This is initial, interim data, for the February challenge on CN, all taken with the L-eNhance filter. I racked up all of 2 hours integration from my first night, spending a lot of time getting situated first. The second night I fought winds and bad seeing, but ultimately got 2 hours out of that also that I decided to add in. Except for the truly awful subs which were discarded.
I may or may not rack up more L-eNhance time. The month is half over, and at the moment the moon is rather close to target. When that clears I want to start adding some data that will be first light with my new SII filter.
Rig is a 6" Orion f/4 Newtonian, MPCC Mk III, f/s Nikon D5300, on a belt modded HEQ5 Pro. Acquisition through BYN. Subs were 240s at ISO200. Flats taken for each session using a new exposure method, and a master ISO200 bias was used. All fed into DSS and stacked per ST guidelines.
In initial processing, my OIII channels were showing a strong left-sided gradient, and for Wipe to handle it I felt I was having too much of the Ha channel impacted. Or so it looked like. As I was playing around with it anyway for potential stacking purposes, I opened my DSS file in Siril and used the RGB split to quickly write out 3 new FITS. I composed the R into ST as mono and, after cropping the edges, ran an independent lighter Wipe. I then composed the G and B as (2xG)B, (GB)(GB), mono, in order to match crop and then run a stronger Wipe to clean up that gradient. Finally those results were composed as bicolor into R-Ha and G-OIII, and not as OSC/DSLR as the 2xG was already taken into account.
Then just processed through (including Wipe again, but with the settings now pretty much all zeroed out), and it seemed to allow for better detail and a lot cleaner data to work with.
This version is in the H(H+O)O gold/blue. Am looking forward though to seeing how much sulfur I can capture and what kind of SHO image can be created out of it. Or at least SHOHb, since it's only an L-eNhance not an L-eXtreme.
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- Rosette 4h split wipe ST8 1A.jpg (485.32 KiB) Viewed 2280 times
But I didn't come away empty-handed. I learned that direct moonlight into the Newt will bounce around in there and make its way to the camera. No baffling in these things.
Even beyond whether I should be fiddling with weighting like that, the fact that it was post-tracking/processing means that when those ST modules were doing their thing, they contemplated and used a different luminance combination. Could doing this change after the fact produce artifacts or flaws? I wonder if I would be better served to alter the relative Synth L weighting at the outset, in Compose, and how that result would then pan out. I suppose I will have to try!