 Hey everyone, Nico Carver here. This past July I put out a call to send me your images for another astrophotography critique and the response was incredible. I had 257 images sent in so it took me several months to look at each one and my notes document is up to 75 pages long single spaced so I'm sorry it took so long but I wanted to get to every single person who took the time to send in an image but now that I'm all organized with all of my notes today's the day to finally hit record and get this done we're going to go straight through so here we go. This is from Anand and it's an image of the Andromeda Galaxy of course taken with a Rokinon 135 millimeter camera lens a Canon T3i DSLR and a Star Tracker and it's a bit under an hours worth of integration from a Portal 6 guy. I think that the color the framing I love the vertical crop and the contrast here all look really good I don't see really any issues with the final edit but Anand did send in the raw stacked data so let's take a look at that and actually I already did a okay so here's just the raw picture after stacking and you can see there's a light pollution gradient the the light pollution dome is over here on the left hand side so the first thing I did is I just removed that light pollution gradient with automatic background extractor and picks inside here and you can see there is this ring artifact and it's hard to really pin down exactly what that's from it's usually some kind of reflection from the optics it could be something like a very localized light pollution source reflecting on something but what I'd try to do is just try different things to pin down what that's coming from with the Rokinon 135 I don't think it's the lens but I don't know why you have this sort of ring artifact the other thing to really try is just play around with your flats technique because maybe this is a an over correction of the flat or something like that so play around with different kinds of flats and because this is really difficult this kind of ring artifact to completely get rid of in post processing so it's something you want to address in the acquisition stage for this image of course it didn't really matter too much since andromeda was in the middle and you could just sort of crop it away but in a field where you had like nebulosity across the field this would be a bigger issue so work on flat fielding otherwise good job anand erin sent in this image of the row of yuki cloud complex done with without a tracker just a sony a 6000 and a sigma 16 millimeter lens on a tripod so i'm surprised by the amount of detail erin got at 16 millimeters focal length like the star cluster here is quite impressive i i wonder why erin cropped in so much because if this was done at 16 millimeters i think erin could have fit in a lot more like the blue horse head and even the milky way core area but maybe there were problems and other parts of the field so other than that i think this is very well done personally i would have shot probably wide open rather than stopping down um is that's my preference when shooting without a tracker i'd rather get more signal and just uh you know sacrifice the star quality a little bit but that's that's me other people are more sticklers about about tight stars a becca 18 captured sickness region with a canon yasara roking on 135 lens and an eye optron skyguider pro a becca 18 mentioned splotchiness from uh combining in the starless image especially in the canada section here of the north america nebula and um that's a common problem especially uh you know with star net artifacts and if you if you change the if you do star reduction too much then that's going to leave uh those artifacts exposed when you add the stars back so my way of dealing with that um and i'll just show sort of my version here is to just leave the stars alone don't try to reduce them um just play around with levels on the star's layer um or curves to get sort of how you want it to look so i just never do star reduction on a wide field image it just doesn't work out because of that splotchiness and i'd i'd rather have lots of stars even if they look sort of like noise then what i know is the sort of splotchy star reduction artifact kind of stuff um my one other note about this image is i think that the color balance got a little bit too red i'd prefer a little bit more of a balance with the o3 signal um so i just did a quick version here and you can see i got a little bit more color variety a little brought out blues a little bit more um and reduced uh sort of the reds impact um so and the other thing i'll say about color contrast is i think that it also helps with detail so when you have a color contrast like the sickness wall here is in red against this more neutral uh background it really makes it helps it pop out and it looks like you've captured more detail but it's all through manipulating color adi sent in an image of the carina nebula which is a treat for me since it's a southern hemisphere only object and this was shot with a nikon d750 and a nekor 105 millimeter lens untracked on a tripod from portal 4 and it's about 11 minutes total and i think for untracked this looks really great um adi mentioned maybe going overboard with the processing and getting weird shades of orangish brown in the image and so i tried processing the same data sort of with adi's uh issues in mind uh and i was able to get this out of it um i'll just quickly show everything i did here i just took the stacked image that adi sent i made a starless version of it that looks like this i did that with star net plus plus i did a small color adjustment using a blue curve to bring out the blues and carina then let's see here i added the stars back as a new layer and set that to screen blend mode which you're going to hear this a lot this is sort of my standard processing and then reset the black level and did a little bit of a color adjustment there to remove some of the green noise and then i just finally added a little bit of saturation and playing around a little bit more with curves and called that done and so i'm not sure exactly how you brought out so much brown uh stuff uh i don't think that this area has that much brown dust um so just play around with your um but it is i think in the milky way so there are a lot of stars so maybe that's that's it but just play around with your techniques and uh and keep going thanks for sending it in okay uh this is from adrian and it's another highlight of the southern hemisphere skies uh this is an image of the fighting dragons of aura and adrian took this with a william optics 81 millimeter telescope and a zwo 1600 with zwo narrowband filters and first off i want to say i love the composition and color of this it has a really nice flow the composition um and the color variety gives it this really nice depth um so i have two small critiques one is that i find that the o3 halo artifacts are a tad distracting so like this this kind of thing where it's like a very saturated blue around the star um so i would just suggest cleaning those up manually um you could do it in photoshop uh or another tool just when you're combining things just look for those artifacts and and use like spot healing brush to clean them up um if you know if they're away from any nebulosity make sure you're not destroying any detail but like for instance this one i don't think you would be destroying much detail if you just cleaned up that artifact and my second critique is with the topaz denoise ai i'm not opposed to it as a rule but i think it's very easy to go a little bit overboard with the sharpening aspect of it and this feels to me just a bit overdone with the sharpening in topaz um but that's that's really a personal taste thing again the color work and the flow of this composition are just superb so other than the o3 artifacts um i think that the stars look great too um you know the the size of them uh their impact in the image and their their color saturation all look really good so thanks for sending this in all right amid sent an image of the north america and pelican nebula taken with a nikon d850 an opt along ellen hands filter and a red cat 51 telescope all on ioptron skyguider pro star tracker amid asked about the balance of the photo and how to balance the image when the stars are so unevenly distributed so sygnus uh i mean uh yeah sygnus is smack dab in the middle of the milky way so of course there are a lot of stars and um then in this photo it's interesting because on this side you have the northern colsack nebula which is a huge dark nebula so my critique of amids processing here is that i think the crop is a bit too aggressive and i'll talk about balance more when we look at what i did but i think the problem with balance here is that amid didn't like all the stars on the left side of the image so cropped them off and that centers the pelican but then it makes sense that the left side of the photo is too heavy since there's nothing over here to balance out the north america nebula my other small issue with the processing is that like many people do i think that the reds are too saturated here which makes the image feel sort of not as detailed because of lack of the color variety that you could bring out okay so here's what i did with the image and what i tried to do is keep as much color variety in the image as possible i added no extra saturation saturation because i really liked that you know how it looked uh with this sort of original framing and uh there's interesting stuff in each corner that i think balances it out well creating a nice x pattern uh with the nebula the big nebulas in the middle and um when you start looking at it uh i think that the the huge star cloud over here to the left of north america and the coalsack over here on the right they provide sort of a nice yin yang kind of balance to the photo all on their own so sort of answer your original question how do you balance when the stars are very different i think you just accept that's how this scene is and uh and and try to embrace it uh in your crop and in your processing okay askel askel shot uh this image of the ryan nebula with a breccer exos 2 mount not really a mount i'm super familiar with but i think it's sort of uh on the lower end um and a sky watcher 150 pds newtonian reflector and a canon 400d from a portal for sky and i think this looks really good very sharp and noise free which is especially impressive considering the 400d is a pretty old canon dslr and the collimation of the telescope i'm just looking at the star spikes looks really spot on my only critique is that i bet askel could bring out a bit more of the running man nebula up here in my experience if you can bring out the lower part of the ryan nebula uh then you should be able to get pretty good detail in the running man and um this is just a jpeg so ignore uh so this is just a jpeg that was sent to me so ignore what i'm struggling i'm going to bring out a lot of noise but just to show you that there is more stuff up here in the running man uh i'm just going to bring up the levels a lot and you can see that we can see more of the shape of the running man if i really bring up the levels like that now it might be hard to to balance out the noise and other stuff and bring that out but i'd i'd give it a shot um just because i think that would sort of help uh complete the image by making this corner so interesting with the running man up there albin time lapse shot this with a canon 200 d and a 70 to 300 millimeter zoom lens at 250 millimeter focal length from a portal four and this is shot untracked meaning just on a tripod and albin time lapse uh as the name suggests uh noted that they usually shoot time lapses and they're new to trying deep sky stacked exposures and i think it's very good for someone new to deep sky shooting untracked for me it's a little bit over processed meaning pushing the data further than it can go based on the amount of data that you have and over processing creates artifacts usually that's sort of a sign of it usually uh or especially i should say on the stars when you when you try to push something too hard you get sort of rings and different things on the stars um so i tried to stick with sort of the vision for this picture but um not have all of that sort of saturated artifacts on the stars and in other places and reprocessed it using albin time lapses data like this um and so i just sort of went through my normal process here uh starless um playing around with saturation and curves bringing the stars back in resetting the black point and then i did a little bit of noise reduction using the camera raw filter which in photoshop is right here alex sent in in alex sent in an image of the carina nebula and the southern beehive cluster shot with out a tracker using a nikon dslr and a nifty 50 lens alex was looking for tips on bringing out the milky way and nebula detail um so it's definitely a challenge with untracked stuff uh what's the right amount of detail to bring out or hide uh we had an earlier picture of the carina nebula that was sort of going through this exact same thought process um but in any case uh here's what i came up with um it's it's a lot i think messier than alex version so i think you know it really just sort of comes down to what you're looking for um but since alex mentioned how do you bring out the milky way in the nebula detail this is how you would do it but it's not perfect it's a very sort of messy looking i think um so it's a trade-off and maybe you'd want to go somewhere in between where i went here is this sort of maximalist editing versus where alex went to which i would call more minimalist editing but anyways i'll explain my process here but it's pretty similar to what i'm going to explain many times i'm sure in this video i went starless with star net plus plus i did some curves work i probably went a little bit too far there but oh well um brought the stars back in just did a little bit of cleanup um a glow in that lower right corner there reset the black point increased saturation and a