This being a Bank holiday weekend, and the skies being cloudy I’ve had some time to review the DVD presentations from the 2009 Mid West Astro Imaging Conference that I bought from Astro Photo Insight some time ago. Two were of particular interest; “The Hows and Why of Image Calibration” by Kevin Nelson of QSI and “Choosing a camera for astrophotography” by Craig Stark. After watching these I decided to evaluate some flats produced by pointing the telescope with Canon 350D at a blank illuminated laptop screen (I used an empty Notepad window). Analysing these images in Maxim, the results were nothing like I expected; less an even grey frame, more a technicolour nightmare!
After that shock I went back to look at my images of the Double cluster and reprocessed them with the new flat frames. Compared to my original efforts there’s much more colour evident in the stars and the overall blueish tint is much reduced. How much of the improvement is down to the flat frames and how much to improved technique is up for debate. That’s all part of the fun; there’s always something new to learn!