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Not sure what has been going on here of late. Here is the scenario, but I'm not seeing this with normal Emission and Reflection Nebula. Just this Dark Nebula for some reason.
I went to a Bortle Class 3 dark site last night and did 40X300s Light Frames of the Dark Shark nebula. The image below are all the 40 lights with all the calibration frames included.
My Gear was a Meade 70mm Series 6000 Quadruplet, two years old now, with a fairly new ASI294MC Pro Cooled camera. Using an IR-Cut filter, Was using two Dew Zappers, one on the Main OTA and the other on my guide scope. Moisture was not a factor last night. It was cool and dry...!
Guiding was superb at an average of 0.71", outside temperature was 52 degrees F, very cool. The sky was excellent, crystal clear, with no interference at all other than your normal atmosphere one has to image through. Object was about 40 degrees off the horizon.
I did a quick process in the field just to see how it looked after about 10 light frames. Lots of hazy white looking stuff again, like I got when I was doing this in my back yard. I'm trying to figure out what is causing this? Could hardly see the stars.
Here is this mornings screen shot of it at home.
40 Lights, 20 Darks, 40 Bias, and 40 Flat frames which I made from NINA, using the Flats Tool. I did the Dark frames, and Bias frames on APT. Not sure if that mattered or not.
In this screen shot here, is this normally under the above conditions, what this should look like? I was thinking I should be getting a cleaner and darker background. There was no light pollution either. None that would cause this. Your opinion please.
Thanks,
Rod
I'm not even sure if I am doing the light pollution tool the correct way. This is how I've been doing it. Trying to shove out all these gradients away to the other side. Putting in 1-2 squares at a time in the dark portions slowly moving it to to the right. Do I remove the yellow and red squares? or just leave them? Some pointers please...
Correct me if I'm doing this all wrong. I don't seem to be making any progress with my images lately.
Thank you,
Rod
To me, the first image with the white haze, looks like it's not corrected with flats. You can see the dust spots in it as well still. So I think you're looking at the vignetting of the setup there.
The light pollution needs a different approach yes, you start with stretching the result to the max, saturation as well. Then you identify 5 spots around the image for background and place them (they can be small ones). You check what that does, then you slowly add 2-3 more towards areas that are problematic, not directly on top. Check again, repeat the process. Placing them so close together doesn't really help as APP has a rigid modelling of gradients, so if the gradient is indeed a true gradient, then it should be able to correct them with not too many boxes.
I used the NINA software Flats tool, last two times. Maybe i should just make all of the calibration frames using the same software. APT is normally what I use.
I'll make another set of flats and try this again. The sides of all of these past few Dark Shark images seem to have the sides only looking darker that the rest of the image. Tope and bottom look the same, whitish film.
I got most of the white looking stuff out, but it took almost an hour chipping away at it..
Thanks again
Rod
@rockinrod It is really important to shoot lights and darks or flats and dark flats with the same software. So if you shoot flats with NINA then you need to take the dark flats with NINA as well. Same for lights. If you use APT for the lights then the darks need to be taken with APT as well. Combining when shot with different software may work but usually doesn't.
Yep, that's what I will do. Just thought I would give NINA a try to see how they worked out. Guess they dod not.
Thanks,
Rod
To clarify on the stretch. Is this done in the drop down menu, next to that Red Square with the ? in it
Or at the top right side on those sliders under the Histogram? I do not use those B and W knobs much, should I?
Rod
Next to the red square indeed (if you click that, you get more info btw on that panel). Just pull it down and select 30%.
Yeah, I was thinking that, just wanted to be sure I was doing it right. Looking better now.
Thanks
Rod