final color correction curve but um the other thing i'd say is just i love this field i can't wait to get down to the southern hemisphere and see uh this kind of cool field with the milky way plus these huge open star clusters the karina nebula so it's so uh neat and the and the giant colsack uh here i think that's the colsack so really cool field thanks for sending it in alahandro sent an m 31 image in dramata galaxy untracked from a very light polluted location it looks very good i love the star color alahandro was able to bring out and alahandro mentioned having to redo the flats the next day um and was wondering if that was an issue they did send the full image here and looking at this full image i don't think that the flats are a problem here um there is a lot of sort of funkiness going on uh you know along the edges but i think that is more of a untracked re-centering issue where um my biggest advice here looking at this final stacked tiff from alahandro is to re-center more often because this this was done at 200 millimeter focal length and so i've noticed at 200 millimeters i'm re-centering every 90 seconds every two minutes something like that um pretty often to keep the object as centered as possible the more you increase the focal length when with untracked the more you're going to have to um take you know 40 50 shots even 30 or 20 something like that and then re-center and so it's it's a little bit more intensive with with untracked at high focal lengths but it can be worth it because you can pick up more detail of course um but i think that will really help with all the the registration artifacts we're seeing here i don't think uh this is an problem with uh flats but uh this is an impressive amount of detail on the galaxy especially considering this was taken from a portal seven sky uh so thanks for sending that one in okay hey uh alex b sent a tracked wide field image of sygnus done with a tamron zoom lens set to 35 millimeter focal length i really love this it's very nicely processed to my eye um i love constellation shots where you really get a sense of the vast number of stars in the band of the milky way um and it definitely helps to have a sharp lens for a shot like this because uh if your lens is not very sharp then it gets very overwhelming with a ton of stars um i don't really have any suggestions in terms of processing alex mentioned having trouble with polar aligning because it was hard to distinguish polaris from other bright stars and i think the key there is to really get comfortable with the northern constellations of ursa major cassiopeia and ursa minor um because of course all three can help really confirm that you're pointed at the right spot uh if you sort of look at a star chart on your phone and see how cassiopeia um or ursa major depending on the season should be pointed um you can really pretty quickly even with lots of stars i think point in on where polaris should be and then you just get down and sort of line up your star tracker and make sure it's it's pointed right the other thing is use your latitude adjustment on the equatorial wedge to really dial in your latitude as closely as possible before starting with any of this because then you know you're at least correct up down and you just have to get it uh correct sort of left right which again you can do sort of looking at the constellations so hope that helps okay alex oh uh sent me an image and this is again untracked from of the andromeda galaxy and again taken at 200 millimeter focal length i love the colors uh it looks really good the blues and the sort of neutral whitish brown and the star color looks good i think for my taste uh the topaz denoise ai is too much and i don't usually use topaz denoise ai on untracked images because it's just not i just don't find it works very well so what it does is it it takes noise and it blurs it and it but it also sharpens some of the noise so that it looks like signal um so anyways for untracked stuff i'd rather use the camera raw filter here for denoising um so here's sort of my take and yes it does look noisier than yours but yours also has sort of a lot of um blur uh that looks sort of strange to my eye so anyways i think uh camera raw filter is safer than topaz um you know i i personally only use topaz if it's something like a 30 plus hour integration and i'm just using it very uh carefully like it two to three percent strength um otherwise i think that it sort of makes a mess of things a little bit um but i think that uh you're definitely on the on the right track here and uh keep it up i think that the the color uh variety you got here for an untracked shot is is really nice okay anador sent a very nice milky way image uh at 50 millimeters with a canon m mirrorless camera and a cheap 50 millimeter lens and again i love wide fields that aren't afraid of really showing off how many stars there are when we just let our cameras expose uh for those smaller stars um that we can't see visually just that like we're looking up at this night sky doesn't look like this because we're not seeing all those small stars i do have a few very small tweaks um one is i would reduce the chromatic aberration and this is again with just a bit of that camera raw filter i can open it up here to show you what it looks like in a sec and so the chromatic aberration fixer is called defringe it's under optics and you just play around with these sliders um to fix it um but doing that uh you know taking the chromatic aberration out turn the image a little bit greenish at least on my monitor so i uh fix the color balance and then i just brought down the overall brightness of the image just a little bit with curves like that andrea shot this image of my favorite constellation Cygnus and mentioned it was their first image done with a star tracker andrea used a Nikon 3100 and a Nikon 50 millimeter f1.8 uh i think that's the Nikon version of the nifty 50 and was wondering about the stars being misshapen um away from center and yes this is a very common thing with almost all lenses but especially wider angle lenses so 50 millimeters and wider you're gonna see more distortion as you get away from center um generally uh so you know we can say that certain lenses are better or worse it's not that all lenses perform the exact same way so sometimes even very expensive lenses that are great for normal photography are really bad under the stars in terms of star distortion um but now that you have the star tracker i'd probably look into something like the samyang 135 f2 lens it's a very good lens for astrophotography with really minimal distortion uh considering the price of that lens it's like around 500 or even 450 um and so there are better lenses out there but a lot of times you know the really good lenses for astrophotography like the sigma art series are over a thousand dollars so the samyang 135 is really very good considering its price um and and once you start getting into like trying to get to perfection you're just going to be going at higher and higher prices to eco just a little bit better star performance um but i should say that i think that this looks better actually than the canon nifty 50 and it's a very nice image uh with really uh nice color and uh restrained processing so thanks for sending it in okay and andres uh m or first andres um this okay andres uh this is a really cool photo very inspiring to me because it's something that i'd like to try myself this is the trapezium region of iran so just that really bright core of iran that most of us usually blow out to just pure white um but you can see it's a really interesting color the green greenish color of nebulosity that's the true color of it this was shot using an eight inch reflector telescope without tracking from the middle of a city a white zone in terms of light pollution and it's 50 photos at one second each at iso 200 and so this should give you an idea of how uh the trapezium is pretty unique and how bright it is for a deep sky object so it's really the perfect target to try um untracked with a telescope so high focal length um and i don't really have any critique i love this it's a perfect natural color shot the trapezium should be this sort of sea green um with a little bit of the red hydrogen alpha coming through and then the goal when you're shooting the trapezium is to split these four stars in the trapezium cluster and they're clearly separated here so great job okay another andres sent me an andromeda done with a zoom lens set to 135 millimeter focal length and using a celestron cg3 mount with motors added to it and this was done from a portal five sky and andres mentioned maybe having overdone the star reduction um so maybe but i i've definitely seen star reduction um done sort of way too much where you're seeing artifacts or just looks very unnatural and this doesn't look that unnatural to me so i think it's pretty tasteful especially for this high contrast uh look that you're going for and my one critique actually has to do with the saturation in the galaxy um i think that the saturation boost to the galaxy worked out pretty well um to the outer uh arms and things like that um because the hot blue stars uh out here really need a sort of a saturation boost but as we go in towards the core some of these colors are starting to look a little bit unnatural like an unnatural orange that isn't quite right and this is sort of nitpicking but it's just happened to me many times so that's why i recognize it so a quick fix would be just to select the part of the galaxy where it feels like a little bit too much saturation and bring it down a little bit um but other than that very nice job okay andrew andrew shot this with a modded nikon d850 and an l enhanced filter on the red cat telescope and andrew asked about the colors and if they looked natural and was worried about oversaturating and i mean no the colors don't look natural and that the ha emissions are gold when they should be red um but or a slight pinkish i guess because there's so much o3 in this region but people use the word natural in all kinds of different ways and andrew put it in quotes so i think he understood that there isn't anything this is this picture isn't anything like true color of the nebulosity um so maybe the question is more does it feel natural and i think it does i think this doesn't look oversaturated and i like the amount of color variety um like over here in the satyr butterfly region it looks really nice um and we're also seeing more greens uh over here while in the o3 area we have just more of like a straight up blue and so not lots of nice color varieties and good amount of contrast um meaning not too much contrast like i love when you can see uh the natural color of the sky is a little bit brighter than some of the dark nebulosities and so i think you really nailed the contrast which is what helps it feel natural and not uh like overdone so good job okay here we have a photo by andrea um and andrea shot this untracked with a nikon dslr and a sigma zoom lens and it's a conjunction of mars this bright object right there and the pleiades star cluster and andrea mentioned that this is their second astrophoto ever and it was stacked but they didn't do much further processing and i don't blame them um these conjunctions of planets and deep sky objects are very difficult because the planet is so much brighter than the deep sky object so it's challenging to retain color on the planet because we want to see like that's the red planet mars while trying to bring out any detail on the dso um so i think this is a good balance here um and nice job capturing this event andy ben did a bunch of 10 second exposures tracked with a sky watcher h e q five and a sky watcher 80 millimeter refractor and sunny mirrorless camera and i think the processing is very good um i did look at the raw data and i can see that the reason the background is as dark as it is is because you're trying to hide walking noise and walking noise is very annoying it's this diagonal uh noise and the only really effective way to get rid of it is to dither um or to really nail polar alignment i suppose which but dithering is only practical once you've added auto guiding but as soon as you do add a guide scope and guide camera to your kit then you should immediately work on figuring out dithering because it would really help eliminate uh walking noise um i also suspect that taking longer than 10 second exposures would help with walking noise because then you're burying the noise and more signal so even without guiding i think that would help um and i'm pretty sure with your sky watcher h e q five in that telescope you should be able to go up to 30 seconds no problem without any kind of trailing issues from the periodic error of the mount um but other than that really nice job the focus looks very good and it's very uh sharp nice picture of uh a perfect uh pair of galaxies to try with your setup okay angelo shot andromeda with a canon 60d tamron zoom lens and a sky watcher star adventurer and angelo asked about image acquisition feeling that his shots were not as detailed as they could be um so what stood out to me here on close inspection you zoom in just a little bit is that all of the stars are a little bit trailed from left to right and then just a little bit pointing in the upper to the upper right corner and when all the stars are trailed in the same direction like this um that is that means that there's some issue with tracking so it could be polar alignment it could just be that the the mount can't handle uh sub exposures as long as you're doing angelo mentioned they were doing 90 second sub exposures so my first advice is to try 60 seconds or even 30 seconds and then you know you're you're shooting at f2.8 if you want to try to match uh exposure with the shorter exposures then you can just bump iso and that that method of just using shorter exposures is i think the best way to avoid this kind of trailing um other than just really practicing polar alignment making sure you have good balance nothing is loose or