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Hello from Snohomish. Welcome to the site and the hobby!
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You are off to a great start! Also, don't think that you can't do amazing work with free tools because you most certainly can! Siril and Gimp are very powerful and capable packages. You might also look at Graxpert and Astrosharp, two other great and free software tools. BTW, I used to live up there. Lived in West Seattle and worked at the Museum of Flight. |
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As you've seen plate solving is a magical and wonderful thing. You're right in that you'll reach a point when getting the data is pretty much routine. It's the processing that really brings out your skill and creativity. Both things are fun but in different ways.
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yup, that was big fun. I was in the education department, ran the Challenger Learning Center among other things.
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Hello there. You have a very portable and promising imaging rig. I have been in Seattle a few years ago. Wonderful location. One of those places where you are grateful to every single occasion the clouds dissipate for an imaging night  |
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Hello from the Tri-cities! Nice shots and here's to clear skies!
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Welcome, Phil! I am also a newbie relative to the average Astrobin user, having been here only a year. You seem to have great raw data! I am a 100% Siril user and so far I haven't seen the need to move to the expensive Pixinsight solution! Maybe one day... Have you experimented with Starnet++ in Siril? This was a game changer for me. So I did something bad... and I edited your image of the Veil (it was only a 300kb image that you posted publicly). I apologize profusely because editing other people's raw data without their permission is definitely unethical - especially on Astrobin which is a site with high integrity. But if you'll forgive my uninvited intrusion, I wanted to see what your veil image would look like with Starnet++ separation with some reduction in Star intensity. Below is one result using your data. Of course, image editing is completely personal. There is no right or wrong, and everyone has a different perspective on what appeals to them. I was not in any way attempting to criticize your image. I did want to add that that I think you nailed the composition of this image! I'm looking forward to following you and seeing your progress! Neil  |
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Awesome, thanks Phil and I'm so glad you weren't offended by my editing of your image! Bortle 6 isn't too bad - you'll see incredible images on this site from astrophotographers in Bortle 7-9 and I'm sure they will gladly share advice. I am luckily in Bortle 4/5 but I still have some challenges. Once you have Starnet++ successfully installed as an integration to Siril you will see the menu below under star processing in Siril. No need to leave the Siril application. I am also 100% in the Mac/Siril/ZWO environment and I can confirm that everything integrates well. For a Mac the trickiest thing is setting the permissions to allow the StatNet++ files to be read. There are plenty of Google/YouTube explanations of how to do this but I'll happily walk you through if you are having difficulty. Of course it's up to you... But I wouldn't recommend mixing Mac and PC environments unless you have to. I have found everything I need in the MacOS environment. I am lucky to have a recent M2 MacStudio with a huge amount of RAM and the the processing of everything is fast. There are many more applications available in the Windows environment, and I believe that most astrophotography users use Windows. I recommend picking one environment.   |
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Hi Phil No need to credit me! Capturing good data is the hard part. With StarNet++ all of the stars are removed. Two files are created: one with a filename that starts with "starless" and the other with a filename that starts with "starmask." Everyone's workflow is slightly different, but in my Siril workflow I: 1) stack the images 2) Autostretch 3). crop the nasty stuff at the edges 4) do Photometric color calibration 5) Remove Green Noise 6) do Starnet star removal then I work on the two images separately, and on each image (starless and star mask) I: 7) change back to linear mode 8) Stretch the image 9) Save the file in 32 bit TIFF format 10) edit in Photoshop (curves, color saturation, sharpening, contrast/highlights/shadows, color adjustment) 11) Reimport into Siril 12) Save the edited file as a FITS file. Then when I have both images back as FITS files in Siril I use the "Star Recomposition" function. As I said, there is no right or wrong workflow and I have seen many other workflows, but this is the one that works for me. Of course editing is very personal and I tend to oversaturate colors which many people HATE! But that's what I like. Oh I should add that I also use Topaz Denoise in my workflow. That is the one piece of software (besides a Photoshop subscription) that I purchased. There are lots of noise reduction packages including the ones built into Photoshop. Of course your image was already stretched so I didn't do any further stretching but I did Photoshop editing and noise reduction. Editing the star mask file (the one with stars) is generally an exercise in getting just the right amount of star brightness and number of stars, and maybe a little color adjustment. Neil |
