Thor's Helmet

Wow, love it John @connor231, thanks for sharing !

Mabula

@connor231, nice Thor's Helmet 👍 , CS Martin

Thanks @mabula-admin, @artem for the kind comments.

I thought I might describe how I created the synthetic luminance, as it is a new technique - for me at least. Might be useful for others.

I started with a normal (drizzled) integration, producing stacked files for each filter (lrgbho). Then I cleared APP and loaded the luminance, Ha and Oiii stacked files as if they lights and told APP that they were all Luminance. Then I stacked these three files using the "maximum" integrate setting (rather than "average" or "automatic") - resulting in the maximum value for each pixel. This gave me a high quality Luminance stack that was very easy to denoise and sharpen. Then I just layered this onto a "rgbhoo" file from the rgb combine tool and it needed very little extra processing. I'm not describing the extra steps where I separated the stars and added them back at the end.

I used to sometimes create a synthetic luminance by selecting "integrate per channel and all" under "multi-channel/filter options", but I always worried that this would average down pixels that were bright in one filter and dark in another. This method seems to work better, although perhaps not for every target.

I'm guessing this technique might even work well for a osc camera, ie by separating the rgb channels and doing a "max" integration to produce a luminance file. I might experiment with that, although I only use osc for widefield.

JC