dragging on the tracker and i think that's an important one you know loose loose things could be like the wedge could be loose at just make sure everything is really tight nail polar alignment and then take some test exposure see if you can maybe get up to 90 seconds but if you zoom in you see any trailing then back it off to 60 seconds or 30 seconds and that will help with uh detail too if you're if you're not trailing it's not just that the stars will be around her but you'll see more detail in the objects okay uncure uh shot the marcarian chain of galaxies and uncure mentioned after going full spectrum modification meaning taking out some filters out of the camera they notice these artifacts i think they mean like this here and this here i'm not sure what this is about but i don't think that's what they mean they mean these little like white smudges um on their photos um so i suspect these little uh smudges have something to do with some physical thing on the sensor maybe i mean dust is usually dark so i'm not sure why they're bright but maybe maybe they were dark and then with flats the flats over corrected and they became bright but anyways that's my best guess is that there's something physically uh going on with the sensor dust or something like that um to test that theory try a manual air blower never use compressed air but just like a manual rocket blower hold the camera upside down so that the dust can fall out and then take a long exposure blow the air manually onto the sensor you know and see if you can dislodge any dust if that doesn't work um which i'm not sure if it will but it's always good to do that first anyways then get order one of these sensor cleaning kits which will be sort of a one-time use thing with some liquid to help clean the sensor and see if that helps okay anurag sent in an image of m81 and m82 bodes and cigar this is lrgb filtered plus ha filter and it was taken with a refractor zwo mono camera and i think this is really uh well done you know it's a very high contrast high saturation look but they they did it well and anurag asked about the integrated flux nebula ifn which is this very dim um background dust kind of stuff um and it's it's especially strong in this area of the sky so to see if i could find any i stretched the heck out of the uh the luminance filter because that's where you would probably see it first and i didn't really see much of it there um but what i did find in stretching the loom like this is lots of reflection issues these rings are uh sure signs of reflection issues so check your your optical tube your spacers make sure that everything is a matte flat black to try to get rid of those um there's also this big obvious um i don't know a dust spot or something here i don't know what that is um but and i'm surprised that didn't get taken out with flats and i'm not sure also how you dealt with all with that one especially in processing the photo but it it's uh it's something i would i would look at with your system is is try to figure out some of these uh rings and and reflections um other than that let me see what i think about this picture i think the color balance is pretty good i think you could have relied on the luminance uh just a bit more to bring out detail and keep the saturation of the each a boosted red um a little bit lower so lower the saturation on these on these reds i know that it was exciting to bring those out and i think they look pretty good in the cigar on the bodes i think they look a little bit too popping like they're they're not part of the galaxy anymore like it looks almost like they're like on top uh paste it on or something uh so that's it i think it's uh really well done and i would just look at what's going on with uh with this these rings i've had them before and they were my spacers were just a little too shiny even though they were black spacers i painted them with matte black paint and i got rid of those rings okay a rosh uh shot the pelican nebula with an l enhanced filter and asked about star elongation on the corners suspecting tilt uh so i agree um there might be some tilt um because if i look at the center they look pretty round if i look in the corners i can see a little bit of elongation um so that could be tilt i don't know i might it could also be a back focus issue just make sure um you know your your back focus is really right on um i i'm you probably have already looked into that but just something to look into you know it might that might just be the best you can do you could try uh fixing uh tilt with you know foil tape or something like that but i i'm usually too lazy to to do that anyways uh i don't think it's too bad in terms of processing i just think this could go further i'm used more you could use more stretching so i'm just going to put a curves adjustment on here just to show you that even just something like that on the jpeg i think there's a lot more data uh in here um the other thing i'd say is uh i'm not sure if i'm i like this composition just because you have part of the north america over here um but then sort of nothing over here on this side of the pelican so i just wonder if you could have done something a little bit more interesting compositionally but i think the data looks really nice i mean i i to me the slight elongation doesn't really bother me but i know some people it does so if you you can try to figure it out but i think the focus is good um and it looks pretty uh pretty clean even when i just apply the stretch to the jpeg i still think it looks pretty clean okay another arash uh sent the north america and pelican taken with a canon t3i and a canon 200 millimeter prime lens on a star tracker and was asking about how to best bring out emission nebulae with a stock camera well i think you did a really good job of it here um the only thing is i think we just need to finesse the processing a little bit to get rid of the green noise and the the chromatic aberration that's really common with this lens though sort of see this sort of like orangish red around a lot of the stars and so i just did that here just to show you what it looks like um and it's really great data so i would just keep working on processing it because you've captured a lot of nice sort of o3 signal uh the and the ha signal which is common uh with a stock camera and i think can make a really beautiful photo of this region as you have done here so i just used my normal processing technique where i took the photo i made a starless version with star net plus plus i increased color with curves and saturation i added the stars back in and on this stars layer i screen blended it and also applied the de-fringing with camera raw filter and then i did a final uh reset of the black point okay next up we have arne and arne did a very nice wide field on the sygnus region uh focusing sort of on satyr centering on satyr and i think that arne framed it this way so that they could include the supernova remnant uh the sygnus loop or the veil nebula whatever you want to call it down here um but it doesn't come across super well um but and then it also means that because you framed it this way uh the north america nebula is sort of awkwardly cropped on this side um so i think i would have preferred a normal um horizontal rotation even if it meant cutting off the sygnus loop uh beginning more of the north america uh so that's my only critique is just the is the the framing and the rotation but i think other than that it looks it looks really good and uh especially for that wind-up tracker which it seems like a lot of fun and i hope to use this summer okay speaking of the veil nebula or the sygnus loop uh we so i should explain what i mean by that you know we sometimes we say the eastern and western veil nebula but then when you when you shoot the whole thing with the flaming pickering triangle and all that you could call the sygnus loop supernova remnant so if you hear me just say sygnus loop that's what i mean uh it includes all of the pieces of the veil um this is uh pictures by artur or arthur i'm not sure uh and artur artur and uh this picture of the object was done by artur and artur did this with an acromat meaning a a doublet telescope that's um not as corrected as a as an as an apo and uh they did it with a stock nikon d610 so that's very impressive to shoot the veil with a stock dslr and artur mentioned um just having gotten a fladner for the telescope and that made a big difference yes so if you're using an acromat uh getting a fladner will really help because the stars will clean up a lot so anyways i think this is a very nice image it's very impressive how much detail they got in the uh a flaming pickering triangle here uh if you you know if you've picked that up uh with a stock dslr you're doing something right and i think that uh the star reduction is pretty good too it's you know it's a little bit uh it makes the little small stars look a little bit like noise but that's really uh sort of the best you can do for the veil nebula region because it's so packed with these small stars so i think this is uh is well done in terms of the star reduction okay arian shot uh this with the nikon d5300 dslr and a nikon 85 millimeter lens no tracker from a portal five area and they sent two versions this one which looks good and then this other one where they said they stretched it really aggressively to try to pick up the horse head nebula here and as i do uh see it um but then they mentioned that with this version the noise and the color banding and all that is pretty bad and yeah that's a that's a common problem with uh untracked is that uh when you're you start for signal and you try to boost it up in post processing you're also bringing up the noise and the any problems with the camera sensor anyways arian said they shot this at iso 800 so i'd suggest trying a higher iso might not help but it's worth a shot and of course if you can get anywhere even darker than portal five that can also help with noise issues i've found doesn't doesn't intuitively make sense but i found that um the reason it does work is because when you're at a very dark spot then you're doing less in processing to subtract sort of like light pollution gradients and things like that and uh then the light pollution itself is a signal that comes with its own noise so going to a darker place can help with noise in your image as well but i agree with you that this one where you got the flame but the horse head is pretty much invisible is still a nicer process overall okay and then we have asa and asa sent this milky way image over a rock formation and said the rock was lit up by cars and by a town below and i like it especially the natural green air glow down here that was not processed out i think that looks really cool um the the overall brightness of the image makes me feel like it's not very naturalistic um so you know this is just a jpeg but let me just try taking down the brightness here something like that i think is where i would put it so you know this is all about taste but i you know and personal preference but i i like a sort of darker moody ear milky way image and i think that by bringing down the brightness a lot like that it also actually makes the the rock formation look more dramatic and make it even though i know it was lit up by cars and towns and everything it makes it look more like night you know um with it at full brightness like this it almost feels like a milky way afternoon or something so i like to have some some dark blacks in my night shots astro shot this untracked with a stock dslr and kit lens and it's definitely a difficult object to do with a kit lens and an unmodified stock dslr so it's great that we're seeing some structure here in the north america nebula i did take a look at the raw frame and i think this is good processing for what you had my only suggestions are one to take more flats i mean to take more lights if you can uh this was 202 lights or sub exposures and going up to 500 i think would make a big difference or even more if you can and then my other suggestion is if you haven't tried the aryan nebula yet that's a winter object well this is a summer object so maybe uh since this video is coming out in the winter it'd be a good option for you right now it's much much brighter than the north america nebula so it'll be much easier to bring out untracked compared to north america but otherwise a nice job it looks pretty well focused and uh and pretty good for a kit lens so astro brick sent an image of andromeda shopped from a very light polluted sky and this is 400 lights at three seconds each at f2 on a star adventurer with a sony camera and a zoom lens and um they had a bunch of questions about sort of the the performance of this lens what i'd really recommend with a lens like this is and here's just a more sort of neutral um stretch that i did just to show uh the massive distortion um is to stop down the lens because at f2 i'm guessing that's pretty probably wide open or close to wide open so try stopping it down to like f5 and take longer exposures so uh three seconds is 800 if you stop down to f5 or f5.6 or something like that um and then exposing longer i think you might get a lot better performance out of it um and not see so much you know weird stars especially away from center um that would also help with noise too because three seconds is pretty short um if you did like 30 seconds you know that might be a combination of bringing down the iso and the aperture but uh i think that would be worth trying before you feel like you need another lens okay astro abude 7 took this image of the little goon and triphid nebulae and my main suggestion is um just to do a little bit less with the processing here um and specifically doing less with star reduction and noise reduction so uh if you were like let's say 80 percent on those things star reduction and noise reduction uh if you're at 80 percent try 30 percent um and especially the the noise reduction i find can give it sort of a an artificial look where some parts are super smooth and then other parts