Re: M101 - difficulty processing
Posted: Thu Mar 25, 2021 5:20 am
Hi,
Acquiring signal of low surface brightness objects is daunting at the best of times, but with the moon out that becomes really hard (the moon's light can be subtracted by Wipe, but the noise component of that signal cannot!). This is one of the reasons why most AP'ers wait for the moon to disappear.
As others said, (better?) calibration frames will help a lot here - there is some strong horizontal banding visible that prevents real celestial detail from being brought out.
The Wipe module can clean up some of the calibration issues, but it is always preferable you fix these things during acquisition/pre-processing, rather than in post. That will always yield much better results, while you won't learn much from the specific hacks/workarounds you have to employ for one particular flawed dataset. That time learning specific hacks, tweaks and workarounds is better spent trying to improve your acquisition (though I can show you if you really want!) and working on (and learning) things that you can use every time across all datasets.
Pretty cool though - you captured a lot of other faint fuzzies, even at 20s subs.
Acquiring signal of low surface brightness objects is daunting at the best of times, but with the moon out that becomes really hard (the moon's light can be subtracted by Wipe, but the noise component of that signal cannot!). This is one of the reasons why most AP'ers wait for the moon to disappear.
As others said, (better?) calibration frames will help a lot here - there is some strong horizontal banding visible that prevents real celestial detail from being brought out.
The Wipe module can clean up some of the calibration issues, but it is always preferable you fix these things during acquisition/pre-processing, rather than in post. That will always yield much better results, while you won't learn much from the specific hacks/workarounds you have to employ for one particular flawed dataset. That time learning specific hacks, tweaks and workarounds is better spent trying to improve your acquisition (though I can show you if you really want!) and working on (and learning) things that you can use every time across all datasets.
Pretty cool though - you captured a lot of other faint fuzzies, even at 20s subs.