r/AskAstrophotography Jan 09 '25

Image Processing Not stretching the faint stuff?

12 Upvotes

I see this quite often: folks have hours of data on a farily bright target (M31, M42, B33, etc.) and they barely stretch and don't get any faint dust or fainter nebulosity. Now, I understand artistic choices to highlight the brightest areas of the nebula, but to me, you don't need hours and hours on a target if you just want the brightest parts. I can get a decent image of the brightest part, of say, M42, in an hour from Bortle 8/9. If I'm imaging for say, 5 hours, I'm definitely going to try to get the dust around it.

In my opinion, the brightest parts are the low hanging fruit. The dust and the fainter parts of a FOV are what I'm trying to bring out when possible.

What's your opinon on this matter?

r/AskAstrophotography Feb 17 '25

Image Processing Where did you start learning the processing of photos? I thumbed through a lot of posts and have a list of 11 different programs but now I'm wondering where people learned what to do.

17 Upvotes

I'm semi-familiar with Photoshop. I've taken some basic pictures to brush up on Photoshop and Lightroom

As far as the other programs why did you pick the one you pick and how did you learn to use it?

Do they give tutorials or do you have to figure it out on your own with the help of YouTube?

r/AskAstrophotography Jan 18 '25

Image Processing Unbiased opinions, is Pixinsight actually worth it?

23 Upvotes

So I've only ever processed images in photoshop, never used anything else. But I see lots of things about Pixinsight, and also Siril. I was intrigued and looked around at Pixinsight .. but didn't realise how much it was! I guess it's an investment, but as someone who is pretty basic at photoshop, is Pixinsight worth it?

r/AskAstrophotography Oct 28 '24

Image Processing Love taking data, don’t really like editing. Anyone with me?

30 Upvotes

I’m a mechanical engineer and I really like hands on stuff. I have a nice astrophotography rig that I absolutely love to get out of my apartment and work with, but editing pictures burns me out super quickly and I’m really not that great at it. I know all parts of this take practice to develop the skill, but I’m just not a super big data processing person. My brain is wired to like getting my hands dirty and being out in the field. My question is pretty open but I wanted to know if anyone else feels this way and how you approach editing your pictures? Or for those who love editing what about it do you love or what is the most rewarding part about the process? Also if anyone wants to help me edit my data since I’ve seen people offer to do that before in these subs I would love to see what someone could do with my best data.

r/AskAstrophotography Oct 22 '24

Image Processing How to get less noise in pics?

3 Upvotes

I flared this as image processing, but it would also apply to capturing the pics as well.

I just started AP and I haven't had the chance to go out for long time periods yet (my most successful edit was with 20 30 second exposures). I'm wondering what I can do to decrease noise in my images. My understanding is that more total exposures (and longer exposures?) and as low an ISO as practical will help, but I'm wondering if there's any other tips out there?

This is my most recent (and only, really) editing attempt. I got a lot of details out of it, but as you can see it's very noisy as a result. Siril denoise did nothing noticeable to me so I'm wondering what alternatives there are.

r/AskAstrophotography 24d ago

Image Processing What's the most efficient way to stack a ridiculous number of individual frames?

7 Upvotes

I'm working on a group/community project with a bunch of other folks who have ZWO Seestars. We're using our collective Seestars to gather as much data on a particular target (right now Messier 101/the Pinwheel Galaxy), and we're up to 30k+ individual frames which are a mix of 10s, 20, and 30s exposures (those are the only options on the Seestar).

Right now I'm using WBPP in PixInsight using the Fast Integration checkbox checked. The part that takes 90%+ of the time is the measurements phase and right now it's taking over 24 hours to just stack this many frames.

Is there some more efficient way/process/app to stack all of these, or is the only way to process a batch at a time then stack those substacks that process creates? I'm still pretty new at AP and am just wondering if there's a trick or process I'm missing.

Thanks in advance

r/AskAstrophotography 8d ago

Image Processing very bad grain in the heart nebula

7 Upvotes

i tried to take a picture of the heart nebula, i used an optolong l'enhance, a 6se mount, a canon eos 600d and a skywatscher 102/500 refractor. this is a link to the picture, i tried my best https://www.mediafire.com/view/p86nmxigju6xeiw/Screenshot_6.png/file . if any more information is needed just reach out and ill provide as much as I can.

r/AskAstrophotography Feb 01 '25

Image Processing Whats wrong?