are more crunchy and so um i did just look at your raw data and the data actually looks really good um you know like there's a lot of detail in here but the what's really holding it back is the uh huge vignetting and and and there's like a ring here too so i think what you could what would really help is flat fielding so if you can figure out how to get a really good flat master flat frame to calibrate your lights with uh that would really help um good cleaner cleaner data so keep trying try figure try to figure out flats and and make them uh work better uh and uh and go from there okay astro amateur one captured central Cygnus with a stock cannon t3i and a cannon nifty 50 on a sky watcher star adventure and they asked why their colors seemed unusual um i think it's it's normal not to get a lot of red with a stock camera um although you could just boost the red channel a bit in processing to bring it out other than that i think you just stretch the data too hard um bringing up everything a little bit too much um and uh the noise becomes you know becomes so bright here uh that it's hard to tell what's noise and what's a star um so anyways i i did it here's my take on your data i didn't really bring out the reds too much but maybe a little bit more than you have them here they look a little bit more orange in yours and then the main thing i focused on is just um a different uh stretch uh so you know when you stretch it not as aggressively than the noise won't take over the image so much but you can see that you can still get a lot of nebular detail uh you know even uh with just your nifty 50 lens uh this is the starless i applied some curves and saturation put the stars on top as a screen blend and then reset the black point and you know this i'm gonna that's my sort of standard just sort of test of what the data looks like you know i might do more in processing but just to show people uh who are shooting wide field like this sort of what they have i find that this is a good way to do it just go starless apply a little saturation to the starless screen blend the stars on and and reset the black point you can really get an idea of what's what's in the field that way okay astro creations sent this image of the lagoon nebula done with a canon 40d a celestron power seeker 70 millimeter telescope and an a ryan astro view mount so the all of that is you know uh what i'd call budget gear it's it's uh but for budget gear this is really well done it looks really cool i really enjoy the framing of the lagoon as this vertical feature up and down i rarely see it that way um i usually see it turned 90 degrees clockwise i guess from here but this orientation gives it a different feel my only suggestion is in the stretch to see if you can go for a little less contrast and a bit brighter overall in the shadows and i know you said that you had a lot of red noise and things like that so but i wonder if you when you say red noise if what you were seeing was really noise or just the milky way because the lagoon is smacked up in many stars that are sort of this sort of like orangish reddish color um and so it can seem like noise you know especially over here when it really isn't um so i i just play around with different stretches um bringing out uh things with a little bit um less contrasts meaning you know not making the sky so dark and the uh bright parts the nebula so bright but just more in between where the mids are coming out a bit more okay astro jeff astro this is astro jeff's first astrophotograph very impressive much better than mine was i think um it was shot with a rokinon 135 millimeter lens and a full spectrum canon dslr on a star tracker and i think that the focus um could be a little bit improved it's either that or or maybe that the um you should use a clip-in ir cut filter um just there's just so many stars in this region and then the eye if you have a full spectrum camera the the infrared picks up so many more um but uh and in the in the deep red so then that can give a color balance shift too so i'd try it eye or cut filter and then also maybe just uh i'm not sure if the focus is is quite right um you also mentioned wanting to work on color balance which i agree it's a little bit um too magenta ish reddish um so i just took your data and tried to make it a more neutral uh color i don't think i got it quite right but it's more neutral maybe maybe now i'm going a little too blue um but i just do it by eye and uh it takes practice to get color balance right you know i look at the the histogram sometimes sort of see are the channels lined up over here on the left hand side uh that could see at least a good black balance the white balance is harder there are tools um and picks insight and seral for for getting the white balance right but at least in photoshop you can get the black balance just by sort of lining up the left hand edge of the color channels so another southern hemisphere nebula this is you know i i love these because they're a treat for me to see something different uh something i've never seen before i've been able to photograph myself and i think this looks really nice uh this is by astro girl dot au and astro girl dot au asked about getting the color right especially the ha looking to orange um and astro girl dot au uses pics insight so let me actually jump over to pics insight for this okay so i'd actually be prefer to do this in photoshop but i can do it in pics insight here since that's what astro girl dot au uses i'm just working off the jpeg but what i would do if you see it looks too orange is i would go to the scripts utilities and color mask here's the color mask script i'm just going to click the red button and that picks sort of the hues that are that considers red and click okay it's going to make a mask okay there's our mask of everything in the image that is red and then i'm just going to apply that to this image just by dragging it over here like this and then let's go into the mask menu and no click on this image turn go into the mask menu click off shell mask so we can see what we're doing and then we're going to open up the curves transformation under processes and then i'm going to click into the blue curve let's open up a preview so we can see what we're doing nope not on that on this one there we go and now with this blue curve i'm going to just start adding blue to the reds and remember we've masked it so that white is what's what it's being applied to black is not being applied to so it's not going to change the color balance and anything but the reds and then i'm just going to take a blue curve and do something like that just take it about one make a point about one quarter of the way over and raise it a little bit and apply that okay and then let's see the before and after so here's before too much orange adding blue just to the reds and it looks like that and that's i think a much closer to a at a natural ha response including the h beta part of the spectrum and the reason you're i'm adding blue if you see too much orange is that blue is opposite on the color wheel to orange so by adding blue to red we're basically taking away orange or making it less orange and it gets to this more sort of pinkish red which as i mentioned i think could be the o3 if there isn't any o3 in this object or it could be the h beta but in any case i think it looks the bluish red can look better than the orangish red but it depends on the photo but i think in this one it does help so hopefully that uh made sense i'm less experienced with showing how things work in pics inside even i do know the program pretty well uh i i feel like sometimes i'm bumbling around a little bit so thanks for sending this in astro girl dot au okay next up we have astro hyal astro hyal sent in an image of the pelican and the sickness wall and i really like this uh framing and orientation this vertical crop with the it's sort of like it shows the sickness wall and the pellet this bright part of the pelican how they sort of mirror each other uh which i've never really seen exactly like this but it looks really cool um i think for me the the star reduction and especially the contrast i've gone too far um so with the star reduction it feels like uh maybe you felt you needed to push it because the focus wasn't so good i'm not uh because if i zoom in on the stars here i feel like i can sort of see their donuts um so my guess is maybe you um you did a lot of star reduction but i i should i should say really like the color palette i just think that uh if it was a little bit less contrast it might look even better but i i do like the the sort of unusual color palette okay astro hunting ed took this image of orion with a stock canon t7 an ultra high contrast filter and a nifty 50 lens on star adventure and i definitely pulled out some nice detail i think zoom in to make sure yeah definitely okay so there's definitely a bug in your processing here where you use the wrong um debayer pattern or it's not necessarily that you use the wrong debayer pattern but the program you were using used the wrong one and the way that i know that is because when you see sort of the grid here in certain places like the grid of pixels and then when you look at the colors of the the nebulae when they're sort of reversed so this should be red the horse head but it's green that means that the wrong debayer pattern was chosen and the pixels that should have been coded as red were coded as green and so forth anyways um i think you mentioned use seral so if seral did this automatically you're going to have to find the setting in seral to manually override the debayer patterns instead of putting in an auto um you should for the t7 put it on r ggb um but if that doesn't work depending on which version of lib raw you use i'm just reading this online uh you might need to apply the gb rg um anyways just just try it out on a few samples and once you figure it out uh then the barnards loop uh you know you have here you've caught here and the in the horse head and stuff like that should appear more uh red than green and that will be your your sign that you've you found the right bear pattern okay astro lux brings us a photo done with the telephoto lens on a huawei phone like the one i have here piggybacking it on an equatorial mount and i think this is a very cool idea and one that i want to try i've only tried the normal wide angle lens on my huawei phone on on the milky way this is with the telephoto lens which is more like a 50 millimeter equivalent and for anyone that doesn't recognize this object this is the row of yuki cloud complex you can sort of see the dark streamers there and uh this is the ophiuchus uh reflection nebula the blue reflection nebula there and i think this is a really beautifully vibrant starfield for a cell phone i would not expect to get these kinds of colors out of the stars from a cell phone um and so that's something that impresses me i want to try to do more with my phone after after seeing this uh photo so thanks for sending it in astro lux okay next we have astro swank and astro swank process this in seral s i r i l which is a really good free program for uh processing and then they also brought it into photoshop um but they're wondering how to make it less green in photoshop so let me show you how i would go about this uh it's not going to be perfect since i've sort of did it quickly but it gives you an idea um so i'm going to start with uh saturation adjustment layer so i'm just going to add that and what this does is i just went into instead of setting it to master i set it to greens and then i'm just going i just played around with the hue of the greens so you can see even sort of make them any color and i'm just going to make them uh sort of golden yellow now you can see there's a lot of green left still in when you do this but it gets us uh somewhere a better starting point than it being just completely green like that then i just applied a curve uh both the rgb and the green curve just bringing them both over so that the sky is darker and more neutral okay and then next i'm going to add a selective color and this is where it gets really fun so we're going to go into greens we're going to take out all the yellow make it and add 100 cyan so just to show you what that does and then we're going to go into the yellows after that and mess around with those as well you can see like this and also go into the cyan and take out the yellow and that's going to get us closer to the central part being blue but we're going to have to do it again so we do it again in this one and now it's truly blue we do the same kind of thing with uh yellows we keep adding magenta to yellows to get it closer to this sort of golden orange did i do anything else here yeah keep taking yellow out of green this time i also took cyan out of green and we're at this point getting to a pretty good uh cool like shl look and so then i'm going to add saturation oh i think that's a bit too much let me add a little bit less there we go and finally a final uh reset curve to the black point and actually i'm going to take out a little bit more green yet again i don't know something like that again as i said i'm doing this pretty quickly but it gives you an idea of how to go from uh very green all over to something that looks more like an shl look with this data okay next up we have astro whim and astro whim sent me a photo of lagoon and trifid taken with a panasonic gx9 and lens on a star tracker and they were wondering about bringing out the blue in the field um well astro whim definitely has some here i see the the blue reflection part of the trifid there um but astro whim did send me their data so let's see what i could do with it here we go um and i didn't do much here i just did my first sort of step in processing which is trying to get the color balance right when stretching um and uh getting rid of major gradients but just applying a stretch to see what was there so this is just looking at the data in a more raw state than uh this finished one um but you can see that there is a lot of