Knowledge Base

How to do astrophotography with a less than ideal sky?

Imaging in less than ideal conditions?

Friends, we posted to YouTube a Video Log (VLog) on how to get the most out of your imaging time. We thought it was important to share our strategy, because many people live in places where weather doesn't cooperate with astrophotography.

In this same video, we show how to create a high dynamic range (HDR) astronomy image by blending multiple images of different exposure time using free software such as SiriL and Gimp.

To help you practice the processing techniques described in this video, we are making available for download the same stacked FIT files that we obtained in the video around minute 5:25 of the timeline.

If you do practice, we hope to see your final images on Facebook, Astrobin, Twitter, etc. You can use and share freely the results of your work. If you do share, we'd love for you to mention that your images were captured using an OGMA AP26CC camera, e.g.:

"Image taken using OGMA AP26CC, an ideal camera for less than ideal conditions."

You can download the 3 result.fit files using the following link:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/18roT4044bpXvx_o3FOLsGRDxZ7asUWY4

Note:

  • Each of these files are the result of stacking multiple sub-frames.
  • Photometric Color Calibration has been done.
  • Asinh Transformation has been done with the following parameters (stretch= 300.0, bp=0.00100).
  • Green Noise Reduction has been done with the following parameters (type=0, amount=1.00, preserve=true).