Do images with your own watermark which is not supplied by Astrobin get yeeted out of IOTD early? AstroBin Platform open discussions community forum · Mina B. · ... · 19 · 416 · 1

Hi,

I don't think so, even if am not a fan of watermarks (or worse… signature watermarks), I wouldn't reject an image by judging the watermark.

I could be both a submitter and a follower of you, and even without the watermark, I could recognize your image so I don't believe that "breaking" the anonymity of IOTD process with a watermark should affect the judgement.

Unfortunately watermarks nowadays can be easily removed so you shouldn't worry that much for image theft.

Given your gallery and the progress we can all see at least in your last four images, recognition will come . I will avoid a lengthy discussion about the IOTD process because it is a huge can of worms (but I will say that I've got nothing against it, it works, and Salvatore's intention is to steadily make it even better). Don't worry about the IOTD process. Enjoy the hobby!

Hello Mina,
Your own watermarks are certainly no reason for images to be removed from the IOTD process.
If it is rejected early, you can recognise this by the info symbol on the image.
As the weather in Europe has been good in recent weeks, solar activity is very high and there have been events such as the Northern Lights and Perseids, there are currently a lot of images in the evaluation queue that the team has to review.
A submitted image cannot be rated neutrally according to quality, but always competes with the other images that are available for selection at the same time.
This means that the competition is greater than average and people can't keep up with viewing and rating all the images.
The situation is exacerbated by the fact that many of the team members are currently on holiday and therefore there are even more pictures for fewer people.
If you write me a PM and tell me which picture it is, I might be able to give you a hint or two as to whether it might have been rejected due to technical deficiencies or not.

CS
Hartmuth

Salvatore Iovene:
Speaking of improving it, I just noticed that two of your recent images exited the process without achieving enough views from Submitters. They should be automatically resubmitted in that case, but sometimes it doesn't work so I will investigate that again.

I resubmitted them manually now.

Also, it's summer and activity from the staff is reduced, which means that more images don't get viewed enough, therefore resubmitted, therefore the workload gets bigger, therefore volunteers are less encouraged to empty their queue... a bit of a dog chasing its tail.

I recently added over 10 new recruiters to the process and I will monitor the situation.

Thanks for looking into it - I do understand that the Submitters are volunteers, and pretty busy with reviewing currently. If you said you resubmitted the images that exited the process - am I able to see the statistics again because they are gone from the pictures?

Hartmuth Kintzel:
Hello Mina,
Your own watermarks are certainly no reason for images to be removed from the IOTD process.
If it is rejected early, you can recognise this by the info symbol on the image.
As the weather in Europe has been good in recent weeks, solar activity is very high and there have been events such as the Northern Lights and Perseids, there are currently a lot of images in the evaluation queue that the team has to review.
A submitted image cannot be rated neutrally according to quality, but always competes with the other images that are available for selection at the same time.
This means that the competition is greater than average and people can't keep up with viewing and rating all the images.
The situation is exacerbated by the fact that many of the team members are currently on holiday and therefore there are even more pictures for fewer people.
If you write me a PM and tell me which picture it is, I might be able to give you a hint or two as to whether it might have been rejected due to technical deficiencies or not.

CS
Hartmuth

Sure, I‘ll send you a PM - thanks!

Mina B.:
Hey all,
to my surprise my technically best image so far got yeeted out of the IOTD queue early while an objectively worse image of me is still in for like over a week now.
I submitted the latest image with a watermark which I made in photoshop because I‘m afraid of image theft.
I know that the process of IOTD is anonymous, could it be that I ruined my chances by myself? It‘s just very surprising, it‘s a long integration, I‘m fully content for the first time myself and I got lots of comments and likes for it, so it seems weird that exactly this picture is out of the queue after 4 days already?

Thanks

I guarantee you that it was not the watermark.  As others have already mentioned, the Iris is super common, as is M51. Both your M51 and Iris could benefit from more integration time. Additionally, M51 is oversharpened to the point of making it an easy pass. I do not think your camera is doing you any favours. Small pixels like that only really make sense with fast telescopes, and by fast I am talking below F/3. If you want to try an experiment, reprocess the images after binning them. You might find it easier to work with.

I think new and newish people to this hobby get obsessed with trying to get a crazy sub arc second pixel resolution with equipment that quite frankly has no business doing so. You are better off going for a lower resolution that will help you get a better SNR, because a poor SNR seems to be a running theme in all your pictures with what would usually be decent integration times.

As a Reviewer, I see watermarks all the time. It has no effect whatsoever on me or how I evaluate an image. You didn’t really ask for advice, but I’ll offer some anyway: Don’t try to reason through the IOTD process. It’s inscrutable and angsting over it will drive you crazy. Just keep making the best images you can and try to learn from the many wonderful images you see here on Astrobin. You’re on the right path and doing quite well with the tools and environment you have. Every single one of us has tons of room for improvement. Even consummate pros like Adam Block, Warren Keller, and my teacher, Ron Brecher are always learning and trying new things. 

if you remain concerned about progressing in the IOTD process, here’s a great talk on TAIC from Andy Campbell, one of the top-tier IOTD judges that might be useful to you:

https://www.youtube.com/live/wlc5qKJKRJk?si=KDo5pCjj_VD6VRsz

Salvatore Iovene:

Timothy Martin:
It’s inscrutable

I know what you mean, but lest somebody interpret the word inscrutable differently, I want to remind everyone that the IOTD/TP process is very well documented and the code is open source. So from that point of view it’s very transparent.

