Combining Masters? Further Post-Processing?

@rockstarbill,

Thank you for your question, combining multi-channel data can be done in different ways.

1. Since you have already created the master, just load the masters as lights and register them in 4), then at the bottom of 4) save the registered frames. They will be saved in you work directory with the -reg.fits extension. You can load these directly into the RGB combine tool to make a composite. As a bonus: if you normalize the masters as well in 5) and save these in 5) then they intitial composite will probably be better. The normalization makes your masters bettter compatible. This really helps is if you combine L with R, G,B or narrowband with broadband channels.
2. Load all frames of all channels, perform 3) analyse stars, then in 4) choose a reference, usually you want to pick one of your better L frames. Register all data to this reference. Then after registration you have two options. Either normalize all data to the reference, or normalize per channel. If you choose to normalize per channel, only select the frames of 1 of the channels (deselect the others). Use the right-mouse click menu to do this quickly. After normalization of all frames or per channel,  integrate the selected frames per channel to create the masters. If you choose to normalize per channel, before integrating the next channel, you will need to select the frames of the new channel and perfrom normalization on those before starting integration.

Method 2) is probably preferred since the data will only be registered once.

Let me know if these steps are clear and if you need more help 😉

Cheers,

Mabula