Anywhere Is: Andromeda mini

...and my sincere "thank you and farewell" to .tiff intermediates.

It appeared that I'm not the only one who experience misunderstanding between Canon 60D and DeepSkyStacker. And while the fix is (hopefully) on the way, I tried to walk around the problem by converting .cr2 RAWs into Adobe DNG. Success! It will not make my images any better, but it allows me to "bake" them faster :)

The only downside of this processing pipeline is that now I need real flat-field images. My trick with blurring the light frames works no more.

 

Aquisition time (start of a session): JD 2456578.358241 (13.10.2013 00:35:52 MSK)

Image orientation: straight.

Equipment:

Canon EOS 60D (unmodded) with Canon EF-S 60 mm f/2.8 macro USM lens fitted with Baader Planetarium 2" UHC-S filter on Vixen Polarie star tracker mounted on photo-tripod via Manfrotto 410 Junior geared head.

Aperture 21,5 mm

Focal length 60 mm

Tv = 60 seconds

Av = f/2,8

ISO 3200

Exposures: 13 (too few) (plus 10 dark frames (also not enough) and 103 bias frames. No flat-field frames :( )

Processing: images were converted into .DNG format RAWs and stacked in DSS using AAWA method. Final touches in Photoshop.

Note: faster, much faster than with .TIFF. Plus no pain of choosing between linear and sigmoid contrast and no color shifts in resulting image - grey is now grey.

And I have started to collect a library of master offsets/bias frames - will also speed up the further processing.

Done