow skiff]

ohhh

aight

ty for advice 😊

imma try it out

[slender egret]

yw

[naive fox]

https://tenor.com/view/hehe-gif-1840159130613519810

[naive fox]

the way the nebula folds into the spiral arm

[naive fox]

something introduced a bunch of fake stars in your image

a lot of those points don't exist

[slender egret]

hmm i see

i dont really care though

it looks nice

[naive fox]

alright I over denoised it a little more than I liked, now I'm happy

[hollow skiff]

aight is this attempt better?

i dont think that last time the problem was siril

[hollow skiff]

oh yea aggressive denoise does that lol

idk how to solve the star problem tho

[naive fox]

there's not a reason to denoise this image that much though

[naive fox]

you dont

ignore them

[hollow skiff]

aight 😊

[naive fox]

I did not provide the data that would let you guys fix them

[hollow skiff]

sometimes it looks smoother lol

[hollow skiff]

ohh

like a saperate star mask?

[naive fox]

kind of

the only way I've been able to come up with is a tedious and time consuming method of "reconstructing" the stars in a layer based editor

there's not any other way I know of

[hollow skiff]

oh boy

i am new to ts lol idk how it works but sounds tuff

layers like wavelets?

[hollow skiff]

welp i learned new thing from this data tho

its really peak

[naive fox]

layers and selective masking

if you look up how people used to do HDR in like 2022 and before, it's basically doing that

[hollow skiff]

ohhh

i see

i kinda used to do masking in photoshop

like color range thing

[supple ore]

@naive fox heres my process, HaOIIILRGB, was super sick data! such high res! makes me wanna do something similar with M31 when it comes around

[naive fox]

I'm going to add more onto it this year

I really like everything about this framing, resolution, overall sharpness, etc. and I want the narrowband to be a little bit deeper

it's just deep enough that it's testing a lot of the really cool, small narrowband details but not deep enough for those details to have the same clarity as the brightest parts

[tender zinc]

WOOW

[chilly nova]

wooo that's clean as

[naive fox]

Absolutely.

It's my favorite process so far.

[chilly nova]

u gon get meganerd soon?

[naive fox]

I doubt it. 😭

[bitter quarry]

@naive fox

[thorny oyster]

that process has some strange artifacts

[naive fox]

no

not his fault

that's in the data itself

if you read the full description I wrote, you would know it was from my dew heater

[thorny oyster]

ohhhh ok

[tender zinc]

WHERE

WHERE DATA

WHY DID IT DISAPEAR

@naive fox I NEED DATAA

[hollow skiff]

i deleted it too 💔

[naive fox]

@tender zinc @hollow skiff sorry, I deleted the files cause i needed space but Ive reuploaded now

[tender zinc]

Yayyy Tkx

i'll download them and i can get them on my drive if u want

then i can send the link for everyone here

[naive fox]

no it's fine rn

[tender zinc]

lmk if u need some for a lil time i have 1tb free

[tender zinc]

I just love this dataa

not my best process tho

i'm very tired lol

how can i get rid of the purple on the bg?

background neutral doesnt work and neither does dbe

[naive fox]

that's coming from the H-alpha

the background isn't purple on its own unless you SCNR'd it

getting rid of it is tricky because you want to keep the faint nebula while nuking the high bg

i did a very careful dance of screening and black clipping the narrowband until i got a good blend

Im trying to think of some better ways to do it

[hollow skiff]

lower only the red and blue channels a bit

[tender zinc]

no, its cuz i saw some green on the img, so instead of SCNR i did lower green histogram, so the image overall is less greenish

[tender zinc]

i dont like SCNR its pretty rare when i use it

[hollow skiff]

ikr

i used to love spam scnr for some reason

[tender zinc]

lol

[hollow skiff]

idk how i managed to do so bad 💔

wait lemme do it again

idk if its better or worse lmao

[tender zinc]

Just dbe bruh

or crop tbh

lots of Oiii and Ha tho

[naive fox]

Good

It's the H-alpha background then.

It's higher/stronger than the broadband so it largely dominates after you introduce it with the rest of the image.