Well, I decided to upgrade my equipment. As I have some weird fascination with Newtonians, I got the mountable Quattro 300P. The focal length is a little more useful on it at 1200mm. It also has a better focuser on it than my Dobsonian did. I paired the focuser with… Continue Reading... "New SkyWatcher EQ8-R and Quattro 300P"
I was looking at my old moon photo, and noticed just how out of focus it was. I started with an aggressive deconvolution, as the original was super out of focus. I finished with a little local contrast enhancement. It looks a little unnatural now, but you sure can see… Continue Reading... "Upgrading that full moon"
Conditions were pretty good tonight, but my guiding and tracking just did not want to agree with me. I was only able to get 15 decent subframes of two minutes each of NGC 672, a nifty double galaxy near the Triangulum. Continue Reading... "NGC 672"
I finally noticed that after debaying my RAW images in Siril, the colors didn’t look right. With my modified DSLR, the images are definitely strongest in the red channel, but the debayered images did not match that. I fiddle with the settings for the program, and it now processes the… Continue Reading... "General settings in Siril for DSLR images"
I was reviewing the images I took for NGC 925, and I noticed a long smudge in my final stacked image. I decided to look through the original subframes individually, I noticed something moving! I have no idea what it is, but I know it cannot be a plane or… Continue Reading... "Possible asteroid"
If you have an uneven background in your image with a target that doesn’t take up most of the image, I have found a good method to remove it. My flats are sometimes not the best, probably due to the multiple pieces of glass I have between the telescope and… Continue Reading... "Effective background removal"
With the new denoise scheme and other skills under my belt, I’ve been redoing the post-processing of many of my older images, with much better results. As another example, here is the Crescent nebula: Steps taken to process this were the following: Levels adjustment to remove most of the background.… Continue Reading... "Retouching the Crescent"
I did some tests with the stacking settings in Siril, and then checking the noise values afterwards. Trying both average and median, along with the many rejection schemes and their settings, I have found the following settings to work best for me: The sigma rejection scheme seems to give me… Continue Reading... "Siril stacking settings"
Even after stacking dozens of subframes to reduce noise in an image, I would still have quite a good deal of luminance and color noise. Luminance noise is definitely the most distracting, and removing it without removing detail of approximately the same scale was very hard to do manually. After… Continue Reading... "The silver bullet for still noisy stacks"
Still experimenting with post-processing techniques, I made another attempt at the Triangulum. The subframes for this were extremely noisy, and the resulting stack was still quite noisy. The flats I took at the time were pretty poor and added some rotational gradients to the image. I decided to take a… Continue Reading... "Triangulum 2: Galactic Boogaloo"