blue reflection all around and there's also some blue in the lagoon um and in the stars and things like that so you could process it here to your liking but it's really just about looking and trying to preserve data as you as you stretch and and not crush anything so just being careful with your your black level because i mean this is a finished picture but your black level is pretty black so just trying to be sort of neutral and and just keep looking at these um who i can see actually i have too much uh green in the background there so let's see what happens if i adjust the green a little bit oops wrong way cut that part out so the the key thing is just if you if you want to get more of the faint blue nebulosity you're gonna have to adjust your black level to get more of it in but that also means maybe bringing out more of the noise and the fainter stars so there's always trade-offs here okay at astrophotography processed a single four-minute shot that i had taken and previously shared in a video called single shot challenge and i like this take on the processing it's very creative i like that they went with a vertical framing and added these star spikes on all the bright stars especially works well i think on these belt stars to give the picture an interesting focus at the top there to give you an idea of how different this is from the processing i shared this is my processing it looks very different because i brought out a lot of this tried to bring out a lot of this brown dust so these are processed from the same same single four-minute shot just to show you how big of a difference processing can make in astrophotography to get different kinds of presentations all right agi is pretty new to astrophotography and did this with a stock dslr and lens on a star tracker and this framing with the the leading line uh here this dark nebula up into north america and then the dark nebula sort of continues out there into the that upper corner i think is ingenious i haven't seen it too much and it looks really good um overall i'd say this photo looks too bright um i i usually like brighter versus darker because then i can see what's really there but of course it also highlights all the issues uh in the picture like noise and things like that agi did send their data and i took a stab at it there i tried to keep the picture pretty bright um uh it looks a little bit funky um but i was basically just trying to get rid of some of these gradients and uh uneven uh field issues um i did start with pics insights automatic background extraction tool to do that but if you don't want to spend money on pics insight uh there is a free version in ciril s i r s i r i l the background extraction tool in ciril works pretty well too but again very nice image love the framing um and it shows what can be done with pretty basic equipment this was 90 minutes with a stock can dslr 70 to 200 millimeter zoom lens on an ioptron skyguider pro from a portal for sky okay osse astro osse astro is a 13-year-old astrophotographer from australia who took this image of the lagoon and triphid with an olympus camera and lens on an eq one mount with an r a motor drive and they were wondering about making this image better and sharper so let's zoom in just a bit okay and um so what stands out in terms of uh sharpness is that the all the stars are trailed just a little bit left to right um meaning there's a tracking issue either tracking or polar alignment one of the two probably um or maybe a combination of both um and trailing besides just making the stars a little bit out of round will also hurt image sharpness uh because the small details that you're going to get in the nebula and stuff like that can also get a little bit blurred out left to right um osse astro said this was 60 images at 30 seconds each at 150 millimeter focal length uh so i think that uh you know i'm not sure if the eq one is capable of that it probably should be but um so maybe just work on your polar alignment i know that's harder in the southern hemisphere uh you know from australia so maybe that maybe that's the issue but when you think you have polar alignment down my next tip is um if is when you're shooting try different exposure lengths so try 30 seconds try to zoom in on the camera make sure that the stars are round zoomed all the way in if they're not then then bump it down try 20 seconds try 15 seconds and because it's going to get you a better image overall to shoot shorter sub exposures with round stars versus longer sub exposures with with trailed stars but keep it up and looking forward to seeing more from you barni sent this image of andromeda barni said they are new to astrophotography and they have an ecu five mount and don't have a polar alignment scope yet so they're limited to shorter exposures this is 30 minutes total from a red zone with a canon dslr and a zoom lens and they're wondering about how to get more detail into that into this shot well there are a few different ways the main thing is the more light pollution have the more you should focus on just getting lots and lots of total time on the object so 30 minutes from a red zone is just barely enough i'd say to you know be passable like you know this image is definitely getting some detail but you know extending that to one hour two hours 10 hours whatever is i was going to help the other thing i'd say is be careful with noise reduction because that's going to blur detail and i think that you went a little too far with the blurring effects here which hurts hurts detail okay bear bear sent this image of orion and the running man nebulae and asked if the reason uh the flats correction didn't work well is because they didn't use enough flats uh they use 20 flats no i don't think that's the issue it's much more likely that the way that you're taking the flats needs to be tweaked in some way so uh let's see if i really stretch the jpeg here let me do this okay um you can see it's it's darker in the center uh and then a little brighter along the corners uh so that means the flats are over correcting uh for one reason or another and the the first thing i'd try if you're you know flats are over correcting is just decreasing the exposure time on the flats so if you were at half a second try a quarter of a second if you're using like a flats wizard in a in a program you know if you can see the edu value try having that um you know another thing to try is just stack your lights without any calibration frames and see if you have this issue of the bright corners because it's probably flats but maybe it's not uh so stack with just darks check add darks and bias and flats check that's kind of thing this is what i tend to tell people to do for calibration issues is try to try to needle it down to what actually is is causing the problem probably your problem is flats given the corners uh being the issue but never know okay ben uh took this image of the andromeda galaxy with a samyang 135 millimeter f2 lens on a star tracker and this looks really cool i think um ben saw this meteor strike uh right here which is a really nice green meteor in one of his frames and then added that back in after stacking um ben did send in a stack with flats and one without flats and then the stack with flats got messed up and removed a lot of the stars i don't know why that would have happened um but i think it demonstrates something important which is if you think you have good photos you know if you're looking through your individual lights your individual sub exposures and they all look good and then after stacking something very strange happens then like i said in the past critique the thing to do is try eliminating calibration frames and seeing if you can find where the problem is um so the and then you try to fix the calibration frame so the lesson is and don't ever take flats it's that you know you have to work on figuring out why uh something wrong happened um and that that's just a lot of trial and error i can't i can't usually tell someone exactly what to do next but they just have to try out different things uh and uh if i was there with you maybe i could figure it out but uh otherwise i just tell people just to experiment and it you'll get there eventually okay another ben took this nice image of the lagoon and trifid with a camera lens and asked about stock dslr's and hl for response specifically if there was anything short of modifying the dslr to enhance the hl for response and they also said maybe a darker sky could be a way yeah a darker sky will help a little bit um another thing you can try is a filter so if you use an hl for filter or one of the newer dual band pass filters like an opt along l enhance those filters won't increase your signal but by blocking out all the other wavelengths other than the emission nebula ones they allow for much tighter contrast um higher contrast i should say on the hl for regions even with a stock camera i have some videos now showing this and it can help enhance uh those now they will also though block out a lot of this um natural blue color like in reflection nebulae so especially the deeper blues they will capture the sort of teal of an o3 because that's what they're meant to do but um they will stop a lot of the yellows and deep blues and things from coming through so the best i think is you know get one of those off the long l enhance or elk streams or whatever uh use that with a camera lens you're going to want the l enhance because that can be a clip and filter use that to get some of the nebula details then take it out shoot unfiltered like you have here and then combine both data sets in in processing and you really get the best of both worlds that way okay and burned uh burnt send this uh sent this image of the north america and pelican uh with a nice Hubble palette effect taken with a dslr and elen hands filter and this was done with short sub exposures just 44 seconds each and no auto guiding um and i've heard a lot of people say you can't use filters like the elen hands with these very short exposures with no auto guiding it's it's not true exactly uh you're you know it's going to be more difficult maybe because you can see you can see there's some walking noise here that auto guiding would have helped with because you can you can dither in between your sub exposures um you know that's a it's a an auto guiding also helps keep you more right on your target so then you're not going to have as much drift to begin with which was what causes walking noise um so i think it's sort of true auto guiding would help um but it's not it's not strictly necessary to use these filters um another question that burnt head was about the star color um and i think that could be made better with just processing um burnt also sent the just the stretched image so this is with some manipulation of like separating the color channels and putting them back together um but here's just the image stretched with the filter and you can see the star color is a lot better so what i would do is take out the stars from this image and layer them on top of this image um to get the better star color and so you can do that with layer blend modes like lighten or something like that in photoshop or uh gimp bops sent in a nice image of andromeda taken with a vintage soviet lens called the tear 3s which i have a copy of that lens too and i've been meaning to do more with it bops asked about the noise in the photo and the stars uh being a little bit out of round perhaps a bit triangular let's see we can see that maybe a little bit i think they look pretty good but not perfect uh and i think i think that's probably just the limit of the optics of the lens you have you know the lens copy and everything that's just you know chromatic aberration not much you can do about that um you asked if taking darks would help with noise and yes i think they do but the thing that really helps with noise i guess is just total integration time of the lights meaning the photos of the night sky so this is just under an hour integration if you quadrupled that to four hours you're going to see a market improvement because every time you quadruple the total you're going to have the uh you don't really have the noise but you increase the signal to noise ratio uh times two so it it really helps be be able to bring out more of you know in the image without seeing as much noise uh so try try to increase the total integration on even on a bright target like andromeda because the thing about andromeda is the core here is very bright but the actual the outer arms with these blue stars is actually still pretty faint so it just needs more time to develop big nose 13 big nose 13 sent me this image of north america and pelican nebulae taken in sickness taken with an old 135 millimeter focal length lens a modified canon 600 d and an eq 5 with the motor kit attached and big nose 13 wanted me to address the colors in the image and did send me the stack to file to take a look at so my first thought with the colors is that the red and magenta color overall has has taken over the image of it too much um i'll show my processing here so you can see in my processing of the image there's a lot there's more variety of colors in the scene um you know there's more variety in the star colors but also in the nebulae i think we see more of a pale blue uh into red um color is tricky because it's not just about saturation but also contrast uh so when you when you up the contrast uh or saturation too much in an astrophoto both of those tend to destroy color variety or flatten the total number of colors in the image so a couple things i did here in my uh processing is a careful background extraction you can do that in pics inside or seral um serals free then you know removing the stars separating out the stars in the nebula and the stars back playing around with saturation and then a final color balance so you can see here i think uh this is sort of to me looks a little bit too yellow so i just took away a little bit of yellow by i think we're let's see what i did reducing green and adding blue yeah