SolarChat!

I'm really enjoying the new ERF from VAL on my PST Stage 1 152mm. I can Barlow only rarely since my scope does not like too much power, so today was a non-Barlow day. This is an AutoStakkert stack of 20 frames with a bit of curves adjustment.
Thanks for all your help over the years,
Starry Jack

Oops. Here is the adjusted one...

Very nice! Is this with an ERF from Valery?

Yes. The scope is a 152 mm f6.5 achromat with Baader corrector to make it an f11 thereabouts.

His ERF Is a 6” Ha and Calcium if I recall.

Jack

Are you using any form of sharpening after stacking, Jack? Try ImPPG if not.

Stu

Stu,
Great question which got me started on a couple of new directions (thank you for that).

First, I had indeed done sharpening of 15 in Autostaakert.

Second, per your suggestion, I did download IMPPG and gave that a whirl with the defaults and a bit of playing around then imported into GIMP (again, I have you to thank for bringing that back into my life) and attached the result here. Not knowing what I was doing seemed to produce a but of graininess.
Below is the original image (not from IMPPG) but also processed in GIMP to have brighter curves and better contrast. I like this result the best but am open to coaching!

Hi Jack,

Better to not use any sharpening in Autostakkert. Use the 16bit TIF stacked images from it in another image processing tools.

I personally prefer AstraImage Pro 3.0 It consists excellent deconvolution tools like Lucy-Richardson, Maximum Entropy and Van Cittert.
It also has Wavelet sharpening tool and Unsharp Mask. These deconvolution tools are best I ever met in similar tools. They are quite easy to understand and use.

And do not colorize images untill you will reach a certain level of processing with just b/w images. Adding colorization makes things worser if an image is not well doen in a b/w.

Valery

Thanks, Val. What is the group consensus on Registax? I finally got that working as well yesterday and produced nice results.

Part of my workflow though is shooting in color because I do outreach and b/w simply is not as fun for the people watching.

Jack

Nice results there ...

What an inspiring thread!

I will be playing with my newly 'second-hand# PST and one day I will do stage 1 using my not much used Explorer Scientific AR152 F/6.5. I guess Altair 178M should be OK with AR152.

It might be just my retirement hobby - mostly Solar/Lunar - I guess.

SolarChatted,
I'll be happy to share my hard-earned experience with this arrangement. I use a different camera but lots of success with the PST, a Baader glasspath corrector and the ERF.

Jack