Official StarTools support forum

OK. All said and done, not an easy target and with an unmodified camera. Don't expect too much in the way of colour and oversaturation begins to distort other features. A personal preference; the green channel could do with trimming back. That smokey grey/blue fringe in M42 is a bit too green.

Hi Richard. Depending on the data, separating the stacked RGB and recombining in the LRGB module, produces an image with much more control over colour saturation. An added benefit appears to be the ability to blur the RGB colour channels reducing colour noise. But I find that combining channels prom...

Here is a very simple command line script for separating an RGB image into R G B L and L* (lightness in LAB) channels = approx 10 seconds on my 8GB system Requires ImageMagick Works in Linux and should/will work in MacOS. I'll investigate a windows version. Update: new version a few posts down 1. Co...

If you have ImageMagick installed, you can extract the RGB channels from your stacked image like so - on the command line. I could write a small utility to do this, if it were useful for Linux/Mac - very quick. convert stack.tiff -depth 16 -separate +channel %d.tiff ...which produces 0.tiff 1.tiff 2...

Lawrence. Any chance you can post the images here or provide links to the images? Not sure I can help, but someone else might be more willing to assist, without wading through hundreds of images to find yours.

Other than an autoguider or one of these - http://qhyccd.com/PoleMaster.html, drift alignment is an option if you can't see the pole. It takes some time to do but is very accurate. There are different methods. An over simplified explanation is, once the mount is roughly aligned, take a one or two mi...

Hi Michele. My interest was comparing results to see what APP is doing, rather than critiquing your work... :D PixInsight manages flat illumination really well. My script produced virtually the same result as APP and I need to work on improving flat correction in the script. Thanks again for sharing...

It was necessary to manipulate flat illumination to get a proper calibrated result. PixInsight does that well but not automatically. DSS and APP likely attempt the same, automagically. With 50% binning I needed a Wipe dark anomoly of 2 - 3 to get a good result. Proper flat illumination is difficult ...

Thanks Michele. That's very generous. I will work with the CR2 files over the weekend. I am very interested in the comparison with DSS /APP.

Michele. Have you by any chance saved this image sets to cloud storage - dropbox or similar? If you have and don't mind sharing, I would like to try preprocessing with my Linux script. Otherwise, no need to go to the trouble of uploading. Just curious...

Rowland