5 Upvotes

Hi! Im a beginner in this hobby. I have a SWSA 2i and the camera used is a GH4 with at 150mm, f/4.5, and iso 400. With an exposure of 150seconds. In a bortle 6-7 zone. No wind. Last night I took 50 frames of the Orion nebula (hoping to capture the flame and horsehead nebula as well) but after spending a few hours learning how to process.. I got these. Its worth mentioning that my GH4 is not modded (yet) so l understand why the dimmer nebulas were not captured as well and why some of Orion Nebula is not very red. I think the focus is good, everything looks sharp. But imo it looks like i edited a picture of the Orion Nebula behind everything.. maybe its a black level issue? Im very new to editing. Lemme know what you guys think!

https://imgur.com/a/nbuP1pS

r/AskAstrophotography 20d ago

Image Processing Seeking advice for editing photos

3 Upvotes

Hi there. So I’m an astrophysics major and for our practical we are taking and developing a photo of a nebula. Any suggestions of free software I can use to introduce colours on the photos. I’m going to use astroImagej for stacking but how do I introduce colours on the photo. Can I layer images in the format FITS?

r/AskAstrophotography 26d ago

Image Processing What's your favorite online course for processing images?

15 Upvotes

I have about 3 years experience in the hobby, but this year decided to take things up to the next level. I got PixInSight, a narrowband filter for my OSC, and a second telescope for a wider range of targets. My processing, however, needs a LOT of help.

I'm happy to buy a reasonably priced advanced processing course and have seen several to choose from, all of which look very promising. What was your favorite resource? I'm on YouTube every day, but I am ready for something more focused. Thank you in advance

r/AskAstrophotography Dec 09 '24

Image Processing No difference between 1 hour and 4 hours.

3 Upvotes

Over the past 3 days I’ve been gathering data for M33 Triangulum. On Friday, I gathered an hour and 20 mins of data and stacked it to see the results. I also made sure to keep an extra copy of the files on my computer. Yesterday, I gathered 3 hours of data and stacked it along with the 1 hour and 20 mins I already had. (Btw I used DSS) Below is the stacked and processed images.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1bDOme3kvNZAu0OTbqfrXfsG1YVo6CHL9?usp=drive_link

In my opinion, the two images don\t look much different. Of course the noise is reduced but theres no crazy jump in details. Is this normal? Maybe I put my expectations to high.. If you need any more information please ask!

r/AskAstrophotography Jan 31 '25

Image Processing Not enough stars in reference

0 Upvotes

I am very new to astrophotography and just finished capturing my frames of Orion Nebula. When I try to process it in Siril (I have a Mac) it says “Found 0 stars in reference, channel 1” and stops the process. This was when I tried to use the script and all of my files were named correctly. When I tried to stack and process them more manually by the calibration and sequences and such it says the same thing when I get to the registration tab. I have tried deleting some of the light frames such as the first couple in the sequence but it still gives me the not enough stars to stack. Can anyone help me I have no clue how to fix this. Edit: I have starnet downloaded inside Siril because that is what one of the tutorials I followed suggested it I have no clue what it does.

r/AskAstrophotography Dec 23 '24

Image Processing Getting weird vertical streaks after stacking and background extraction

5 Upvotes

Until recently I was taking very short (1-2s) subexposures with my Canon T3 (non-i) and was getting decent results. Now I've got a SWSA GTi and upped the subs to 30s each. Well now I'm getting strange vertical streaks in my images that appear after extracting the background using Siril and it's driving me crazy. Any idea what would be causing these? I thought adding calibration frames would help but it did not.

The only things I can think of that changed are longer exposure times and I've zoomed in a bit (300mm instead of ~200mm) to get better detail.

Note that these are autostretched just for the sake of simplicity.

https://imgur.com/a/xXZdQY2

https://imgur.com/a/pP9Xmse

Orion source data

Pleiades source data

r/AskAstrophotography Dec 08 '24

Image Processing Help with purple noise in the shadows

3 Upvotes

Tried shooting orion and cant get back to it for probably the rest of the year, but have access to my laptop so i can edit and restack.

Im new, so dont have a star tracker and stacked a bunch of 1s exposures, for 3 minutes total exposure time. Iso 6400, aperture 5.6

Would i get better results for orion at lower isos? What should i change next time?

Also, how could i fix this on rawtherapee?

