Joe, Thanks for the info. I will try and retrace your steps. Jim --- On Thu, 2/26/09, Joe Bauman <josephmbauman@yahoo.com> wrote: From: Joe Bauman <josephmbauman@yahoo.com> Subject: Re: [Utah-astronomy] HH from Patrick's data To: "Utah Astronomy" <utah-astronomy@mailman.xmission.com> Date: Thursday, February 26, 2009, 9:21 AM Patrick, I agree about the stars. If you blow up a section of a wider view you get fatter stars. Often the smaller view will have more detail. If I made a zillion-piece mosaic that covered as much a single shot from Tyler's telescope, it would look similar. So I am not going after big objects. I'll shoot things like planetaries and galaxies that aren't enormous. Jim, Maybe the difference is in the clear data. I took each of the clear photos and subtracted the dark from it. Then I used a "remove bad pixel" feature of MaxIm DL to get rid of bad pixels, some of which were in more than one of the frames. The feature keeps a map of bad pixels so you can apply it to other views from the same session. Next I picked out the clear that seemed to show the best range and used an "equalize screen stretch" button to make all the clears about the same. Finally I combined them using various methods to see which was the best. I think the best one turned out to be taking a medium of the images. I did the same sort of thing for the colors, except that one -- I think it was green -- had only one image so I didn't combine it with another green. Finally I combined LRBG without playing with curves because it seemed about right as it was. My last operation was to adjust the brightness and contrast with MaxIm DL. Best wishes, Joe --- On Thu, 2/26/09, Patrick Wiggins <paw@wirelessbeehive.com> wrote: From: Patrick Wiggins <paw@wirelessbeehive.com> Subject: Re: [Utah-astronomy] HH from Patrick's data To: "Utah Astronomy" <utah-astronomy@mailman.xmission.com> Date: Thursday, February 26, 2009, 2:01 AM Very nice Joe, Tyler sent me his version after what he called "a relatively quick processing job" and while his colors are a bit different from your version the overall sharpness and appearance is quite similar to yours. You have come a long way with your processing skills. Now if you'd just get your observatory built so you could start taking more data of your own... (that was an unsubtle hint, BTW.) Joe, as I've long suspected, one of the reasons Tyler gets such small, pinpoint-like stars is he is using a much shorter focal length than you or I. I came to this conclusion by taking his version of my latest Horsehead and shrinking it down to the same size as Tyler's jaw dropping shot of the HH and surrounding region. I then placed it next to Tyler's original and got a pretty good match. Still not quite as good as his, but pretty darn close. http://users.wirelessbeehive.com/~paw/temp/hhcomp.jpg patrick On 25 Feb 2009, at 18:46, Joe Bauman wrote:
Here's my slapdash effort to assemble Patrick's data -- obviously I didn't pick out some of the bad pixels:
http://www.slas.us/gallery2/main.php?g2_itemId=1141
I didn't use flats because it seems fine without them. -- jb
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