Forums
Astro Pixel Process...
Gallery
M101 with 15cm F/4 ...
 
Share:
Notifications
Clear all

Mar 28 2026 APP 2.0.0-beta40 will be released in 7 days.

It did take a long time to have the work finished on this and it  will have a major performance boost of 30-50% over 2.0.0-beta39 from calibration to integration. We extensively optimized many critical parts of APP. All has been tested to guarantee correct optimizations. Drizzle and image resampling is much faster for instance, those modules have been completely rewritten. Much less memory usage. LNC 2.0 will be released which works much better and faster than LNC in it's current state. And more, all will be added to the release notes in the coming weeks...

Update on the 2.0.0 release & the full manual

We are getting close to the 2.0.0 stable release and the full manual. The manual will soon become available on the website and also in PDF format. Both versions will be identical and once released, will start to follow the APP release cycle and thus will stay up-to-date to the latest APP version.

Once 2.0.0 is released, the price for APP will increase. Owner's license holders will not need to pay an upgrade fee to use 2.0.0, neither do Renter's license holders.

 

M101 with 15cm F/4 - throwing in everything but the kitchen sink

 
Gallery
Last Post by Mabula-Admin 8 years ago
2 Posts
2 Users
1 Reactions
7,141 Views
RSS
 Bart
(@bdeclerc)
Main Sequence Star
Joined: 9 years ago
Posts: 14
Topic starter May 21, 2018 20:49  
 
Using the new multisession/multifilter functionality in APP 1.061 I finally did what I hadn't found the courage to do before - while testing my transportable setup (a 15cm Fotonewton on Celestron Advanced VX mount) I took a lot of data on Messier 101 - mostly from home, but in the end also one night at an Astronomical gathering in the Belgian Ardennes ("RACA" in Neufchateau) where the skies are far better than at home.
 
Using the new multisession/multifilter functionality in APP 1.061 I finally did what I hadn't found the courage to do before - while testing my transportable setup (a 15cm Fotonewton on Celestron Advanced VX mount) I took a lot of data on Messier 101 - mostly from home, but in the end also one night at an Astronomical gathering in the Belgian Ardennes ("RACA" in Neufchateau) where the skies are far better than at home.
 
This gave me 450+ individual light frames in Red,Green, Blue, Luminance and Hydrogen-alfa across 5 different nights, under varying conditions and with the camera rotated 180° half the time - plus a few hundred assorted darks, flats and flatdarks.
 
I threw everything into APP, divided into sensible sets (the darks were globally valid, but some different nights required different sets of flat/flatdarks) and ran with it.
 
In the end, it spit out 5 frames, L, R,G,B and H-alfa - I then restacked L + R + G + B as a single master luminance (using "SNR" to provide the stacking ratio) , then I did an LRGB color combine and an HaLRGB color combine, balanced out the star colours and output DDP'd TIFF files into Photoshop.
 
The main postprocessing (denoising, contrast enhancements) was done on the LRGB, I only recovered some H-alfa to slightly push the H-alfa regions in M101
 
The end result is clearly superior to any of the processings I did on just a subset of data before, and the effort required was far far smaller thanks to the multisession/multifilter support - thanks Mabula!
 
Oh, and the image? Check it out at https://flic.kr/p/27ozWqV
 
The previous attempts can be seen at:


   
Mabula-Admin reacted
ReplyQuote
 Mabula-Admin
(@mabula-admin)
Universe Admin
Joined: 9 years ago
Posts: 5056
May 22, 2018 12:35  

Hi Bart @bdeclerc,

Excellent, the final result looks very nice and I look the amount of H-alpha blending, it shows the active regions well in the galaxy.

Perhaps the overall colors could be a bit more reddish, so the core of M101 becomes somewhat more yellow, but I think this is very close already 😉

If you create a super-luminace form the L,R,G,B channels I would advise against using SNR for integration weights. SNR is a pretty unreliable metric due to deviating gradients between your imaging sessions. Images with bad transparancy and out-of focus images can also become false positives when you use SNR as weights. I would rather go for star shape weights, that will give you the sharpest super luminance. Or use quality weights to have a superluminance optimized for sharpness, noise and stardensity (so good transparancy/seeing) combined.

Thanks a lot for sharing 😉

Cheers,

Mabula



   
ReplyQuote
Forum Jump:
  Previous Topic
Next Topic  
Share: