Official StarTools support forum

Hi Henry, First: try to find a cheap but decent fixed focus lens instead of the zoom. Old manual focus lenses are pretty cheap and may be fitted with a Bathinov mask to focus using Life mode & focus assist magnification. I own a Pentax 300 mm f4 which is not APO grade but OK for wide fields. A good ...

Hi Henry, as Mike suggested, this is tot a really bad WIPE result. In a bortle 2 area, You'll get a lot of Shot noise, as this is correlating with signal strength. Note that WIPE will remove the gradient but NOT the gradient's shot noise! So more background light means more shot noise. The SNR howev...

Hi Dietmar, I think NBA is indeed not designed to move back and forth in the flow. I think having played around with it a bit You can almost use it blindly. In many scenarios, the ROI needs to be defined new, because the Autodev ROI is pertaining the global stretch for all of the object'd dynamic ra...

Hi Henry, I own a 77mm IDAS LPS-P2 filter, which is a broadband LP filter, great for Luminance. Mounted in front of the Lens, the filters only work good above F3.5 or so which should be ok with Your doubler. If Your Lens is F2.8 I'd recommend to stop down a bit to avoid nasty banding. I wonder if an...

Hi Max, How are You aquiring & process the Duoband datasets? I found these work nicely as Luminance files for (especially in light-polluted areas or for faint nebulosity within busy starfields.) But I need to fulfill several requirements for good results: 1) The Duoband Stack (Luminance) has its own...

Hi Troy, this is probably a pretty good idea... many modules in ST ( I think including AutoDev) prevent clipping or have special tools to recover highlights ( like "Highlight Repair" in Color. However, I think for this local M31 core part we should be OK, because what You asked for is already Implem...

Hi Mike, congrats to the nice image! I tried to capture M31 this year as well, but due to cloudy weather in Central Europe I had no luck so far. My field of view is similar to Your image and I get Your point. In fact, the very outer (weak) spiral arms actually do not fit at all. Maybe one can work a...

Hi Peter, I also miss Reveal DSO Core in 1.8 HDR and that is a very important step in my workflow. As per inofficial manual / Guy's User note, there is a way to achieve the old V1.7 HDR settings in HDR 1.8.... : Mimicking the Reveal DSO Core preset, as per reduce Context Size, and only set Shadow De...

Hi fmeiresco, I think Your images are quite appealing for this challenging target.... Have You ever tried to capture with duoband (Ha /O-III) lights and load their stack into Luminance? This pushes back the stars vs the nebula so Navi will be less prone to saturate. Then for color, create another st...

Hi Sven, I'd recommend AutoDev, as it optimizes the global stretch against the ROI rather than applying a fixed "film" dynamic response. However, finding a good ROI on M31 might be tricky, as it is a challenging HDR object for sure. My best attempts were vertical rectangles which included the core, ...