> IR-cut filter removal improvement on Pentax K5
I am so impressed with the K5 ability to quickly gather signal from nebulas (Quantum efficiency) and galaxies, so I decide to take one more K5 and to remove the IR-cut Filter of the old one. The same thing I have done in the past with Pentax KM and I got significant improvement of 2.5 stops. Here is a short article on that: http://planetarium-gb.eu/pentax_astrophotography.pdf
Since I have K5, I almost stop using KM as K5 has huge advantage in terms of QA and noise levels. There is no amplifier glow and no need of dark frames and cooling.
In fact K5 is one of the best DSLRs for astrophotography which is using Sony IMX071 Xmor CMOS sensor. Same as ASI071MC Pro (color) (https://astronomy-imaging-camera.com/product/asi071mc-pro)
Thus after the modification the Ha sensitivity improvement is far less then what I expected. But this camera is great unmodded, so it seems that Pentax IR-cut filter is letting most of the Ha spectrum to the sensor. Below is comparison of M42 Orion nebula with UHC-S filter of 1.Modded (without IR-cut) K5 and 2.Unmodded. There is very slight difference but well enough to show far great results, when push it to the limit with a fainter objects and stack of 100+ frames.
Recently I started to use Siril for processing my images as I was shown a new tool for star extraction Starnet++.
Since beginning of 2023 Chat GPT was launched as a human language model and start a new era of technological development.
As may times I said it is essential to keep all your shots over the years, as you can go back and reprocess them.
Make new discoveries or improve the resulting image quality.
When we have a new newton telescope we shroud avoid touch the collimation of the secondary mirror as we may get into troubles.
