Paul Imm replied to the topic 'Starters Guide to ASI294MC Pro' in the forum. 3 years ago

Hi Mike,

Thank you for replying back.

I am using Astro Pixel Processor for my stacking and Star Tools for the Post Processing.

My biggest struggle is with Flats, if not for this I think I might be getting somewhere.

With my flats I try to be somewhere between 25,000 to 35,000 with the Median ADU.  I purchased a light box to aid in tweaking the numbers.  I know that the combination of longer flats and dark flats should yield better results; for this reason I've not really adopted sky flats as the dusk sky can rapidly change with ADU.  It has been a challenge in getting the flats to stay in an acceptable range.  Normally the issue happens to be that the light from the light box raises the ADU too high even though it is on the lowest setting.  I have been playing around with white T-shirts and acrylic additive to the light box to tone it down a little.  From there I have tried a grey T-shirt, which brought the ADU too low.  From there I experimented with lighter shades of grey T'shirts which I had mixed results.

Recently I tried using an UHC filter that I happened to have.  Now that I think about it, this may have been causing the red cast that I talked about.  I don't know if I ever got a good flat with this.  The red levels were 10,000 above the blue and green.  It's a shame that I couldn't get this to work as it really picked up the Veil Nebula well.

Yesterday I tried out the 50 White Balance that I was glad to find suggested here.

Unfortunately in looking over these flats they were truly flat.  I think with the red value so much higher than the other levels it must just be messed up.

By any chance would anyone know the trick towards getting good flats with UHC or other prominent red filters?

This evening I received a cheap UV/IR filter which I immediately tried out.  I tried a 5 second image.  I was elated to see that red, blue and green ADU numbers were very tight and a very good vignetting and dust mote image preview showed up.  This is within the light range of the light box towards the low side.

I'm hoping to apply this to an imaging session this evening.

Thanks for your help!  I'll feedback whether the UV/IR filter finally achieves what I've been after.

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