Description

My first really successful imaging session, nothing went wrong, clouds didn't roll in the moment that I got everything working.

I've had a number of goes at processing this image, none of which I was fully happy with. In the end I split the image into a full resolution mono image and a binned colour image and processed them separately so that I could work separately on maximizing detail in the mono image and reducing noise in the colour one. I then recombined them at the end of the process.

Equipment:

iOptron CEM25P mount

Skywatcher ED80 DS Pro

Sony a6300 camera

ZWO ASI 120MM-S Guide Camera

Raspberry Pi 3 running Astroberry for capture and guiding

Acquisition:

Night of the 9th of January 2019

31x 300secs dithered lights @ ISO 400 (155 total mins)

42 darks

30 flats

300 bias

Pre-Processing:

dcraw conversion script to ensure no white balancing

Stacked in DSS

Main Image Processing in Star Tools:

Luminance image processed to bring out detail:

Crop

Develop

Filter

Life - Isolate

Denoise

Magic - Tighten stars

RGB image processed to reduce noise:

Bin 50%

Crop

Develop

Filter

Denoise

L and RGB images combined in Layer module - I had to resize the RGB image back to the original dimensions as I prefered the result from the Layer module over the LRGB module, but the images must be the same size.