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You don't always need to go all the way to 16-bit tranches - play around and see what you like best. Pay attention both to the bright stars and to the main subjects (galaxies in this case).

Up to 17.5 hours. Not different from the 14-hour version, of course. Finally decided to stop trying to add time so I can use that time on other projects.

So here, at last, is an astrobin link: https://astrob.in/2s0uky/0/

NGC_3180_151x120s_1600_crop.jpg The "Little Pinwheel" is a lovely face-on, unbarred spiral near mu Ursa Major. Stellarium calls it NGC 3180, but if you search in Stallarium for NGC 3184 it takes you to the same place. Wikipedia says that NGC 3180 refers to an Ha region within NGC 3184. This is the ...

I'll toss some stars in here, too. Maybe we can make this a generic open cluster thread... In this case, I used some time while waiting for proper astro darkness to image a semi-randomly chosen open cluster, NGC 2281 (the "Broken Heart" cluster). 45 minutes total from two consecutive nights. NGC_228...

Quite worth sharing (it's called STAR Tools, after all!). I'm shooting ~ 1/2 hour of an open cluster (the Broken Heart Cluster) right now, while I wait for full darkness. I think your stars look lovely. The nicely saturated cores and diffraction spikes give them a great look. Your aggressive reducti...

Back with a new rendition. (how many years will it take for this one to be "done"?) Added some more time, up to ~14 hours now. We're just getting into the season where it's conveniently positioned in the sky, so hopefully even more to come. Also a new processing approach - another use for processing...

I started with ~5 hours of L-Ultimate duoband. Then I shot a couple of hours of straight OSC and was surprised by two things: how bright the nebula is in broadband, and the fact that there's a couple of reflection regions that get lost in all the typical yellow/orange + sky blue narrowband images. S...

Out of curiosity, I downloaded a linear fits from the CN "Process my data" thread. The image as processed by the photographer in PI was an astrobin Top Pick, I believe. With a simple ST workflow: Wipe (using *very* minimal settings, as the data were collected under extremely dark skies), Optidev, SV...

The gain (or ISO) should be set to the value that corresponds to perfect 1:1 counting of electrons as pixel brightness increases. Is the reason for that to have the noise distribution be reasonably Gaussian (and does that refer to only read noise)? How important is that, compared to having less noi...

Alex, here is the log