Tuesday, November 19, 2019
 The Pleiades |
 HorseHead Nebula |
 The Orion Nebula |
 Post Processing |
Tuesday Night, November 19, 2019 ... A Night for Nebulosity ...
I was certainly busy on this first super clear moonless night using the big 11" Celestron EdgeHD telescope with the Starizona HyperStarHD reducer.
These are some of the most photographed astrophotograpy targets, and for good reason, as you can see. I also included a schema as to how I process these pictures from the single sub-frame image, to the resuts of stacking them, into post processing in a astrophotography program called "PixInsight" and then color and image enhancements in Photoshop CC
To give you an idea of the process of going from photographing an astronomical object with the telescope to the final picture, here is what I do.
Picture 1 is one subframe … that is, one image of several that were photographed during the night. In this case, 60 images all being 60 seconds in exposure length.
Picture 2 is the final image after being stacked in a software program called “Deep Sky Stacker”
Picture 3 is the result of performing a color background extraction of the excess green color … since a "One-Shot-Color" camera has an extra green bit (RGGB).
Picture 4 is the result of processing Picture 3 in Photoshop CC. My primary editing tool is the “Camera Raw Filter” function which allows for many different color and brightness enhancement tools. This is followed by an “Image ‘Selected Color’ adjustment”. Step 4 is usually the most entailed and takes the longest, sometimes over an hour.
Equipment Used:
Telescope: Celestron 11" EdgeHD
Reducer: Starizon HyperStarHD
Altair Hypercam 294c Pro Tec One-Shot-Color camera
Filter: Baader UV/IR cut Light Pollution
Equatorial Mount: Celestron AVX
Polar Align: QHY Pole Master
Software Used:
Mount control: Celestron PWI
Guiding: PHD2
Capture: SharpCap Pro (64 bit V 3.2.6054)
Galaxy Stacking: DeepSkyStacker v4.22
Post Processing:
PixInsight v1.8.8
PhotoShop CC 2019
Location:
My Heavenly Backyard Garden, Savannah, GA
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