Astrophotography

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Welcome to !astrophotography!

We are Lemmy's dedicated astrophotography community!

If you want to see or post pictures of space taken by amateurs using amateur level equipment, this is the place for you!

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Please read the rules before you post! It is your responsibility to be aware of current rules. Failure to be aware of current rules may result in your post being removed without warning at moderator discretion.

Rules

I | Real space images only.

Astrophotography refers to images of astronomical objects or phenomena exclusively.
~~Images that show objects or people below the Kármán Line (100km) will be removed.~~ We won't be enforcing this rule for now, but as the community grows eventually we will split and have a separate space for just landscape astro.
Images must be an accurate representation of a real astronomical object.
See this page for more details

II | Original and Amateur Content Only

Image posts can only be images that you have captured and processed yourself, or discussion about capturing and/or processing your own images.
Images acquired from public sources, professional observatories, or other professional services are not allowed.
If you have done a drastic alteration or reprocessing of a prior submission, you may repost your edit - but only after a minimum of one week has passed.

III | Post Types

Image posts are to link directly to the image, not to landing pages, personal galleries, blogs, or professional sites. Link to these in the comments. (AstroBin and Imgur, are allowed)
Questions are welcome here for the time being.
Links to blogs, articles or external websites should be interesting and promote discussion about amateur astrophotography.

IV | Titles

All image posts should just include include the name of the object being photographed. Extra info such as equipment, it being your first image, or other information should go in a comment along with your acquisition info. Please see this page for more details.

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V | Acquisition and Processing Information

All submitted images must include acquisition and processing details as a top-level comment. All posts without this information may be given a warning, and if not updated will be removed.
This includes the telescope, mount, camera, accessories, and any other pieces of equipment you used to capture the image.
You must also include processing details, i.e. the programs you used and a general rundown of the workflow/processes you used within those programs. “Processed in Photoshop” is not enough.

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M42 - The Orion Nebula (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

4 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Equipment details:

Mount: OpenAstroMount by OpenAstroTech
Lens: Sony 200-600 @ 600mm f/7.1
Camera: Sony A7R III
Guidescope: OpenAstroGuider (50mm, fl=163) by OpenAstroTech
Guide Camera: SVBONY SV305m Pro
Imaging Computer: ROCKPro64 running INDIGO server

Acquisition & Processing:

Imaged and Guided/Dithered in Ain Imager
420x30s lights, 40 darks, 100 flats, 100 biases, 100 dark-flats over two nights
Prepared data and stacked in SiriLic
Background extraction, photometric color calibration, generalized hyperbolic stretch transform, and StarNet++ in SiriLic
Adjusted curves, enhanced saturation of the nebula and recombined with star mask in GIMP, desaturated and denoised background

This is my first time doing a multi-night image, and my first time using SiriLic to configure a Siril script. Any tips there would be helpful. Suggestions for improvement or any other form of constructive criticism are welcome!

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Wow, this is great!

Thanks for including your equipment and process.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Looks great overall! I think you may want to increase your dither size (or do them more often), as there's a hint of raining noise when pixel peeping. Also if your tracking allows for some longer subs, you could try to HDR those with your 30" exposures and bring out some of the fainter parts of the nebula

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Thank you for the feedback!

I think you may want to increase your dither size (or do them more often)

Good catch! What happened was that I forgot to tick the box to enable dithering on the first night, so the first ~180 subs or so had no dithering at all, which definitely caused the pattern noise. That said, I'd be interested to hear if you know of a rule of thumb for dithering settings (i.e. how frequently should you dither, and how many pixels). When I was dithering on the second night, I dithered every 2 frames by 2 pixels, but I more or less picked those values arbitrarily.

Also if your tracking allows for some longer subs, you could try to HDR those with your 30" exposure

Gotcha, I'll give that a try next time. I'm shooting with an unmodified and unfiltered camera from an urban area (Bortle 7-8) so I figured longer exposures wouldn't help too much, but it sounds like it might still be worthwhile. Thanks for the tip!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

If I’m shooting just one filter I usually dither every 4 frames, but most of the time I loop LLLRRGGBB > dither or HaHaOiiiOiiiSiiSii> dither. Imo dithering every 2 frames is a lot as you’ll spend a lot of time waiting for it to settle and not actively imaging.