UPDATE FROM MABULA
I have had a very rough 2 months unfortunately health wise. I was struck 3x in a row with bacterial infections. The second infection occurred  after a routine hospital checkup and I became very sick. I had to rest and take a lot of antibiotics. Once I was recovering and restarting work 1 month ago, I again became sick. The infection was not yet gone, so even more antibiotics and rest was needed. Needless to say, it took a lot of my energy and I needed a lot of rest.
Finally, the infection is really gone and my energy is coming back step-by-step now and I have started work again. I am terribly sorry to have kept you waiting for support. I will address all outstanding questions and e-mails step-by step and will be on the forum daily from today.
APP 2.0.0-beta47 will come soon as well, a lot of work was already completed before I became very ill, so the release is also nearly ready for you. Beta47 will be much faster actually. Many workflows will be more than 2x faster, mosaics can even be 10x faster than before because registration really received a major boost... all compared to beta46. Â Before I release it, I will make sure that everything is working properly and then I will release it.
Hello,
I am trying to improve my calibration scheme, now producing master darks and flats for all gain settings that I've been using so far with my camera (ASI385MC).
When averaging the dark frames, should I use 'no rejection' or can I use e.g. a MAD rejection? I tried both, and I understand that the number of hot pixels and the high-end distribution is different for both cases. But I don't understand why the median value is also different. For example, with gain=150 I get a median value of 4 with rejection, and 6 without rejection. For gain=300, I get again 4 with rejection, but 11 without. Which one is correct, and more importantly, which method should I use to calibrate my flats?
Also, the bad pixel maps look quite different when I run with / without rejection. I have read in another thread that _long_ darks should be used to compute bad pixel maps, which is not my case here since I took the darks with same exposure time as the flats. Does this mean that I can't use these to derive a bad pixel map?
Â
Cheers,
Fred
First of all, darks with the same exposure time as the flats are more like bias frames with potentially some extra hot pixels. They are good to calibrate the flats with, but not for your regular images. So it's best to use a very long exposure dark for the bad pixel map, but if you don't have that, use the longest you have (which usually is 5-10 min depending on your light frames exposure time) + calibrated flats and bias. You can then use the bad pixel map almost indefinitely.
For extra info on how to create them, I'd advise a look at this video: https://www.astropixelprocessor.com/data-calibration-and-integration-the-pelican-nebula/
At about 2 min, things start with the data.
