craig stark, stark labsstark-labs.com/craig/resources/articles-&-reviews/nebulosity_rtmc.pdfwhat...

Craig Stark, Stark LabsThursday, June 2, 2011

http://www.stark-labs.com

Overview

What can and can’t you do with Nebulosity?Who is it meant for and not meant for?

Capture demo

Scripting demo

New multi-set pre-process tool demo

Stacking demo

Stretching demo

Noise reduction demo

Thursday, June 2, 2011


What can you do with Nebulosity?

Control your camera and filter wheel

Focus

Capture (on the fly or via scripts)

Pre-process

Align and stack

Color balance and stretch

Reduce noise and sharpen

Go easily in and out of other software as you see fit



Who is Nebulosity for?

Anyone not running a fully automated observatory

Anyone with supported hardware and $60 to spare

(or today, with $50)



Cameras on the Mac and WindowsStarlightExpress USB2

& Filterwheel

QSI (filter wheel)

Fishcamp

SBIG (filter wheel)

Canon DSLRDIGIC II, III, 4Meade DSIs

QHY8



Cameras on the Mac and WindowsStarlightExpress USB2

& Filterwheel

QSI (filter wheel)

Fishcamp

SBIG (filter wheel)

Canon DSLRDIGIC II, III, 4Meade DSIs

QHY8

ASCOM-5 compliant cameras Apogee cameras Atik 314, 4000, 16, 16IC, and 16HR / Artemis cameras (all 16-series and “Generation 3” series) CCD Labs Q8-HR / Q453, Q285M / QHY2 Pro FLI cameras Moravian G2/G3 Orion StarShoot Deep-Space Color Imager OpticStar DS-335 series, DS-142, DS-145, and PL-130 QHY8, QHY8Pro, QHY9 QSI 500 series SAC10 SAC7 / SC1 long-exposure modified webcams / Atik 1 and Atik 2 cameras.



Collecting data (images) as simply as possible: Capture Demo

Simple user interface

Remove need to think too much

Reduce errors

Reduce time with gloves off

Frame/Focus

Fine Focus

Set options

Go!



Automating data collection: Scripting Demo

What if you want to sleep?

What if you want to automatically do things on startup?

Scripting provides a simple solution to automate and:

Change exposure durations

Change filters

Change binning

...



# Simple test script# This will take 3 shots at 1s each called "Demo1"# and then take 2 shots at 2s each, binned called# "Demo1b"

# Connect to an Starlight Xpress cameraConnectName Starlight Xpress USB

SetName Demo1SetDuration 1000Capture 3SetDuration 2000SetBinning 2SetName Demo1bCapture 2



# Simple test script# This will take 3 shots at 1s each called "Demo1"# and then take 2 shots at 2s each, binned called# "Demo1b"

# Connect to an Starlight Xpress cameraConnectName Starlight Xpress USB

SetName Demo1SetDuration 1000Capture 3SetDuration 2000SetBinning 2SetName Demo1bCapture 2

# Assumes you’re connected already

# Setup for Lum filter shotSetExtFilter 1SetName Demo2_LSetDuration 1000Capture 2

# Setup for color filter shot# Note that the duration will still be 1sSetExtFilter 2SetName Demo2_RSetBinning 2Capture 2



Bias, Darks, Flats, oh my!New multi-set pre-processing tool

You may have several sets of lights, each with different exposure durations, filters, and binning.

You’ll likely have some mix of flats, darks, and biases (control frames).

Control frames need to be stacked and then applied appropriately.

New multi-set tool drastically simplifies the process


http://www.stark-labs.comThursday, June 2, 2011


Aligning and StackingAlignment modes:

Translation

Translation + Rotation (+ Scale)

Drizzle

Colors in Motion

Non-stellar automatic

Stacking

Average (mean)

Standard-deviation (sigma-clip)



StretchingAlmost all of our interesting data in our image is packed into the left edge of our histogram.

Stretching pulls this out

Levels

DDP

Curves

Levels Transformation



Color Balance and Adjustment

Adjust Color Offset

Adjust Color Scale

Auto-color balance

Hue/Saturation



Noise Reduction

Adaptive Median

GREYCStoration (see Help!, Tutorials)



Here, default over-smooths it



Decrease overall smoothness (regularization strength)

dt = 20

(from 60)



Allow more irregular contours (contour regularity)

p = 1.2

(from 0.7)



Original shows fine-grain noise



Decrease noise scale too far

alpha = 0.1

(from 0.6)



Bump up noise scale a touch...

alpha = 0.2

(from 0.6)



Final tweak: Better precision

Precision 3

Runge-Kutta



GREYC helped save this shot

3 nm H-α filter (Custom Scientific)4” Refractor (Borg 101 ED F/4)

Interline CCD (QSI 540, QE = 30%)

Each of the 3 panels is ~45 min of data



What can you do with Nebulosity?

Control your camera and filter wheel

Focus

Capture (on the fly or via scripts)

Pre-process

Align and stack

Color balance and stretch

Reduce noise and sharpen

Go easily in and out of other software as you see fit


Questions?


craig stark, stark labsstark-labs.com/craig/resources/articles-&-reviews/nebulosity_rtmc.pdfwhat...

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