Combining colour and luminance data from different cameras

AstroDMx Capture was used to capture data with a William Optics ZenithStar 66 SD Apochromatic refractor mounted on a Celestron AVX mount.

Click on an image to get a closer view

The final, resulting image obtained by combining Luminance and chrominance data from different cameras.

How it was done

Using an Atik 314L mono CCD camera, AstroDMx Capture for Linux was used to capture 60 x 45s exposures and 40 x 15s exposures of the Orion nebula.

The equipment used

Screenshot of AstroDMx Capture gathering FITS data on the Orion nebula

The final luminance image after stacking in Deep Sky Stacker and post processing in the Gimp 2.1

On a previous night, using AstroDMx Capture for macOS, 150 x 15s exposures of the Orion nebula were captured using a 14-bit ZWO ASI178MC CMOS camera to produce this image, of which the best 135 were stacked:

The equipment used to capture the Chrominance data

The luminance image was overlaid on the Chrominance image using Picture Window Pro using shift, rotate and scale to precisely overlay the stars. The resulting composite image was cropped and post processed in EasyFoto by softmaker.

The total exposure time for the final image shown at the top of the page was 1.48 hours.

Steve Wainwright and Nicola Mackin