Man, this is super impressive how comfortably you navigate your way through PI and generate such beautiful images. So much to learn, really impressive.

@Aero19612

4 ай бұрын

There’s always something to learn in PixInsight. Very daunting at first, but just take it one step at a time. You don’t have to use every process in the box. Have fun!

Wow, those were flat out stunning, even if those were taken with a mono camera, they would be stunning, but that fact that you got mono quality imaging from a OSC camera, is truly amazing. I had to laugh at our comment about coming back in a couple of days when you started Star Exterminator. It used to take my 4-year-old laptop over an hour to do STX on a 2600MC image using large overlap. However, once I found out how to make the GPU engage, it dropped to 6 minutes! That was with a bare bones nVidia GTX1050 card. I just bought a new laptop with an nVidia 4080 and it rips it out in 35 seconds! Interestingly using the onboard GPU, with the new laptop it only took 4.5 minutes. So faster than my old dedicated GPU.

@Aero19612

4 ай бұрын

Thanks for watching! Yes, I'm very happy with the near-mono image quality I'm getting out of the OSC camera and these dual-band filters. Once upon a time, I did setup the GPU for crunching through the time-intensive calculations. I guess I'm going to cave in and set that up again.

Wow, I didn't expect so strong Hb. This video sold me on that filter. I had it in my mind for a while, now I know what is going to be my next purchase.😊 Thank you

@Aero19612

9 ай бұрын

Great! H-beta is new for me. I was surprised and happy to see its contribution. Hope you enjoy your new filter when it arrives! Thanks for watching!

Very informative video! Great seeing the advancements osc is getting with these new filters.

@Aero19612

8 ай бұрын

Thanks for watching! Yes, I'm very impressed with what these OSC filters let you get away with.

Nice "Stuff", James. Very informative. This gives a great blueprint on how to extract the bandwidths of the dual-band filters from the OSC exposures. I just the other day ordered an Antlia O-III and H-Beta narrow-band filter for my monochrome camera. I am excited to see what this brings. I did have an Optolong H-beta filter but it didn't work properly resulting in huge halos. (I tried it on several targets). For it being Optolong, I was quite disappointed. Of course, these new techniques of extracting the channels from the OSC images lead to questions of needing a monochrome camera and all of its filters.

@Aero19612

9 ай бұрын

Hey Pat. That is surprising/disappointing about the Optolong H-beta. I hope you get better performance from the Antlia filter. I've used it for all of two nights. So far, so good. Monochrome still has its place. More "trouble" than a OSC camera, but better overall image quality/detail. I must say, the convenience of the OSC is attractive. By the way - You've mentioned difficulty focusing your SCT with the Celestron Focus Motor. I ran across this video that refers to the same thing and provides a fix. See 12:56 in kzread.info/dash/bejne/rJh1psuBnaqyoNo.htmlsi=oKyx9M9vO6ckBADT

Fantastic image and beautiful range of colors achieved with this combination of filters! I'd like to see your processing from removing the stars to the final result, which again, is wonderful! Greetings!!

@Aero19612

9 ай бұрын

Haha. I had a lot of the processing in the video but took it out because it was too long. I'll try to make some of those kinds of videos in the future. Thanks for watching, Adriana!

Thanks for taking the time to explain and creating this content I don’t shoot with OSC but found your section on spcc really informative, once I’d worked out I needed to have the image plate solved in pixinsight it was a great addition to my workflow Thanks again Bryan

@Aero19612

8 ай бұрын

Glad you were able to get something out of it! Thanks for watching, Bryan.

Love you process thought. Cant wait to give this a whirl.

@Aero19612

9 ай бұрын

Let me know how it turns out. Thanks for watching.

Wow James, what a great video. Very detailed, as always, and your explanations are very clear and fairly easy for me comprehend. I'm not an experienced PI user and videos like this make me want to start using this app. I've been a little apprehensive about using PI basically because it looks very complicated to a person that has never used it. Even with all the videos I've watched about PI I still feel very intimidated about using it. I know that will go away after I start to gain experience with PI. Anyway, I really enjoyed watching your video. Thank you. Sincerely, Rich Williams Astor, Florida 32102 USA!

@Aero19612

9 ай бұрын

Hi, Rich. Thank you for the kind words. When I started in astrophotography, I had no experience with PI or PhotoShop so I decided to hitch my wagon to the more astrophotography-centric app. It is complicated and daunting at first. There are processes in PI that I've never used. Still others that I'm not using "properly". The only way to climb the learning curve is to jump in and start learning. It's a good (heck, probably great) program. I paid for it once and haven't had to send any more money. Not sure that's the case for PhotoShop. But there are cheap/free photo processing tools out there so that's still an option. You'll find a lot more on-line discussion/instruction with PixInsight. Good luck and thanks for watching!

