📷 Jelly Fish Starless.jpg
My set up I used for this shot is a 294 mc pro/Askar 71F/SA GTI/Antlia Quad band filter. After stacking and calibrating~15 hours of lights I got the above result. Shot was plate solved and I used SPCC in pixinsight to color correct but I keep getting the same result. Ive never seen this multi-color banding before and Im not sure how to correct for it. Looking for any useful insight. Thanks!
Color banding issue persists after calibration
This looks like it could be a shutter problem, depending on your shutter configuration, though a right-left shutter opening would be more common. This defect here would be from and up-down shutter, not sure how a right-left shutter would give this type of pattern. Shutters should last a long time, but I have blown through one shutter on one of my cameras in the past.
I assume you don’t see anything on your flats, since your flats are not correcting it? Because it might have been a problem with some lines of pixels on your sensor. Are you dithering? Still, seems unlikely if it is not in the flats.
Are all the images in the stack well aligned, if you have even a few images that are displaced then the edges and beyond the edge of those displaced images end up as lines or bands in the image.
One thing of that would do this type of horizontal banding is interference in the USB cable or a bad cable connection. Make sure there are no power cables close by. If you have another cable give that a try. If it is the cable you should see it even in a flat if you use exactly the same cable setup, though it is difficult to see problems looking at a flat. Still it is odd it is in the same place, unless there is a fault in the camera electronics that is triggered by the image acquisition.
You don’t need to be imaging at night I think to troubleshoot. Put your camera in a room facing a plain surface without any detail or shadows and take your exposures. You can experiment with cables etc to try to troubleshoot.
Rick
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Thanks for your thoughtful and helpful comment. I took a look at the flats and saw there was some kind of sensor issue with a couple of them and that caused the problem to be carried forward in the process. Once I deleted them and recalibrated my lights everything looked great. Thanks for your help!
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Joe W · Dec 22, 2025, 05:11 PM
📷 Jelly Fish Starless.jpg
I would contact the camera producer or maybe check the power Voltage you are delivering?
OK, you deleted some bad flats but what tells you it will not happen again?
Out of curiosity, what were your gain settings during the session?
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Joe W · Dec 22, 2025, 08:18 PM
Thanks for your thoughtful and helpful comment. I took a look at the flats and saw there was some kind of sensor issue with a couple of them and that caused the problem to be carried forward in the process. Once I deleted them and recalibrated my lights everything looked great. Thanks for your help!
I’m happy you were able to solve the issue. If it was in just a few flat frames it could be a flaky cable or connection. Not sure what exposure you are using for flats, but get the light intensity down so your exposures are in the seconds range, very short exposures can be problematic with CMOS cameras, and anyway, are more prone to glitches. Just a thought, if your exposures are with a light panel there can be a beat pattern from voltage ripples at the mains voltage, so longer exposures ensures you average these out over the frame.
Rick
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