Is it more complicated than appointing a couple of people to make all the decisions based on authority? Yes. But can you imagine how harshly that would be criticised? 🫢

It's the human factor that is inscrutable. The procedure is, as you say, very well documented and transparent. But ultimately, it's a series of subjective judgment calls made by people with differing tastes and differing goals. In terms of astrophotography award systems that are out there, it is by far the very best and consistently produces the best results. I wouldn't change anything about it (well, except for the rules regarding mosaics--but I don't mean to pummel that dead horse ).

Dean Jacobsen:

Timothy Martin:
It's the human factor that is inscrutable. The procedure is, as you say, very well documented and transparent. But ultimately, it's a series of subjective judgment calls made by people with differing tastes and differing goals.

I'm a fan of Astrobin but I have elected to opt out of the competitions and I don't submit my images any more.  I'm a lot happier with my Astrobin experience now that I don't submit my images to the inscrutable IOTD process.

I totally get that approach. But I really have enjoyed the opportunity to be part of the process and have learned a ton from it. I learn new things from it every single day. And I think it has great pedagogical value. When I'm researching a new target, I do a search for IOTDs and TPs to get a sense of how the best astrophotographers have approached the target, what framing options might be available, and other useful information about it. So it not only serves as a reward system for excellence, it creates a great learning tool.

Mina B.:
Hi, thanks for your answer. I know its a more common object, but most of those shots aren't half as deep usually. I agree on the M51 being iffy on the SNR, 10 hours under Bortle 5 aren't all that great, the oversharpening... well, it's a stylistic approach that I liked while processing it - I don't think it looks unnatural already. But it is also not the image in question, I talked about the Iris, which, while common, in my opinion has good SNR and also isn't overprocessed.

I suppose it depends on how you define deep. Simply having a long integration time or a million sub-exposures won't always make an image deep.

Mina B.:
Regarding my camera - that's why I went from an 80mm to the 130 PDS. Not everyone has unlimited money to throw at this hobby and I have to work with what I have. Eventually bigger pixels would be nicer, ofc, but that needs more focal length. The smallish image scale isn't an issue imo if the seeing plays along - if the seeing is bad, I could probably do better with binning, especially for bigger objects.

Be not afraid of pixel scales over one arc second! They cannot hurt you. Trust me. I think a lot of people in this hobby go for more zoom as time goes on, but personally I find myself going the opposite way (at least when I have the rare chance to use my own stuff).

Mina B.:
Also frankly - I'm not really newish to the hobby anymore, I'm doing astrophotography for a little over 4 years now and I know that a small image scale comes with limitations. I checked my SNR mathematically for the iris btw, and it's far from low. It is not even super low on the M51, not amazing, but decent. My older images struggle more from poor SNR than the newer ones. It is also highly debateable if 6-8 hours on most objects are a decent integration time - I don't think it is, especially under my suburban skies, so the Iris and some of my newer images shot under darker skies, have exactly the SNR I expect from high Bortle 5 skies.

My comment on "new people" was more a general statement and not directed at you personally - but I did not really make that clear so that's on me.

Now, speaking of math I am curious as what you are using. For example, on your Iris at bortle 3 you are injecting a bunch of noise - more than 10% - in your stack by using 120s sub exposures. Maybe you are using such short exposures to manage the stars, I do not know. Either way, that is a lot of noise that could be eliminated right there just by bumping up the exposure times to say 300s. That get you to about 5% extra noise from stacking. If you crank your exposures up to 600s then you are down to 2.5% of extra noise from stacking. 10%, 5%, 2.5%... it does not seem like a lot but again when it comes to the dust, it really is. If you want super clean images then you gotta go for broke and get that down to 1% of extra noise added by stacking, which is something like 1500s sub exposures for your camera and telescope at bortle 3.

As for total integration time, lets go for a solid 256 sub exposures. At 300s that gets us to 21.3 hours. That is actually close to what you got, except without the huge injection of noise from stacking 120s sub frames. If you used 600s sub exposures, well now we are at 42.6 hours. A slightly cleaner image at double the time. Want that nice clean stack with barely any noise from stacking?  1500s sub frames are now taking us to 106 hours.

So why a bigger camera? Well lets say you upgraded modestly (as much as modestly means in astro) to the 533MC. Yes, you lose a bit of scale, but due to the larger pixels and the much lower read noise, that 106 hours I quoted you for the best possible stack goes down to 20.4 hours. Now that is a trade I would make to save 80 hours.

Mina B.:
I'm really curious on where exactly do you see the poor SNR in the Iris Nebula, because I'm not seeing it - either I must be blind or dumb. I didn't have to be half as aggressive with Noise reduction for example, while processing, because there wasn't much noise to begin with.

When I look around the core, it is not well defined, and it seems like a lot of sharpening had to be done to make up for it. The best I can describe it is that it is kind of blotchy. Honestly I think it is the high resolution without the requisite seeing to make use of it that is throwing me off. I can zoom in but I don't get much detail, if that makes sense. It is that, and the grainy look of the whole image that pointed me to 'poor SNR', at least in the context of this topic.

Keep in mind that since you asked about flaws everyone in this thread is looking for flaws. We are basically looking for a few scratches on an otherwise quality luxury car and putting a laser focus on them.


Also, consider this image: https://www.astrobin.com/xde65a/?q=%22NGC%207023%22&camera=&bortle_scale_min=3&bortle_scale_max=9

It only has a 2.2 arc second image scale, but I would say that overall it's cleaner. Not everything has to be super zoomed in to be fantastic.

Bill McLaughlin:
Besides, in almost 31 years of imaging I have never been able to make much money on my images so if the pirates think they can do better, good luck to them!

Hey, I tell my wife that if I keep at it and keep improving, someday I will be able to make hundreds of dollars a year at this!