Setup: AP 6 inch F9 ST 402-ME SG-4 Autoguider CCD Stack Modest contrast/saturation boost in GIMP 28 5min L exposures, 14 for each for RGB Would love any criticism on the dataset: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B9u3R9NUcWHPcnNyTnBkbUhUa1E Are there any obvious silly mistakes (had to use flat from the first day of acquisition, lightbox seems to have dimmed just in last two days)? Didn't do any advanced sharpening etc. is the dataset of sufficient quality that it is worth processing further? EDIT: The stars are awfully blobby. I took a short exposure (30s for L x 20) dataset to try and replace them but it looks out of focus relative to other images here. I noticed that my autofocuser (FLI DF2) doesn't seem focus to precisely the same position between contiguous autofocus runs. If anyone has any ideas if it is a matter of focus/stacking or something else, help would be appreciated.
A bit better. Captured ~10 frames of R, G and B and processed with PI. I have lot of L images, but stars were super bloaty and I couldn't seem to make so that they contributed much useful contrast to the image. Will be running with FocusMax next time to see if things improve.
Cheers Bill. Some crit I've collected and summarized (other than what I've already stated): -Background noise is high and this may be a a problem with acquisition. Could only cool to -10 for most frames for this image and my current master dark (made of about 60 subframes) may need to made with better sampling. Tough to tell these sorts of things. I can go into the darks and blur/denoise but always prefer being more conservative rather than showing daft fudging. -Blue white dwarf in middle looks sort of painted on. I suppose that's true, but looking at some other really nice images I can see the same sort of feature. Always troubling looking for "ground truth" in this realm. -Was hesitant to remove the green cast (I believe there is doubly ionized oxygen in there: https://www.noao.edu/image_gallery/html/im0780.html) but others did and it looked nice.
