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.
The image of M51 was taken during 3 nights with QHY10 on William-Optics GT71. The total integration time is 14400 seconds. Image processing was performed in the default setting of APP 1069. Adobe Photoshop cc was used for post-processing (noise reduction, curve and clipping). Hoping you will enjoy this as I do. Comments are welcome.
Thank you @oopfan. My exposure for this image is 600 seconds at gain of 0.5 for each sub. I used SGP pro for acquiring these subs while I was sleeping 😉. It still need some more nights for details and clean background, or re-do with a mono ccd in LRGB (if I could afford one 😊Â .
Instead of a mono CCD you might want to purchase a quality 2x focal extender. I ran the specs of your telescope and camera through a "CCD Suitability Calculator". The result is that you are under-sampling. This would explain why your image contains green stars.
Your telescope produces a diffraction disc that does not cover the entire Bayer matrix, so sometimes the disc falls almost entirely on the green filter. A 2x focal extender will solve it at the expense of reducing your field-of-view. You could also experiment with defocusing slightly.
The image of M51 was taken during 3 nights with QHY10 on William-Optics GT71. The total integration time is 14400 seconds. Image processing was performed in the default setting of APP 1069. Adobe Photoshop cc was used for post-processing (noise reduction, curve and clipping). Hoping you will enjoy this as I do. Comments are welcome.
Instead of a mono CCD you might want to purchase a quality 2x focal extender. I ran the specs of your telescope and camera through a "CCD Suitability Calculator". The result is that you are under-sampling. This would explain why your image contains green stars.
Your telescope produces a diffraction disc that does not cover the entire Bayer matrix, so sometimes the disc falls almost entirely on the green filter. A 2x focal extender will solve it at the expense of reducing your field-of-view. You could also experiment with defocusing slightly.
But I think using a 2.0 focal reducer is not a solution , because the F-Ratio will be twice as big, so ligth collection will be 4 times slower.
Probably best is to combine the GT71 with a camera with smaller pixels.
@kijja, did you debayer the data with AAD or did you use either drizzle or Bayer Drizzle integration here? Perhaps another integration method can reduce the artefacts on the stars 😉
Finally, another problem could be that the GT71 slighly has some Chromatic Aberration. If so, this can be solved with the Align Channels option in 2)
I am glad it worked! My first reaction is to solve problems at the telescope instead of applying image processing techniques. It's a lot of "voodoo" -- just kidding but it shows I need to learn more.
