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Good idea! I'm a retired trucker. I remember seeing a car parked on side of NYS Thruway (I90E) about mm300 between Rochester and Syracuse. The family was sitting on the grass and apparently having a picknick?! But they had just passed mm310 and the Port Byron Service Plaza! When I see vehicles on the side of roads I immediate think and want to tell them....NOT A PARKING LOT!!!

Great video! Thanks a million as I always struggle to make dark nebulae pop out in my shots.

Good to know, Chad. Thank you - Patrick -

Data share drive.google.com/drive/folders/1PGlDALyv1Lq7VOSuWRUcJ_Wbqf9q59LS?usp=sharing

Strangely, DSS button does nothing on my PC when DSS red is selected. I have to select HIPS for anything to happen.

Super cool, thanks! Had no idea Stellarium did this. Mine doesn't show up as black/white, it shows up as color (I double-checked and yes it's the DSS Red channel) but it's all good.

This is soooooo cool 😎👍

Thanks!

And don't forget, if you don't see the DSS button (and I didn't have it), go to Config-->Extras and select it.

Are you really running Ver 1.0? = ) I checked on Ver 24.1 and I don't see the DSS surveys listed anymore. Do you know if there's a download that I need?

Is there a way to do this on the mobile version of the app?

I just put GSS on my mini PC for the first time. What a dream! Suddenly, almost everything I was struggling with in EQMOD vanished. No more fighting to get the mount to sync. No more the mount refusing to accept its location or date. It just does what it's supposed to do. But I can't figure out how to setup slew limits, and I can't find any documentation on it. Do you have any idea?

I use a Mele 3Q for NINA and have Stellarium but it runs sloooow. I’ll try it on my MacBook Pro. Thanks.

Great tip! I need to spend more time in Stellarium.

Kool tip dude. I was just poking around in Stellarium looking for a new target and was bummed (as usual) by the many missing details. Like the Blue but maybe Color more. Thanks for your hard work and keep it up!

My workflow is slightly different, you can run BlurX a 2nd time (or on a copy of your image), at all default values, to sharpen your non-stellar detail while still in linear state, and then remove the stars. You gain a lot of detail doing this step. Very nice image by the way, love broadband dark nebula targets.

FAME is awesome. Another home run!

Nicely done! I’m going to start on this target tonight, wish me luck!

Thanks Chad, I've been NEEDING a script like this. Certainly will load it into PI. - Patrick -

It was added to my workflow the second it came out!

New AM3 owner, thanks for this video. First light did pretty well but I forgot to change the RA to Hysteresis. It still managed less than 1 arc second for the most part, not sure how I lucked out there. I did witness a few minutes of random - it lost it's mind - drift.

Great vid mate as normal just created a google drive in process off uploading all my data from 2 hours to 20 hours intergration you free to link it in your video's let us know ill send u the link

I'm thinking "Magic Wand" like in photoshop would also be nice to have. Especially if you could edit the result of the wand.

I agree-the FAME script is a GAME changer….

Does anyone have the link to the FAME script please?

Like you, I live in OH, and I have a native F7 down to an F5.6 refractor. I also own a classic C8. Because of the weather, I'm thinking about getting rid of both scopes and getting a C9.5 Edge. Native F/10 or slower with a Barlow, use the reducer to speed it up and the last hyper star to go even faster. I want to give it a bit more time with the dual-sensor camera before I pull the trigger.

I've been out of the game for a while. All these new scripts wow!!

Enjoying this channel very much. I don't have a serious photo rig yet, but I'm learning a lot here. I too am a fan of seeing nice, sharp accurately colored stars in photos.

I have the 14" RASA36. These fast scopes do have their issues and require a lot of patience. tools like BlueXterminator make a huge difference when your backspace and tilt are not perfect.

Consider the SS130 if you like stars

Nice demo!

I have the EdgeHD 9.25 with the hyperstar that i am waiting for clear dark skys. Getting some smoke and barely no astronomical night has kept my rig in doors lately.

did he say anything? yikes

This is the best sensor to pair with an IDAS GNB as well. The sensor plus filter combined is narrow-band in the lower wavelengths but allows a lot of Near-IR to pass. This allows more galaxy signal to come through in bands not as affected by light pollution. Trade-off is that near-IR does affect star quality, so if you image with this unfiltered, the star processing might be more painful. Personally, I bought this camera for the smaller pixel sizes/sensor size to capture more detail during galaxy season.