Great results! I primarily use a mono camera, the ASI2600MM, but have also picked up the color varient of the IMX571 and have been learning to use the color camera. As I have been using mono for so long, I find that I am struggling with using the color camera shooting nebulas, I keep wanting to get to the SHO palette (love those blues and golds) but have not been at all successful. This video has been great in showing me how I can achieve similar results from my color camera to that of my mono camera. Great video! CS!

@Aero19612

5 ай бұрын

Gotta agree with your there - I prefer the SHO palette myself when there's enough SII to grab onto. I also like that Antlia created a filter with SII and H-beta (rather than SII and OIII). I like have the H-beta contribution. I bought my OSC camera mostly for galaxies (with the SCT), but I felt I was missing something when shooting legit SHO targets with just the one dual-band filter. Enjoy!

Outstanding work

@Aero19612

8 ай бұрын

Thanks, Tom!

Great video, James, and very nice to see this combination of the two Antlia filters actually being applied. One question though. Doesn’t the H-beta pretty much track the H-alfa, just at much reduced intensity? If you’re adding the H-beta in your OIII signal, does that not mean you’re mixing Hydrogen with Oxygen? Alternatively you could add the H-beta to your H-alfa signal and correct for their typical relative contributions?

@Aero19612

9 ай бұрын

That's a good question. I would assume that the H-beta and H-alpha are present but at very different concentrations. Or does the H-beta exist more closer to the ionization source and where the Hydrogen is more dense? I'll have to look into that. As for where to add the H-beta, I believe it should be added to the color channel best associated with the emission wavelength rather than the source atom. H-beta falls in the blue/green spectrum and OIII in the green/blue area, so I think it makes more sense to add those channels together rather than put H-beta and H-alpha together just because Hydrogen is the source atom. Thanks for watching!

Wow, OSC with the 2" mounted Antlia ALP-T Dual Band 5nm SII&H-beta Filter right? Amazing processing James. I really like the end product.

@Aero19612

9 ай бұрын

Yes. I'm combining images taken with one dual band filter (the OIII-Ha) with other images taken with another dual band filter (the Hb-SII) to get the SHO color palette. Thanks for watching!

Fantastic video and beautiful images! Not sure if this one was a response of previous comments about adding more 'processing videos' or what, but keep going :) Question: have you tried those (expensive) tri-band filters? At which point OSC makes no sense when adding two or three filters to get 'true' narroband data compared going mono?

@Aero19612

9 ай бұрын

I do have the Antlia TriBand Ultra. I used it for several galaxies (there's a video on it). My objective with this OSC camera and SCT is to "keep" it simple" and just use one filter: ether the Triband for RGB targets or the OIII-Ha for emission nebulae. As it turns out, I felt I was missing the SHO palette, so I decided to trade some simplicity for using the Hb-SII filter. Thanks for watching!

@aleixandrus

9 ай бұрын

@@Aero19612 I mean one of those *narroband* tri-band filters, such as the OPT Triad Ultra Quad-Band filter. I'm just curious, I went mono since my 1st day of astro shooting :)

James, this is a fantastic presentation and walk through on how to combine the data from both filters. Certainly provides an alternative option for those of us with OSC camera's. My next question would be how sharp/detailed is this sollution compared to the output from a SHO mono camera of the same caliber?

@Aero19612

7 ай бұрын

Hi Rob. Thanks for watching. Yes, there are some excellent filters out there for OSC cameras. Well, you definitely lose something on resolution with a OSC vs mono depending on aperture. With my C9.25, I’m probably not losing anything because the RGGB binned “pixel” is still less than the seeing-controlled resolution (Nyquist limit vs Dawes Limit vs Seeing limit). Seeing controls for my skies and a C9.25 SCT. The story changes when you get below about 700 mm focal length and you have a 100 mm aperture. Now, the binned RGGB pixel may hurt somewhat as the color of that pixel comes from debayering whereas a mono system gives the proper color balance for each pixel (half the size of the RGGB “super pixel). For lower apertures and focal lengths (say 350 mm focal length at 80 mm), the aperture (Dawes Limit) takes over. The good thing about the ZWO ASI294MM is that you can use the bin1 mode and recover more resolution for mono systems. Sorry for the complicated answer!

@robb7342

7 ай бұрын

@@Aero19612 James, thanks for this detailed answer. Your insight is greatly appreciated. I'm teatering on moving to mono, but my hobby list is longer than my budget, so I need to make logical choices. I currently have the Askar 107PHQ paired with the 2600MC. I'm looking at the 2600MM with the Antlia 4.5nm SHO filters. Thus, kind of at the edge @ 740mm. From what I've seen thus far, mono generally tends to benefit from overall better sharpness and detail. That being said, the price point it rather significant. Would love to hear your thoughts?

