Eskimo in colour

Great first go of it Dave.
It really is smiling, I think the tracking looks slightly out and the colour is abit strange, but all the same there is some nice detail in the "hoodie".

The mono image was far better. But I don't think tracking is the issue in the colour image. Here's my cut at explaining it

If you shoot say 100 images, then some of those will be better quality than others (seeing, focus issues as temperature falls/rises, tracking etc). You can either do the quality control yourself or leave it to the software (eg Registax).

In the case of the mono images I took, it was clear that some images were smeared due to moments of poor seeing (not tracking, becasue others were perfect). Added to this, on the odd occasion, the DSI corrupts an image - you get the odd row of white pixels across an image. I did the QC myself, visually, and got the mono image.

Colour images are a pain - there are three planes per image - R, G and B and there was no way I was going to manually check 54 images . So inevitably, some dodgy frames got in there and smeared the stars a little. Also, the red channel is bloated compared to the G and B channels (no IR filter). All this adds up to an image that looks a lot worse than the mono image.

Given the effort it took to process this (imaging it was no more difficult than the mono) I don't think I'll be doing it again soon with this setup

I noticed the smile face too! The core is bright and when you crank up the levels, it burn out - to the shape of a smiley!

Cheers

Dave

Thats a good explaination of the smearing, I wasnt completely confident on the tracking reason as some of the stars appear to be good.
Its amazing how seeing can affect these kind of shots, I've many frames wrecked by intermittant bad seeing.

Its a real pain - especially when it looks from the laptop screen that you're getting a Rob Gendler type image but when you process it, eggs everywhere... Sould destroying when you have to chuck half of them away. But I've had nights where not a single image has survived to a publishable state.

In the case of the colour image, I suppose I could go back and do a full QC check - but my nerves won;t take it and I suspect I'm on the edge of boring you lot to bits :lol:

Hawaii, here I come (for dark, clear skies and to avoid Coventry )

Looks good to me Dave.

I think colour balance is a personal issue anyway, how are we supposed to know how it looks? I just try and get things looking nice and leave it at that.

Later,

Jed.

I think colour balance is a personal issue anyway, how are we supposed to know how it looks? I just try and get things looking nice and leave it at that.

Totally agree - who knows what the heck colours they should be anyhow? I just like the smiley face!

And thanks for the feedback.

Cheers

Dave