Hi. Do you know what is the difference in the mechanics to justify the increased payload capacity? IMO, they just changed the number in the brochure

Thank you for your step by step video of processing the Heart and Soul Nebula after the initial phase in PixInsight. I am wanting to get a handle on how to pick a good point of passing data over to Affinity but mostly I am wanting to understand how and when to use the tools of Affinity. I have seen some good step by step videos for using Photoshop such as CZcams’s from Craig at Utah Desert, but not so much for Affinity. For example I was very happy to see in your video how simple it was to get in and out of the Develop Persona without messing up the stars and starless correlation. Enjoyed your video!

I'am really sorry but for me the image is way too overdone🙈. Nevertheless a great and very helpful tutorial regarding the workflow and use of the new tools and scripts. Will definetely use your separate Lum extraction and reintegration to get rid of mottled backgrounds...🙏

They are just a couple hours west of me. It's very tempting for me to have one rig out there. I like that they are catering to smaller scopes. Seems to me that astrophotography has seen a lot of growth in the past couple of years. I think this may do well for them.

This is very cool. It isn’t something I’d personally do (I like messing with my gear too much and that’s half the hobby for me) but I think that this definitely makes more stable Astro conditions accessible for a wider audience. I don’t think it opens the door any further for making an entry into the hobby since one still needs to acquire their gear to send off to remote site. In this light I think they are niching on the mid to experienced level Astro people but probably also will include some pro and science people and organizations. Cheers! Doug

You ship your OTA, image train and mount and they put it on a pier under a roof. The cost to ship must be expensive. What happens when all the piers are rented, would they have to build a new structure with more piers? I’m fortunate to be retired and I travel full time in a motorhome. I’m currently staying in a Bortle 2 area in Utah. I’ve stayed in a Bortle 1 area, Capitol Reef NP, but between clouds and full moon, with the moon the skies didn’t seem any better than a Bortle 5 area, I didn’t get much imaging done.

Thank you so much for this video. I’m retired and I can’t justify the continued expense of a new Photoshop. I’m using a VERY old version of Photoshop now, and it’s good to know I can jump into affinity photo. Perhaps when I have to replace my old PC.

Affinity Photo will stack your project including the calibration frames for one night or multiple nights . You can use master files for darks, biases too. Supposedly, you can use Affinity to stack and process using James Ritson astro macros and Affinity tools but I haven' t figured that out yet.

Ran through this today (final image out in my next video using a few of the techniques here). Really appreciate this Chad, this was extremely helpful and worked like a charm!

To get rid of the blue, open a curves tool in the relevant layer, select the blue channel, then click the "PICKER" button. Place the mouse icon over a place on the image where the color and brightness is about what you want to remove, left click and hold and slowly move the mouse down. The curves tool will drop the blue curve at that specific color/luminance frequency, allowing you to selectively get the blue that you don't want out of the space.

Well broke down and grabbed Affinity photo. I have been using GIMP for awhile but before that I was quite familiar with photoshop gosh now a decade ago!

I have the original AM5 and I don’t see any reason to upgrade. I think the changes are minor and won’t affect imaging to any noticeable degree. My AM5 tracks and guides beautifully so not gonna do it. That’s not to say getting new gear isn’t awesome. 🤙

Hey thanks for the shout out Chad! This video will be helpful to a lot of people. Regarding not be able to edit the script. Looks like you have it in Siril's install folder with the default scripts. So it's probably Windows preventing you from editing. If you create a new directory somewhere outside of Program Files, keep your scripts there, and then set that path in the preferences you shouldn't have that issue. Also, sometimes when PCC fails you can draw a selection in the center of the image, and run it it again. Usually that'll work, but not always. There was one time I saved the image I was working on, closed/re-opened Siril, open the image, and then PCC worked.

Hey Chad i use the same tools with a couple of additions that are rc astro noisexterminator plugin in affinity and Astro Sharp to slightly enhance details. Clear skies 😊

My understanding is Affinity supports FITs file format. Could you not bring in the Starless and Starmask files into Affinity as Fits or does the Develop Persona not support this file format. Thanks

Thank you for showing some love for Siril and Affinity. As a newbie I'm not ready for Pixensight. I'm in information overload most of the time. I use Siril and just purchased Affinity Photos 2. I even downloade James Ritson's astrophotography macros. Being a MacOS user I also have Pixelmator Pro which is also a photo processor. My issue is I've never used any photo editing program and back when I was younger (my 50s) I couldn't get the hang of Photoshop Elements and just did simple edits in Apple's Photos. Now with Astrophotography I'm finding the processing part harder than the imaging part. I'm finding Affinity a little bit intimidating and with all the macros and tools it's hard to know what to choose and develop a workflow. Thanks for making this video and I'm looking forward to Sky Story Affinity videos. Can you also do a processing video on galaxies? Thanks