It's an Art (and a Science)

So much could be said about the equipment, and the camera settings, and the post-processing applied. I've launched this website well short of adding in all I'd like to say and share about the technical aspects of the equipment and the processing parameters I've been experimenting with. But every journey begins with the first few steps, and so...

What I will say up front is there is so much more I don't know or that I haven't mastered, and that applies to shooting as well as processing. My planets are sub-par; my Moon shots are barely inspiring. The Sun is an unselfish target for all I've shared here. My passion is for the nebulae and the galaxies, and at that my long focal length and 46'x26' FOV limit what I can grab until I choose to change my optical train.

I encourage anyone with questions or comments to look at the Blog for a topic that might coincide with your area of interest.

The Equipment

- 14" ACF LX850, Optec 0.62x reducer
- Native 2855mm f/8; effective 1950mm f/5 as configured
- ZWO ASI2600MC Pro, cooled to 0°C in summer and -10°C in winter

- Was guiding thru early 2024 with Meade proprietary Starlock; equipment malfunction ended that

- Piggybacked Evolux 82ED f/6.45 refractor as guidescope and as wide-field photography platform

- ASI120MM Mini guide camera
- Flats, darks, and bias frames. One set for Live Stacking and another for post-processing
- Integration times thru 14" ACF from 10' to 60' and longer; 10s or 30s subs; unity gain

- Will experiment anew with wide-field exposures
- Post processing in Siril with Starnet+ and Photoshop

Post-processing

I keep a set of recent flats subs, along with a stacked dark master and bias master, ready in a template folder on my Desktop. All initial processing is in Siril, up to getting a good stack. Sometimes I run a script all the way to stacking, other times I stop at No Stack and discard outlier subs based on Roundness and FWHM criteria using the plot chart.

Either way, after I stack, I do a crop and then apply Photometric Color Calibration. After that I typically Deconvolute whether it's needed or not, and then I use Starnet+ to separate the stars from the rest of the image. My last process in Siril is an initial set of stretches using Generalized Hyperbolic Stretch often followed by a Histogram Stretch only to work on the blacks.

Then that file is saved as a .tif for certain routine and other one-off refinements in Photoshop, after which it is imported back into Siril and converted back to a .fit for a Recomposition, which adds the star mask back in. Final tweaking is again done in Photoshop.