so it's definitely somewhat about you know uh developing an eye for color um but there's also things you can do like just being careful with with contrast uh that are just good general things that you can learn in in processing to to maintain color variety okay bill bill sent in a photo of the wizard nebula somehow the wizard is one i still haven't shot myself but it's on my bucket list to try bill was wondering about printing and images coming out too dark and yes that's a very common problem there are two solutions i found if you're talking about home printing one way is sort of a trial and error method you make a small test print um and then you make some adjustments uh and then you can sort of you know go back and forth between uh your computer and the printer until you figure out what kinds of adjustments are needed for your printer and then uh you have those you can save them in a photoshop file and bring them back up next time and basically just apply those adjustments for other astrophotos the other way is to use a calibrated monitor um there's little calibration devices and then you can load up the the calibration file for your printer and paper and use soft proofing options in photoshop and that works pretty well too um uh and for a critique of this image in general i think um it'd be better if you lifted the shadows up uh here um you know if when i'm looking at an image i like my black levels to be like in the thirties um and on your image they're like down in the single digits so it's almost crushed like you know to black um but you'll see more of a transition from the nebula to the sky when you have a higher black level and it will still sort of look black in comparison to the bright nebula um because your eyes are very good at adjusting to what is what is black and it's it's it's hard um you know i understand because those faint areas of the nebula are much noisier usually than the brighter parts so you might have done this on purpose um but but that's my advice uh to make it look a little bit more naturalistic and then that might also help with printing actually because uh since prints come out darker if you just make the black level a little higher i think it might work better okay borja borja says this is their first tracked astrophoto and for the first attempt i think it's very impressive it looks uh like you got perfect focus nice and sharp across the field um and shows what's possible with a nifty 50 lens stopped down i really need to stop down when i shoot my nifty 50 uh because this looks so much better than what i usually get wide open they stopped down to f2.8 uh from f1.8 uh borja did have a few questions one about the corners not looking as good as the center that's just the reality of using basically any wide angle lens even really expensive ones wide angles you're not going to have perfect stars in the corner to do corners to do that you have to go up to a higher focal length um so you either just live with non-perfect stars in the corners or you crop it down crop down the image um personally i i just live with those stars because i don't think most people really notice that you know that star over there is is just a little bit distorted um the other thing borja asked about is arc sine stretch in seral um and arc sine stretch is a way of stretching with a curve that is designed to help keep star color as you stretch uh is one of the you know one of the problems with normal kinds of stretching is that it's very easy to bleach out the highlights including the star color um i think it looks like it worked well for you here sometimes i have issues with arc sine stretch but i don't know it might just be the data i'm working with i'm not sure um and i don't see have much experience with it i try it often usually i don't like it but sometimes they do so it's just something i think to it's keeping your pocket and try and processing um my only critique i have of the processing processing here is that i think um this little uh blue artifact is a little distracting so i wonder if we just uh you know just took this and just cropped it out like like that something like that i think that doesn't uh hurt the image much at all in it and it just gets rid of that little blue artifact down there okay brad h visuals brad h visuals sent in this image of the wizard nebula done with a sigma 150 to 600 zoom lens at 600 millimeter focal length on a sky watcher eq3 mount a sony a6500 and an stc multi-spectra light pollution filter i think the colors and the composition on this one are really nice um my only critique is that there seems to be a little bit of star trailing zoom in to show you what i mean so see uh so on the bright stars you're not going to see it as much but on the medium sized stars see how they all have this sort of trailing left to right and a little bit up into the upper right corner and that's across the field so even though uh you you went to 600 millimeters to capture the finer detail on the wizard nebula which is understandable if you're tracking isn't supporting uh being at 600 millimeters on your mount then it's better to go with a slightly shorter focal length and you'll actually get more details even if you're if you're at 400 millimeter focal length or even 300 millimeter if you can get pinpoint stars uh with a shorter focal length and then just crop in versus 600 millimeters but you have a bit of trailing um so just try that out i know that it's hard sometimes to see on a on a mirrorless or dslr camera that you're there's a tiny bit of trailing but um you know try out different uh focal lengths and and also do test exposures and make sure you're zooming in all the way in playback and seeing if you can see any any trailing on the stars and if you if you do you know your two options are shorter focal length or shorter exposures usually brandon sent in this wide field shot of andromeda galaxy done without a tracker with a canon 70d and a vintage pentax 55 millimeter lens at f2.8 so this looks really nice i like uh bringing back in this out of focus uh tree here from one of the shots that's my favorite part to really ground us in just how huge andromeda is in the sky um it's over three times the width of the full moon uh brandon does acknowledge uh the whole photo is a bit blue but says that was a stylistic choice uh so in that case i don't really have much of a critique um zooming in on sorry zooming in on the stars i can't really tell they may be in focus uh it's hard to say um and you know they might just be a little bit soft looking because of the vintage lens that's my guess at a 55 millimeter pentax lens they're just going to be a little soft even when in focus because those old film lenses are not super sharp on the stars i wish they were better because you can get really good deals on them but usually a modern lens at f2.0 2.8 will beat out any vintage lens but even though i'm saying that of course you can get really cool photos like this with uh with whatever year you can afford or have access to so thanks for sending this in brandon and next up we have brian brian sent in a photo of the moon which is a little bit different because you've seen mostly star uh photos from for me uh knowing that i don't i shoot mostly the star photos but this looks really cool um it's taken with a sony camera and a very nice zeiss lens which makes it so sharp and this is 200 photos stacked and processed with pip autostackert and a bit of finishing in photoshop and brian mentioned they skipped doing wavelets in red stacks because it already looked sharp but they did do a little bit of sharpening in photoshop um and i i wonder if it even needed any sharpening because i do see a little bit of the typical sign of a sharpening artifact on something like the moon or uh a planet which is a pretty crisp white line all around the edge it's not too bad i'm not you know it's not it's barely noticeable that it's just if you're looking for it you can sort of see a little bit of a sharpening artifact there along the edge um i didn't notice it zoomed out but uh if i zoom in here see there's like a white line there and then the moon uh details start and that sort of goes all along you can really see it there see the white line um so i don't i don't think it's uh it's it's always going to be a trade-off between sharpening uh and getting these artifacts and trying to control them anyways i think this is really nice it's my favorite kind of moonshot when it's in phase like this uh so you can really get the cool shadow details on the craters which uh really come out well here okay another brian uh took this photo of sygnus with a dslr telephoto lens and a star tracker and asked about color and composition so for color i think that you're definitely on the right track it looks very looks very neutral um i would just add some saturation let's see what that looks like something like that and then maybe just add a little bit of an s curve here okay so here's before and after for and after and i'm just doing this on the on the jpeg um but hopefully it gives you an idea of where i would go next with um with saturation and contrast usually i tell people do less and for you i'm saying do a little bit more for composition my only note is uh when you have a strong feature like this uh bright star dineb up here i'd say give it a little bit more breathing room so instead of uh in this case instead of moving the frame because i think it's important to have some stuff down here like this dark area down here what i do is actually rotate the frame a little bit from here um but that might not be an option for you if you don't have a lens color so anyways um if you can you could try to improve the composition a little bit next time but when you have a bright star give it a little bit more room in the frame rather than being cut off right at the top like that okay brody shot this image of entromeda with a nicon d3200 dslr and a zoom lens without a tracker i like it the color and the detail look good but i think i'd be interested in seeing the original crop um this crop is interesting because it's like it's it's sharp in the center and then it's sharper on the left here than it is on the right the right is so um distorted it looks sort of strange um so i don't know maybe maybe a different crop would be better um i'm not sure maybe maybe this is more maybe this is pretty interesting too so uh yeah i would just see what works compositionally um other thing i see is there's a lot of a lot of green noise i wonder if we can bump that down at all with a curve let's see here well we're starting to eat into the detail this is on the jpeg i would just i just play around see if you can on if if you're working with the tiff if you can bump down the green noise without hurting detail on the image okay brice spray shot this image of the milky way core area with a nicon d3100 dslr and a 50 millimeter lens stopped down to f 3.5 no tracker so i think it looks nice and detailed it's not over processed at all um there's some field unevenness uh i'm not sure exactly where that's coming from though it's mostly over here on the left uh you just have sort of like a brighter part so if you couldn't fix that in processing i would probably just crop uh some of that off uh just so it's not distracting um but other than that looks really good calib sent in a photo of m81 and m82 also known as the bodes and cigar galaxies taken with a nicon dslr a tamron zoom lens and an eye optron skyguider pro it was shot from a bordle to sky calib described a lot of stuff um he did to the image based on both my entramina on track tutorial and also mixed in a tutorial from peter zalinka who's another astro youtuber i think somehow along the way the color has got a little bit off that's really the only sort of critique i have of the image um let me zoom in to show you what i mean so there's this like green color in both the galaxies but especially here in the cigar galaxy what should be red is somehow green um just to show you what it should sort of look like uh this is just an image i did very early on with the dslr should you sort of it should be a sort of red out here and then the the bode should be mostly blue with a warm core so i'm not sure where that green came from but i would just look through your processing steps to try to figure that out um from a bordle to sky with a star tracker i generally i would just try to do a lot less in processing so just just try to like pre-process with deep sky stacker skip the whole light room pre-processing just stack in deep sky stacker stretch it and and that's how the colors should probably look they should probably look fine you don't have to really do as much with good data from a dark sky you know i shot this data from a from a bordle eight sky which is why there's lots of noise and stuff but it uh with calibs here there's a lot less uh noise and uh it's really just the color that i think needs work all right cameron cameron took this image of andromeda with an icon d610 dslr and an old canon fd 300 millimeter telephoto lens on a star tracker and cameron asked about the funky stars and assumed they probably did something wrong uh i can say with some certainty no you didn't do anything wrong it wrong it's the lens uh older lenses unfortunately that were designed in the film era uh while they still can be used today and adapted to modern cameras the vast majority of them are not going to be very sharp uh or well controlled on star fields compared to today's lenses uh so bigger bloated funkier stars are par for the course with older lenses uh honestly though i sort of like it uh it's it gives the picture a certain uniqueness uh compared to you know i'm seeing many andromedas today and so it's sort of fun to see one where the lens uh has given it sort of a unique flavor um but looks well processed and and captured so nothing you did wrong if you don't like how the stars look unfortunately you're gonna have to change your your optics your your lens okay next up we have carlo carlo sent me an image of ro olfiyuki cloud complex and he mentioned that flats