15th Feb 2024: Astro Pixel Processor 2.0.0-beta29 released - macOS native File Chooser, macOS CMD-Q fixed, read-only Fits on network fixed and other bug fixes
7th December 2023: added payment option Alipay to purchase Astro Pixel Processor from China, Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, Korea, Japan and other countries where Alipay is used.
I managed to eke out almost four hours of narrowband data on the West Veil last night -- it positioned itself to slide right down the narrow arc of sky visible from my back yard. I was in bed asleep before 11:30! This morning I took the data through bog-simple, default-everything one-click integration in APP, ran the channels through the light pollution tool, combined with HSO 2, calibrated background, and saved the result. Ran that through starnet++ to remove stars, ran the starless image through Topaz Denoise to denoise and sharpen a little, and then off to Photoshop. Still have a backfocus problem, leading to terrible stars in the corners of the original image (e.g., the lower right here). Still, I'm pretty happy.
I left the rig set up and am collecting data on the East Veil as I type. I completely forgot to try APP's star-reducer on last night's data, but will on the East Veil tomorrow.
Tech deets on Astrobin.
That is looking really nice! Slightly grainy in the signal maybe, is that due to topaz maybe?
Maybe? I tried to be super-gentle on the Topaz sliders. My 183 does tend to produce a lot of visible noise, some of which is visible even after integrating 4 hours of data. These are super-mega-blowups of the 52 Cyg region. From the left, the stretched output from APP, the output from starnet++ removal, and output from Topaz. The last definitely loses a bit of detail-defining contrast, which I stretched back into being in Photoshop, doubtless amplifying the remaining noise.
Nice analysis! In the middle I do see artefacts in the bright star, so maybe the settings in starnet need some adjustment?
Probably. I'm running the command-line Python version, which doesn't exactly make it obvious, nor does it encourage experimentation.
