Andromeda - Take 2

[Bob Israel]

First, thanks for bearing with me and my learning journey in astrophotography. The Celestron Origin will produce a stacked TIFF file doing all the work behind the scenes. I deecided to take that file and process it in Pixinsight. This is the result. It also includes increased learning in processing images in Pixinsight and I feel like I'm getting better at curves and saturation. I finished this image in LR and Photoshop and used Topaz Photo AI as well. Comments, critique, tips, etc., greatly appreciated.

Celestron Origin (6" RASA)
335mm focal length
2.2 focal ratio
480 images at 10s each
80 minutes of integration
Pixinsight
BxT
SxT
NxT
LR/PS
Topaz Photo AI

 

[AlanLichty]

Much better with this approach. Beautiful DSO rendering.

 

[Bob Israel]

Thanks Alan!

 

[JimFox]

This is definitely a step forward, and a big improvement over your first attempt. It is a journey though. I shudder to look at my first Astro images they are so bad. But it's all about steps as you said, and this is a great step forwards.

So the Origin does stack your images for you? And then it puts out a tiff? Do you also have access to individual fit files? It seemed like you must have since you were using WBPP.

 

[Bob Israel]

This is definitely a step forward, and a big improvement over your first attempt. It is a journey though. I shudder to look at my first Astro images they are so bad. But it's all about steps as you said, and this is a great step forwards.

So the Origin does stack your images for you? And then it puts out a tiff? Do you also have access to individual fit files? It seemed like you must have since you were using WBPP.

The output from the Origin include a finished jpeg (lower rez/quality), a stacked TIFF file that needs stretching, raw files of all subs in a FIT format. This is in increasing resolution (megabytes). I don't really care for the jpeg files after seeing what the TIFF file looks like. I also like stacking individual subframes and the resulting stacked/finished photo, which can include drizzling, is the highest MB output.

 

[Mike Lewis]

Looks good, you are on your way.

ML