Spent pretty much most of the Thanksgiving weekend listening to the sweet song of Harry Page's voice talk me through the maze of buttons, processes and instances of Pixinsight with the occasional assist from Warren Keller. Sometime early Thursday morning I had an AHA! moment and from that point I glued myself in front of the computer. My wife was not impressed when I spent more time listen to Harry than to her, even when I explained that if she could take me through luminance masking and color calibration I'd happily listen to her instead. Harry took me by the (virtual) hand and guided me through all the "Newbie" steps and a couple of the intimidate procedures although I do have to say the term "experiment" was a bit concerning and used way to often.
In any case I need a bit of direction. I image with a 12 inch Meade 200LX equipped with a Argos 6.3 FF/FR , an Optec TCF-Si focuser with and SBIG ST4000XCM/AO-8 imaging stack on the back side . "Harry" and I have been working with about 7 hours of data on the Deerlick cluster I imaged back in October. In walking through the various tasks following calibration and Histogram Transformation, the image has gone "soft" and I'm not sure how far to step back to fix the problem. I do save the image after each tutorial just to have a point of reference that goes with each of Harry's modules. Without going back to step one, where might I have introduced the "soft fuzzies" to my image?
Thanks again to Harry and Warren for the long conversations and sleepless nights.
Dave