Synthetic Flats

[John_Gill]

Hi,

I have been processing some old data which turned out to be quite horrible, mostly because the flat were bad.  Anyway, I used David Ault's tutorial to create synthetic flats and I was able to create a great image.  My question, should synthetic flats only be created/used as a last resort?

space is not black
John

[pfile]

IMO yes, because the synthetic flat isn't going to capture the FPN from pixel QE differences, nor will you get dust spot removal unless you painstakingly recreate the dust spots.

i usually use the StarHaloReducer script on the integrated master to try to mitigate dust spots after using a synthetic flat. but since it's manual work i tend to only correct the worst ones.

rob

[John_Gill]

kool, thank you.