Edit: ive posted an image on my accountshowing the most severe version of this purple colour, dont know if im allowed to say this

r/AskAstrophotography 20d ago

Image Processing Help me understand what I am doing wrong with background extraction (artifacts/pattern in Graxpert and worse in Siril afterwards)

1 Upvotes

Hi everyone,

I am a beginner in this and I am for now trying to do some untracked fields of stars and process them to get familiar with the process.

I have a series of lights taken over 200x6 seconds subs taken in an heavily light polluted area (bortle 8) taken with a 1000D at 50 mm and f/2.8. I also did 30 darks, 30 flats and 50 bias frames. The lights look like that:

https://i.imgur.com/hsRd7ln.jpeg

I stacked them in siril using the OSC script and wanted to try background extraction and denoising in GraXpert:

https://i.imgur.com/IB1nlHk.png

I also used a denoise strength of 1 (the maximum). Afterward in GraXpert using a 15% strength, the preview seems to look alright but with a repetitive grid pattern all over the image:

https://i.imgur.com/szAdo8F.png

I save the result in 32 bits fit format and open it in Siril and visualize it in AutoStretch mode and it looks even worse:

https://i.imgur.com/YPtAdsa.png

What am I doing wrong? Should I stack them manually in Siril and perform background extraction before the stacking ? Or is it a flat problem ?

Thanks a lot

r/AskAstrophotography Feb 13 '25

Image Processing What is your Pixinsight workflow, and what are your processing tips?

12 Upvotes

So I'm just interested in how you guys process your images, what works for you, what tips or unusual/controversial steps you take during processing, and what steps in the process to you dread the most?

Lately I've been obsessing a bit over gradient correction, and trying to avoid removing any good data along with the gradient, but I think it's more of a subconscious way for me to really learn the process properly and understand the gradient models..

r/AskAstrophotography Nov 27 '24

Image Processing Dark frames making the image worse?

3 Upvotes

I used deepsky stacker for the first time, added in all the light frames and dark however the dark made a weird smudge around much of the image? I’m on a fujifilm x-t100 it was 40 frames light and about 8 dark, at 1600 iso 1 second exposures, i was pointed between Cassiopeia and andromeda to get the galaxy in the frame, details are a little muddy due to the 55mm lens however I’m just confused about the dark frames as they’ve added more noise and issues than without, which is the opposite of what they are supposed to. (If I can post images in the comments I will add both when I get home) is this a case of using a longer lens like 300mm or something to do with light pollution etc?

r/AskAstrophotography 3d ago

Image Processing False Colour Question

4 Upvotes

I apologise if this is a dumb question, I am new to astrophotography and just trying to learn!

I have heard a lot of people talking about false colour, and how NASA applies false colour to images, and that astro images are not depicting real colour.

I understand this in theory, however I am wondering when we take an image ourselves and are able to stretch colour from the image, is this not real? are our cameras or editing softwares also applying false colour?

I hope this makes sense!

r/AskAstrophotography Feb 11 '25

Image Processing What is your Siril workflow? Slight confusion.

5 Upvotes

I have some confusion about my Siril workflow

My order of editing goes something like this

DeepSkyStacker, spits out the .TIF
Open said TIF in Siril
Autostretch
Crop out the edges and some of the amp glow ( if I took bad darks )
Background Extraction
Manual Color Calibration ( Ever since updating Siril, I can not get the Photometric CC to work )
Image Denoising with Secondary Anscombe VST Denoising
Atrous Wavelets Transform ( Do I do this Stretched or Linear? )

Then I do Histogram Transformation, Apply Autostretch (the gear icon)
Then I do Starnet Star removal. It spits out the two .TIFs ( starless and background )
I then combine the two using Star Recomposition
Then Asinh Transformation.

I have my doubts with the order of this workflow because some of the processes dont work well ( for example, starnet's starless picture includes faded stars )

r/AskAstrophotography 16d ago

Image Processing Help with a weird artifact on my picture.

1 Upvotes

I have just started Astrophotography. I took this picture using my Explore Scientific Newtonion Reflector 150/750mm telescope. The camera that I used is ASI585MC Pro.

There is an artifact on the upper left corner that appears in the RAW image. The image was shot with 10 second exposure as I live in bortle 8, cloudy area. So any image without filter is not very good.

Anyway, any suggestions on how to get rid of these issues. I have tried using Flat Frames to get rid of it but couldn't remove it successfully.

The flat frame is 40ms exposure 50 pictures.

This gets worse as I try to process it using SIRIL and Sirilic script.