and biases made the image worse but also said that he processed the image before stacking in adobe camera raw so this is something i see that many people try but um the thing is if you have a a choice uh if you if you want to do that if you want to pre-process your images in camera raw or light room or something like that before stacking then calibration frames may not work properly since camera raw or light room stretches your your lights making them non-linear and calibration the way that is designed in something like deep sky stacker picks insight it's meant to work with linear data raw data uh so as soon as you open something in light room or camera raw it's a automatically applying a stretch to that data so it's no longer raw it's even if you save it as a 16 bit tiff it's it calibration is sort of out of the window so for this reason you know if you i believe if you really want to use calibration frames as they're intended you want to pre-process you don't want to pre-process raw files um so i start with deep sky stacker or serial or picks insight loading in raw files okay with that mini uh sort of side over i i think carlo's processing is nice here um it's just a little too much uh contrast uh for my taste so i went in the opposite direction just to show what's there uh without much anything any kind of heavy processing added um so you can see it's pretty noisy um but that sort of uh can be fixed by just taking more photos um but you can see there's a lot of color variation in the dust that um you could bring out uh that it looks really nice uh there's a nice variety of browns and different colors when you add too much contrast things get a little bit uh sort of one note in terms of color okay we have charles charles shot this image of the bubble and lobster claw nebulae with a william optics 61 telescope a zwo 71 mc and an opt along elix stream on an eye optron mount it looks uh really nice charles mentioned this was their first time processing and picks insight and i think this shows even newcomers to picks insight can get a very nice image from it um my only critique is i find the the framing a little bit um boring i think a lot of people when they shoot the bubble will just uh center it like this um but i know this area of seafious has a lot of stuff so i wonder if there's just a different rotation or different um you know movement of the the mount uh you could fill the frame with stuff a little bit better uh because right now it's just you have the nice cluster here but then nothing over here or up here um you know another idea is we could just maybe just crop in uh on this in more interesting stuff here and i sort of like that composition better uh just because it fills the frame more so your eye doesn't wander into an an empty area okay chair a lot on sent me a milky way shot from a yellow zone done with a nicon dsl r and a kit lens and they were wondering why there is a bright light at the bottom of the photo um i strongly suspect that's a fairly close by light pollution source causing it um it looks like a typical looks like typical light pollution um you'd see from like a street lamp or something like that there's not much you can do about that other than try different locations to see if you can try to not get it in the shot in the first place um it's very hard to subtract light pollution gradients from milky way as they're they're very close in color and intensity usually so you can you can try um but just you know using something like a gradient mask you know doing something like this and then playing around with bringing it down but it's very it's very difficult so the best thing is to try to avoid those light pollution sources in the first place if you can find a different location near you okay next up we have chitown x-ring chitown x-ring sent in this image of the elephant trunk nebula and wondered why they were having trouble getting the gold and blue Hubble palette look in pics insight um so i think the problem is your ha channel is dominating the s2 and o3 too much um so what you need to do is you take the ha the s2 and o3 before combining them stretch them differently so they're all unstretched you're gonna want to stretch the the s2 and o3 more dramatically so you get higher contrast to there um than the ha so don't never use like the auto stretch that's always going to give you sort of a weird mix you always want to be able to stretch them independently so you can even out those channels so that the ha doesn't dominate too much and then you'll be able to get that uh Hubble palette to work a lot better um because otherwise the the overwhelming green from the ha is just going to be too hard to to work with so the best way to control that is in the stretch not after a combination okay chris oh sent in an image of the crescent nebula and this is actually a perfect follow-up to the last one because chris said that they tried to process this as h o o with h alpha in the red channel but they couldn't get it to look right because the red dominated the image too much and the answer is my same answer i gave from the last one you need to control the h alpha brightness in the stretch so don't stretch it as much you intentionally make it dimmer than it could be so that you can go to town when you stretch the o3 and then when you combine them it looks more correct now this is easier to do in my experience when you make each channel starless with something like star net plus plus or star exterminator first um and you may also need to do some noise reduction on the o3 since o3 is already a weaker signal that's why you're stretching it more but then you're also bringing up the noise so i usually just clip the noise in the o3 basically to black before combining with the h a channel and that works pretty well in in most cases okay another chris uh sent in this image of the elephant trunk nebula this was taken with a modified dslr and a mix of l pro data and h alpha data chris says that they can't get much on these emission nebulae without the h alpha filter but they find when combining h a data with rgb data that it's a very red image so that all makes perfect sense since uh you know h a rgb is very red unless there's some reflection nebula or dust to break up the image uh chris wonders if getting a dedicated astronomy camera would help with this if you're talking about a color camera um that won't help with this issue exactly what might help though or would help i actually i can say pretty clearly at least on deep sky objects uh that have you know a strong o3 emission is to get a dual narrowband filter like the optalong el enhance el extreme or the amplia alpt i did a video comparing those you can check them out um but those paths both the h a line in the red on the red pixels and the o3 line in the both the green and the blue pixels and um then you can make uh the o3 whatever color you want in processing i usually make it a nice blue and with that o3 signal really lets you do is add some more dynamics to these emission nebulae and you could do it with the elephant trunk or or anyone that has some some strong o3 data um so you then you come you instead of doing uh l pro and h alpha do l pro and el enhance and then mix them the same way you did here sort of but you would all you'd want to do a little bit more of a pre-mix with the el enhance data to bring out the blues and you can get a bit more of a dynamic shot that way so i don't think switching cameras is going to be your best bet i think switching filters from h a to el enhance or el extreme or something like that would be your best uh that here okay clip watt sent me a photo of indromeda they asked about the core and if i thought that it looked okay or to blown out um i think it looks the core looks really good um doesn't look too blown out to me um my one critique of this photo is to ease off on the noise uh reduction to for my taste it just looks too smoothed out um and i'd like more grain um if it means you know not smoothing out some of these uh details you know that's a personal thing i you know a lot of people like the more smooth uh look personally i like i like a more uh more of the noise if it means uh it doesn't feel sort of um too smooth like sort of like has like a plastic uh look to it so i would just ease off on the noise reduction and and then i think this image is great okay here's something different uh craig sent this in it's a really interesting composite idea of a of a moon mars conjunction passing right by the lagoon and triphid nebulae so it's like sort of like two pairs it's like a very famous duo of deep sky objects and then a famous uh conjunction idea with the the moon and mars um and craig was able to do this by having two different telescopes shooting the same patch of sky but with different settings different cameras all that kind of stuff and then combining the two photos i mean that are each made up of stacks but like combining the two finished photos in a composite like this um so uh this is a little different to review um but i'll give it my best shot the three things that stand out to me um one the fact that this is a moon and mars occultation or conjunction um would have been lost on me if you hadn't told me in the description that that's what was going on um and the reason is is because mars appears to me to be like the brightness of just like a bright star it's it's not it's not really jumping out at me um and so uh i know that the reason you probably had it like this is to retain the color on mars but i still think there's there must be some way maybe you could have made it brighter or something um to draw the eye to mars in processing that's my that's my hope is that there'd be some way to to bring out uh the brightness of mars maybe with glow or something um to to make it stand out um and not just not make my brain just think that's a star uh because i think that you want to communicate that as a as a central sort of feature of the of the image um and then the secondly i feel the sort of the same way about the moon um in terms of i understand like you know the bright side of the moon here you have it just about as bright as it could be before you just lose all detail um so it's very well captured um but in my favorite moon and deep sky compositive scene they do something with the moon halo to make it feel more seated in the scene um if it feels uh like you started to do that here there's a little bit of haziness around there but i will go further with it because it feels it feels still a little bit too sharply pasted on in the composite sense um so i think breaking up somehow the transition between the moon and the the deep sky mosaic picture uh is still needed um and then my third thing uh about this image this one's actually more uh going back to a classic uh kind of critique is i don't like green stars and so this image is pretty full of green stars um so i would just uh do something about that um probably pretty easy to correct um i know that this is a h o o image meaning you're working with narrow band data so when we work with narrow band data perfect star color is sort of out of the question um but uh you know you could just run sc and r green uh in pics inside to get to get rid of the green and i think that's a pretty simple way if i was doing it here in photoshop i would could just uh select by color range and select the green stars and uh color correct them that way and since we're not working with natural star color anyways i don't think it it makes much difference but it would it would uh you know fix a little itch for me of like not liking green stars in the image um so that's it i want to thank you for for sending such an interesting uh image in uh because it's it's always a treat to get some some sort of uh unique images when i'm when i'm doing the d contog says they are pretty new to astrophotography and are just looking for a general critique of their veil nebula image so with this one i think you should do two things differently um one you've clipped out a lot of the interesting nebulosity down here of the flaming pickering triangle um i did take a look at your tiff and there was plenty of data there to work with so it's just about not adding so much contrast making the black so dark um you know initially uh you can then darken them after you've raised up some of that nebulosity um and then second i think there's a better framing and crop for this image i i don't like this uh veil i can't remember if this is the eastern or western but i don't like this veil nebula when it's just centered like this in a big black void um i think that works really well for galaxy shots but for nebulae i prefer to see the extent and seeing more of the the veil uh nebula stuff the sickness loop supernova so i would have maybe just tried a different rotation or for framing rather than just centering it um but that's that's it i think uh those are my two sort of major points um i i i also wonder i actually sort of like the the yellowishness because it's sort of unusual i mean there's there's more you could probably try with color but i i sort of like it as is okay dan sent a nice milky way composite image it's it's two images one for the foreground and then a tracked image for the sky but that's also a single exposure and uh dan was asking about noise and what they could do to minimize it and mentioned that they hadn't learned uh stacking techniques yet so i've done a fair amount of stacked night scape stuff i think it is worth learning i've typically done it um it's sort of a deep sky style meaning i use programs like deep sky stacker picks insight um but what's more common is to use a free program called sequader like equator with s on the front um and i want to learn it because it's really designed for stuff like this where you're wanting to stack and blend in a foreground with a stacked uh night's you know milky way shot and making that as easy as possible i i've heard that sequader is really good at that so i just i'd suggest checking that out but um i you know i think that this style of night scape shooting uh where you just