Official StarTools support forum

Hi Lawrence, StarTools is indeed quite well equipped for lunar photography. Things you will appreciate are the deconvolution (Decon), HDR and wavelet sharpening (Sharp) modules in particular. The best I can recommend is to give the demo a try with some of your data images. For best results, use lin...

I can see that ST could well be 'my' kind of software - but is it suitable for processing images of the moon, and perhaps other non-routine-sky images? I wanted to use ST for procesisng a lunar image but could not find any explanation of the 'sharp' facilty to try enhancing the image. TIA for any co...

Thanks Ivo With my setup, it is not really practicable to swap the LP filter in and out. It is deep within the optical system. I either leave it in or take it out - perhaps for a trial run of a few sessions. I do have some pics taken before it was fitted, though locating them would be time-consuming...

Hi Lawrence, StarTools will attempt to recover color in pixels that have not been overexposed in any of the channels. The "bleaching out" so often seen is an artefact of processing techniques; it is not inherent to the data. Stretching the data as a whole will cause colors to be stretched/compresse...

While I start to learn StarTools I noticed the early paragraph that seems to imply that it is best not to use an LP filter but to use ST to correct the image during processing. Is that a correct interpretation? Until now I have always used an IDAS filter.

TIA

Lawrence Harris

I'm puzzled about a quotation in the colour processing module: "StarTools enables you to keep M42's colour constant throughout, even in its bright core. No fiddling with different exposure times, masked stretching or saturation curves needed. " In M42 the trapezium stars are bleachd out in any norma...

Hello again I am also learning to use DSS! That basic image was my first run with DSS! I have used Maxim DL for many years but I have never mastered it, particularly the guiding. Despite calibration it *always* grabbed a hot pixel and guided on that. I found a workaround but it was very tedious and ...

I am indebted. Many thanks. I will study this.

Lawrence

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B4ZtN-K0mp5WdkJuQ3NEaTZSbGM/view?usp=sharing The file is ~75Mb in size and is a bayered image that has been bias subtracted and comprises 4 images of comet Lovejoy. If anyone is willing to do something with it and post a jpeg with a list of processed steps, that woul...

I wonder whether it is possible for me to post a pre-processed image from DSS and have anyone then do some basic processing with StarTools to show me what can be achieved? I have been working on a few images but have realised that I must be getting things wrong because the 'final' images look poor. ...