Cosmetic stars processing

[Forum_2014]

[ 2014 ]

In the following example I will apply two of the main cosmetic tools present in AA5 (see menu Filter -> Cosmetic): Remove blooming and Compress stars
The field captured with the 0.4 m. Newton at the Observatory of Cavezzo is that of M27 and the CCD camera is a brand new ST-8300M from SBIG. We take 25 frames (5 for each RGB filter and 10 unfiltered) of just 100 seconds of unguided exposure. The night was poor in seeing and the optics was suffering of some astigmatism then I tried to correct anyway the final image with the cosmetic processing tools present in AA5.
Even if the ST-8300 is an antiblooming camera, the signal of the brighter stars was so strong that a little horizontal blooming appears:

Note on the left the original shape of the star with blooming and optical/guiding defects and on the right, after selecting the star centroid and applying the Remove blooming filter, the new rounded and corrected star shape. On the center the Remove blooming Window.
Finally, with the tool Find stars, I selected all the stars of the field and applied them the cosmetic filter Compress stars, to correct at the best the stars elongation caused by the absence of guiding and the optical defects and here it is the final result:

Have fun with AA5!
Martino