Ep 033 - Astronomical Image Processing using DeepSkyStacker and Photoshop CC 2020
A few people asked me what process I go through to make the images I've been publishing lately.
This video is best viewed in 4K if you have it in order to see some of the detail.
Keep in mind too that I'm relatively new to this kind of processing. There are people that have been doing it longer, and no doubt better than me, particularly the processing part in Photoshop! I'm happy to get feedback on ways to improve!
I livestreamed some examples of the capture process recently. Such as this: • Imaging the Small Magellenic Cloud in SGP which shows how the software will slew the telescope to a spot in the sky, validate it's position, autofocus, change filters, take the long exposure, then rinse and repeat all night long while tracking the object from East to West in the sky.
This video shows two main steps.
Stacking with DeepSkyStacker 4.2.3
This is about 20 minutes long.
The stacking process to bring all the 5 minute exposures on each filter in to a single image (per filter) that has much more signal in it than a single exposure. There is a registration & alignment phase, then a stacking phase.
You can get this software at http://deepskystacker.free.fr/english...
Image Processing with Photoshop CC2020
This part starts at @21:18 and is about 13 minutes long.
We combine the three stacks of filtered images to produce an RGB image (in this case a false colour image) in Photoshop.
This process shows the "stretching" of the image to bring out subtle detail that is in the 16-bit greyscale image (65,536 different shades), and concentrate and enhance those details (which might only reflect a few thousand shades right at the dim end of the range). Then we show how adding the three different filters together from the monochrome camera to produce the colour image, and some additional colourisation tweaks to get a nice look to it.
My Photoshop Actions to turn the SHO image in to the typical "gold" hue are on Github, free to use: https://github.com/RobertPascale-Astr...
In the end, this one wasn't a keeper though. It might be if I can reshoot the HA subs, but it was forced when conditions weren't brilliant. Waste of a night's imaging!