since last summer, I have started doing landscape astrophotography more seriously and bought a new setup for this discipline. It consists of:
Camera: Canon EOS 200da
Lens: Samyang 12mm F/2.8
A stable tripod from SmallRig and a solid powerbank
I always capture one set of images, which I expose adequately to have no trailing of stars in my image.
The same set of images will be used for foreground and background.
In case of the first of the two images I am going to share, I also captured a second group of images that contained me standing on the field, but that is kind of a special for this image.
So far, I am very happy with the setup. I intentionally opted against any form of tracking, as I wanted something that is very quick to set up and get to work.
However, I still struggle with the processing part. Here is a description, of how I do it, based on the two images I publish here:
I put my lights and darks into WBPP in PixInsight. I do a full run, except for LN of course, but including drizzle.
This yields me an integration with sharp stars and washed out foreground, which I use for the sky. I process it as a normal deep sky image mostly. That means, I apply BXT, then SPCC for color calibration with a background reference high up to avoid light pollution near the horizon. After NXT, I move to non-linear with masked stretch and finish with some CurvesTransofrmation and saturation adjustments. This is the final non-linear image processed for the sky.
To produce an image for the foreground, I use all the calibrated and debayered frames from WBPP and integrate them. Here the processing is much easier, mostly a LinearFit to the sky image, NXT and some HistogramTransformation.
In case of the image that also shows me, I processed the image containing me in the same fashion as the foreground.
So after these steps, I have two (or three respectively) images: one for the foreground, one for the sky (and one for myself, at least in the first image).
I combine them in AffinityPhoto by cropping out relevant parts using the selection brush tool and a lot of time.
This is the step where I struggle the most. Nearly always, there is some tree in the image, which I had forgotten about during capturing. Trees are a real killer for me in this regard, I don't know a good solution to separate them from the sky.
After this lengthy description of what I do and how I do it, here are the two resulting images:
143x13s @F/2.8 ISO 3200, Bortle 6 skies
This is my most revent landscape astro images, captured only a week ago.
Full resolution: https://app.astrobin.com/i/hjvkdc
196x13s @F/2.8 ISO 6400 under Bortle 3 skies
This is one of my first astro landscape images I captured with this setup, when I was in Austria in September 2024.
Full resolution: https://app.astrobin.com/i/j1qr3x
I hope to get some critique of what I can do to improve my processing. I feel like there is more in the data, but I lack the skill to pull it out and can't exactly tell what may be missing in my workflow.
Also, if any of you has found a good way to combine foreground and sky when there are trees around, I would very much appreciate any tips you can give me!
If there is something else besides the processing that you think requires some changes, please, let me know too!
CS and kind regards for any comments
Gerrit