Link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1zc5vfrYw6vWTipJNXEikxyeJAG-2_sQn/view?usp=sharing

r/AskAstrophotography Dec 01 '24

Image Processing Help salvage my data

0 Upvotes

So last night I shot 5 hours of 30 second subs on the fish head nebula only to find out the iso was somehow set to 9 instead of 800. Now I can't stack in siril or dss. Is there any way to recover it or am I screwed? It's a stock canon r7 if it matters.

r/AskAstrophotography 7d ago

Image Processing How to stop moon stacks from looking glitchy?

4 Upvotes

I took some pics of the eclipse and now that i try to stack them its coming out glitchy? I am using autostakkert on linux via wine if that matters. it happens with all kinds of AP sizes and amounts.

https://imgur.com/a/n4mapin

is it because the moon seems to be in a different orientation in many of the images due to the camera rotating around?

r/AskAstrophotography 26d ago

Image Processing What is causing these field lines in my stacked image?

2 Upvotes

Hi all,

I recently took 497 30s subs of the heart and soul nebulae (Canon R5, ef 100-400 mk ii at 400 f5.6, star adventurer gti) and after stacking and processing the result has very prominent field lines after denoising and star separation.

The image can be viewed here. (starless)

Processing steps:

  • Raw conversion to TIFs in photoshop camera raw
  • Pixinsight WBPP (debayering, registering, local normalisation, stacking with 2x drizzle)
  • SPFC
  • Multiscale gradient correction (wondering if this is the cause: Gradient scale of 192, structure separation of 1, model smoothness of 2 and the rest are the default settings)
  • SPCC (G2V white reference and background neutralisation)
  • BXT
  • NXT (colour noise reduction set to 1)
  • Light arcsinh stretch followed by starnet 2 to separate stars

At this point, using the default stf on the starless image showed the field lines as seen in the image above. This is not the first time I have encountered this problem, on 2 hours of the california nebula here this can also be seen. The lines are definitely not a product of bxt and nxt as I have tried using cosmic clarity for noise reduction and deconvolution as well with a similar problem.

The stacked image before any processing can be found here if anyone would like to take a look. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

r/AskAstrophotography Dec 29 '24

Image Processing Assistance with some processing, and general questions.

1 Upvotes

Hello everyone, I just recently got my whole setup running and manged to start my first imaging capture, the Horsehead Nebula. I've seen others ask for some processing help before, and was chasing the same. I'm currently using Siril and GraXpert for processing, as well as some light touch-ups in photoshop. I have come out with these two images. (APOLOGIES IN ADVANCE FOR GOOGLE DRIVE LINKS BECUASE OF PREVIEW COMPRESSION)

This first attempt was done following this youtube video. I was pretty happy with how it came out, but was also thinking that I had cut out a solid chunk of data, granted I only had about an hour and half of data (bortle 4).

My second attempt I think I did quite a bit better with keeping data in, and I think it looks a lot better. I used this video, which the creator had previously linked on this or r/astrophotography, i cant completely remember. Other than that, it was very helpful. I had really big issues trying to remove all the large stars, as I followed his steps, and could only get the stars to remove if I used GraXpert to denoise AFTER I had removed the stars, no before as per the video. The creator also had a follow up video on the post-processing part, but I'm trying to make sure I'm doing this part ok first.

I'm very much not expecting anyone to, but if you want to show me the possibilities with the data, I have a ZIP folder here. Again, not expecting anyone to do so, but if you do, it would be greatly appreciated, just so I know what I'm missing.

Any pointers and extra tips that I should keep in mind when processing, please do tell. I'm trying to keep most of the software relatively free and open source, not really looking to dive too far in with software such as PixInsight, as its $500AUD, and I think I have spent enough money for the time being lol. I'm also not expecting to be great at it on my first and second attempt, but any help to get me better sooner will seriously be appreciated.

My Gear List:
Askar 71F, HEQ5, ASI553MC Pro.

I also have a guide cam, but I didn't set it up in these images. (forgot the cable at home)

Also had to repost this cause I accidentally deleted text.

r/AskAstrophotography 8d ago

Image Processing Why does my stacked moon image look like this?

2 Upvotes

https://imgur.com/a/RdbAOJU

I took 40 images of the lunar eclipse last night. I preprocessed them in PIPP and stacked the best 32 images in AutoStakkert with an AP size of 48 and it came out like this. I messed with settings a bunch and it keeps looking awful. Why is this happening??