Flaming star nebula wide field. Date: 09/01/2024. Place taken: Marlborough UK, Bortle 4. After a whole month of cloudy skies, a clear night. There was a lot of airflow. All my wide-field photos from the night are vivid green!
SpaceTinkerer Full Spectrum modified Canon 6D + Samyang 135mm.
Stacking with Sequator. Default values.
Photoshop.
RcAstro GradientXterminator and StarXterminator plugins.
Rosette nebulae wide field. SpaceTinkerer Full Spectrum modified Canon 6D + Samyang 135mm.
Place taken: Marlborough UK, Bortle 4. It was a real battle with windy conditions and thin clouds. Also some nasty gradients and green noise at the post process.
Stacking with Sequator. Default values.
Photoshop.
RcAstro GradientXterminator and StarXterminator plugins.
DeepSkyColors HLVG
Trying some new stacking software and post-process techniques. I’ve been using Sequator for my last couple of images. I like the simplicity of it and the fact that it just aligns and stacks and doesn’t drastically alter the images behind the scenes. I had some issues with DeepSkyStacker (weird, wavy artefacts in stacked images) and after some advice in their forum, the conclusion is that DeepSkyStacker is not designed for handling a huge amount of tiny stars, such as in wide-field deep sky images.
Also trying StarXterminator plugin. I’m impressed with it! It removes all stars so you may process a starless version separately and blend images for better results.
It was a nice, clear night yesterday. I didn’t miss the opportunity to capture the above rich star field somewhere in between Cassiopeia and Perseus constellations. To the upper left, Heart and Soul nebula. To the lower left is the Double Cluster in Perseus. To the right smaller star clusters and part of Cassiopeia constellation (the 2 bright blue stars). The map below shows my frame in the wider area.
In one of my ‘Tinkering Stories’, I suggested a portable deep sky astrophotography setup. The above photo and all the others to follow are from a similar and upgraded setup: Star Adventurer Pro, Astrophotography Modified Canon 6D (available for sale here) and a Samyang 135mm f/2 lens. For the post-process, I followed this excellent tutorial from A.V.Astronomy. If I may add something to this tutorial is that balancing the colours as a very first step in Photoshop helped me to avoid strange colour casts, hard to remove at a later post-process stage.
After nearly a month of cloudy skies in the middle of summer (!) yesterday, I had the chance to fully test my new setup. It was a lovely night! I also had a pair of binoculars so I admired a few cosmic gems as I was waiting for the 100 North America Nebula exposures to complete. Just to name a few of the things I saw: Jupiter and its Moons, Saturn (although I could marginally see the rings with the binoculars), Andromeda galaxy (not as seen in the photos but such a great experience to see it Live!), Triangulum constellation and Galaxy.