@Aero19612

7 ай бұрын

It’s a convenience VS resolution (+ a little SNR) issue. Your 107PHQ pics would likely benefit from the mono setup. It is costly to go mono and you’ll spend more time with flats and processing, but I like the mono images better than my OSC images (but not by a lot). The 2600 is a 16bit camera and you’re getting great tonal resolution as a result. You’d be buying a filter wheel to accommodate 2” filters so you don’t get vignetting. For me, I have the 1.25” filter wheel and feel “trapped” with cameras that have small enough sensors that don’t get blocked by the filters (no 2600 for me!). In conclusion: if you stay with the MC, then dither and drizzle to get the best resolution that seeing permits. If you go mono, you may not need to dither/drizzle and the nice thing is you’d be buying a filter wheel and filters that will likely work with any camera going forward (unlike me). No obvious answer (sorry).

Hi James, great video! I have the same 2 filters, and have found the addition of Hb does add additional detail, curious if you think there is any advantage to using your method to integrate the Oiii/Hb vs the ImageIntegration process in PI?

@Aero19612

9 ай бұрын

Hi Dan. Thanks for watching! As for combining blue and green data, there are several potential ways to do it. My approach is arguably the simplest. I doubt there would be much benefit using ImageIntegration with just the 4 images I used. I wonder if the different noise levels would cause ImageIntegration to de-rate the noisier Hb-SII images. That's why I used LinearFit to balance the median noise levels. Now, if you want to go to a lot of trouble, you could extract the RGB channels from all of the images, select a reference, and then use batch LinearFit to equalize all of the blue and green images, and then combine them using ImageIntegration. That way, you might get some benefit from noise reduction and outlier rejection. I'm way too lazy for that!

Hi, check Antlia Triband RGB Ultra Filter It has - H-alpha S-II O-III N-II Bands .... All in one filter for OSC cam.

@Aero19612

9 ай бұрын

I did a video on the Antlia TriBand Ultra RGB filter. I was using it to image several galaxies. It's a nice filter. But it won't let you get the SHO palette out of your emission nebulae images because the SII and Ha are combined in the red channel. To do SHO, you need separate images for the SII (goes in the R channel) and the Ha (goes in the G channel). But the TriBand is a great RGB filter that provides a ton of light pollution protection and gives you the Ha in galaxy spiral arms.

I'm curious. How much O3/Ha is there in that nebula, versus the Hb/S2? If there isn't a lot of Hb/S2, don't you need to spend more time imaging with the Hb filter versus the Ha filter to pick up the details you need from that image?

@Aero19612

4 ай бұрын

Hi Brad. I think I had about the same imaging time on Ha/OIII as Hb/SII. But, as is often the case, Ha dominates and you’re lucky to get OIII and maybe SII. I view Hbeta as a “gift” - I get some, great. I never try to match imaging time for OIII and/or Hbeta to get the same detail as I get with Ha. I’m just hoping for some color and I’ll take the detail I get from Ha. The Hbeta is nice because it provides a different version of blue/green than OIII. There are some exceptions, such as when Imaging the Squid and Flying Bat nebula. I really try to get a lot of OIII to pull out the Squid. Always a tough case for Bortle 8 though.

I have the L-Extreme which only passes Ha (656.3) and OIII (500) although it has a 7nm bandpass. do you think that the Antlia (or other brand of) Hb-SII filter would work with this - I think that the 7nm bandpass may need to be close in order to get best results.

@Aero19612

7 ай бұрын

Absolutely. No need to worry about matching bandwidths.

Interesting video. Can you please tell me which one I should buy for visual observations (not astrophotography): a Bresser 102/1000 mm for 300 $ or a TS Optics 70/420 mm ED FLP-51 for 430$ ? I don't know which of the two would have a better performance / resolution. Bigger APOs are just too expensive for me. Other types of telescopes are not an option for me since I don't want to bother with collimation. Thank you!

@Aero19612

8 ай бұрын

I'm not the best person to ask since I don't do visual astronomy. I would guess that a larger aperture scope would be best.

@3dfxvoodoocards6

8 ай бұрын

@@Aero19612 thank you for your answer.

I am having this issue where i follow your instructions and when it comes to the linear fit using b2 as the reference image, it only applies for G2 but none of the other two. same with the b1 only applies to the g1 but not g2 or b2 like shown in your video. If i continue to the pixel math step, i get an error telling me that it couldnt execute because there is no active image window. Do you have any clue what is going wrong with mine?

@Aero19612

Ай бұрын

Hmm. Not sure how you’re applying it. Load the reference file name into LinearFit, the drag and drop the triangle icon onto each of the other 3 images. Should work ok. Let me know if it isn’t and give me more detail about how you’re using it and I’ll try to help. Good luck!

Mr. Lamb, I have the L-Ultimate filter. Could I buy Antlia Hb-SII dual band filter to pair with my L-Ultimate [captures the OIII-Ha]? I would think so but your thoughts appreciated...??

@Aero19612

6 ай бұрын

Absolutely!