Some New InSight.

The month of May was brutal with travel and weather challenges, so no imaging is done. I continue to learn with reading and observing others from afar… vicariously imaging through others and visualizing to improve. Two things that really jumped out at me when integrating the few subs I’d managed accumulate from the outing the month prior were:

  1. I wasn’t getting enough data. I had too few lights and even fewer darks. I had no bias and no flats. This is a skill I need to work on.
  2. My tools were lacking. Deep Sky Stacker wasn’t going to be my long term data integration solution and the 32-bit to 16-bit conversion in Photoshop was a point I was losing a lot of information that needed to be eliminated. 

I applied for and downloaded a trial of the popular and immensely powerful astrophotography toolset PixInsight. Leveraging some really nice video tutorials over at Harry’s Astroshed, I went back to the original 55 sub-frames I took on May 3 of Messier 51 and started completely from scratch. With this same hour worth of RAW data, I was able to produce a much better result. There were significantly more steps in the integration, but it was well worth it. Capturing a glimpse of what can be done with the rudimentary information I had, it really made me want to improve the quantity of the data set and lower the signal to noise for next time around. 

I did the same for the other two targets and feel I can see some improvement in those as well. Wanting to get some feedback and have a place to share my results, I started placing my revisions on Astrobin. My respect for some of these imagers has grown exponentially as I peel back the layers of the onion and see just how little I’ve progressed and how far there is to go. Exciting to be assured!

Messier 81 and 82
Messier 81 and 82

 

Messier 51
Messier 51

 

Messier 65 and the Leo Triplet
Messier 65 and the Leo Triplet

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