do a single shot for the sky single shot for the single shot for the foreground works really well too so you you clearly have a lot of the important stuff down like focusing and and wide angle tracking uh so i i think you could keep going you know with this style or or learn stacking or or both with night scape a lot of different uh techniques can work well all right this is daniel's first photo of a deep sky object through a telescope i think it looks much better than my first effort through a telescope and i like the composition here here with andromeda sort of diagonal across the frame but with the satellite galaxy sort of hanging out over here looks good um in terms of what to work on i'd work on retaining more color and processing it looks a little bit monochromatic um meaning a lot not much color variety uh maybe just needs a little saturation boost too could try that see what it gives us yeah i mean um this is just on the jpeg but i think a little saturation boost but also working on um retaining color um and then you know a lot just comes down to how you stretch it um and then of course uh there's a lot of noise so we're you know shooting more total time always helps more total integration and a different daniel sent in this image of sygnus taken with a camera lens on a star tracker and daniel mentioned having an issue with artifacts left over after using star net plus plus um yeah that can be an issue uh what i suggest is uh two things uh one don't star reduce this don't reduce the stars on the star layer so just bring them in and control their appearance through levels or curves uh if you start reducing the stars then any artifact that's it would have been just behind and hidden by the star is going to be is going to show more the other thing you can do is on the starless layer if you see any major artifacts like this one stands out right here um clean it up with like a healing brush tool uh here in photoshop or the healing brush is sort of like clone stamping but it just is faster since uh it's a little bit like more intelligent um and clone stamp uh so it usually works pretty well for getting rid of the bigger artifacts uh other thing i notice here is the background uh sky is a little uh blue um so i maybe just see if we can knock that down a little bit that's a little bit more neutral maybe it needs a little bit more work still but just to give you an idea of what i mean um um otherwise i think it looks nice i sort of i like the the um framing here uh it's interesting okay next up we have uh davesh sent in an interesting comparison where they process the milky way in sequadr uh which is a software i need to learn and cirul which is a software i'm more familiar with um and then in both cases they finished off in the gnu image manipulation program and davesh said that they found using each of these programs workflows resulted in different results and wanted me to take a look at them um so here's sequadr and here's cirul and i'm not sure i guess this is their final one um to me the the color balance is much more dynamic in the cirul result uh in the sequadr result here it looks a little bit too yellow because the blue channel i think is very weak um now we could try to fix that of course at the end uh you know we could play around with the color balance uh here something like that but um i think yeah then there's some some strange things with stacking in this one i don't know what's going on because this looks stacked much better so maybe maybe sequadr because it doesn't it's not as picky about star quality and like star roundness maybe it did a better job stacking well this did a better job with color um so yeah i don't i don't know what to tell you i think um maybe you found that sequadr is better for this kind of milky way stacking you're doing but uh cirul might be better for color so you might want to try using both uh because i'm not exactly sure which uh which ones you you did uh in what you know which processes you did in what order but it is an interesting experiment to try out the different programs okay david sent in an image of the neb and the pelican and part of the north america nebula done with a dslr and a lens and a star tracker and david asked about where to head next with improving on his astrophotography and asked about a number of gear upgrades or if it'd be better to focus on processing um so i'd suggest um focusing on bright targets like orion nebula now in the winter the pleiades just up still and drameda and then just spend time on the processing side so i do it don't recommend gear upgrades for you right now uh specifically i'd take a look at cirul s i r i l i have a couple videos on it i want to do more i think if you want to stick with free software cirul is your best bet if you want to jump into paid software i'd look into pics insight but in either case they're going to help you extract the light pollution more cleanly and that's going to help you bring out the nebula and the other deep sky objects just to show you uh here's what i could do just very quickly just extracting the light pollution from your data um the biggest issue actually found with your data are these dark marks down here and here um and i wasn't sure if those are something on the lens or on the sensor um but i'd say in terms of priorities fixing those would be a top priority uh for cleaning how we start out with a manual air blower on a lens or a sensor before uh using any fluids or lens pens or anything like that um and yeah once you fix that then i would focus on processing uh not not gear upgrades yet denis sent an image of the lagoon and trifid nebulae and denis says that they're new to astrophotography and this was done with the omeghan windup star tracker um my only real criticism is that what i think it would have helped this image a little bit to have taken flat frames um as there there is vignetting that would have been easy to correct with with flats uh denis said that he used dodge and burn and photoshop to try to correct the vignetting but flats work better if used correctly um but but even so even though there was vignetting and uh and you use dodge and burn it came out really uh pretty even and nice um so uh it shows you you can do without them but it's easier it's easier sometimes to process uh with them if you if you take them okay and another denis and another lagoon and trifid so it's funny how that works sometimes the odds of uh two people with the same name shooting the same thing and putting them in for their critique um but this one was done with uh an aid in charasa telescope um and it's very nice um my only complaint is with the stars you know this this processing of of the stars is interesting they really stand out against the sky and they're they're very colorful and distinct but uh especially when they get into like the nebulae here they're just too punchy for me meaning too uh sharp and contrasty um very very sharp edged well i prefer a sort of softer star profile um especially when it comes to uh the being with the the the soft nebulae i think that the the hard stars look sort of strange well it looks it does look good when it's on its own so i can see that it's a it's a balancing act because if you want the star field as a whole to look interesting maybe these sharper stars are better um yeah but that's my that's my only uh small critique of this one all right deon sent in an untracked image of the veil nebulae uh complex the Cygnus loop with a stock canon dslr and a kit zoom lens and uh deon was wondering why the colors are weird i actually don't think the colors are that weird um this was just a very ambitious idea to shoot the veil untracked because the whole thing is super dim um and it's in a very busy star field if you want to try it untracked again i would maybe go wider than this um but i'm impressed that you got some pretty nice o3 signal up here in this corner on the on this part of the veil um my main thing is i'd recommend some other objects to try with this gear untracked it will be easier than the veil and you may have done some of these are all of these but i'll just mention them anyways uh untracked with the zoom lens things i'd try before the veil are a ryan nebula or basically any part of the ryan constellation uh the andromeda galaxy the Pleiades messier 81 and 82 messier 101 uh a bunch of probably other messier galaxies and clusters and things because all of those will be a lot brighter than the veil um especially with a stock dslr and much much easier to to capture with those short exposures but but but it's uh i still admire you for for trying such a challenging object and i think parts of it came out really well jarek sent in this image of the eastern veil nebula okay that's uh that's what it is the eastern veil i always get them mixed up um and it's taken with a william optics 61 on an iopter on star tracker with noptalong l enhance filter and the canon t one i dslr so i think this shows very clearly that old dslr is with the right combination of of other gear can still produce really fabulous results um derek did mention the noise was hard to deal with so uh that might have been the the dslr's fault that he said it was a hot night um but i mean i think you did a really nice job with it um my only critique is like the last time we saw this one i don't like the framing of having the eastern veil centered and across the frame like that i'd prefer it turn 90 degrees from here uh so then you can have the flaming pickering triangle at the bottom and have less dead space overall in the in the photo all right uh demont shot this image of andromeda from a yellow zone and did 500 shots at one second each uh so untracked i'm assuming um and they sent their tiff file so i processed it and let's see what the difference is here okay so i processed it uh a brighter to try to bring out any detail that was there um but being from a yellow zone which is like portal five or maybe portal six i think with just eight minutes total integration it's still going to be pretty noisy especially out in the fainter regions here um so if you're you're gonna want to put if you want to push the image you know much further than this um you're gonna have to shoot more so i'd suggest starting by doubling try a thousand shots that would get you up to about 15 minutes total and uh it's going to be easier to manage the noise uh when you do that demetris sent in an image of the roe ofyuki cloud complex uh taken with a classic combo of the canon dslr samyang 135 f2 lens and a sky watcher star adventurer this is a combination that i use often and there's lots of nice details in here um my one criticism of this uh image is the color still needs a little bit of work there's some green hues in here and then there's a very strong purplish blue cast from about right there up in the image i'm not sure where that's uh coming from but it's not a it's not a natural phenomenon to have such a strong blue so i'll just show a quick way to deal with something like that in photoshop i could just grab a curves adjustment i'm gonna take a gradient tool and draw a quick gradient on there something like that like like this okay so here's what the mask looks like and not quite right yet let's try this yeah that might be right okay so anyways the draw the the gradient on the mask and then we're gonna take the blue channel and just try to fix this here so i'm just working on the jpeg so it's not gonna be perfect but something like that uh it's how to fix that kind of weird uh color shift okay next up we have diy nasa diy nasa sent a nice wide field h o o image of the crescent nebula and the soap bubble soap bubbles right there and uh the waves of nebulosity in the background as well and this is all in sickness and for this one diy nasa did equal amounts of h a and o three filters three hours data on each so i think it was probably enough on the h a but the o three is still looking a little bit broken up and noisy at least for as how much is how much you stretched it here so i would probably start with keeping the h a amount the same but tripling your o three but i'm impressed by how well you got the oath the soap bubble to stand out so it definitely is uh some nice processing here to get it to this point but if you want it to look even better in terms of uh the sort of the noise performance i would just uh keep pushing with the o three keep uh keep doubling or tripling or quadrupling your your total integration there and uh it will look even cleaner but nice job all right this one is from duarte duarte's third astro photo and it's very impressive how uh good people are right out of the gate these days i uh i like the colorful star field it's very distinctive it's not a i usually don't go for this the super colorful star fields and wide field like this but it works really well here i like it um and i see some nice uh detail um in the nebulae my one suggestion is maybe just to see if if the horse head and flame can come out a little bit more i feel like that they're getting a little bit lost in the in how dim they are uh compared to everything else uh so i wish they were just a little bit brighter to draw the eye eye over there as well okay dylan dylan sent a photo of andromeda galaxy and they added a nice uh tilt shift effect to it so that's pretty cool um i i wonder uh there must be a i wonder if that's a filter on its own or if they that's a process that you go through to do that um i do have a suggestion and that's to see if you can bring out a bit more of the blue outer arms of andromeda here um because i see that you have lots of nice blue stars outside of the galaxy so i thought maybe it's possible to bring out the blue um in the galaxy a bit more dylan also asked about good landscape astrophotography spots in new england um so in terms of getting good uh landscape features i'm still working on that myself um there's you know there's the lighthouses in cape cod and in main and along the whole coast um uh and then there's the white mountains in new hampshire um trying to think of other things i've heard about i think there's a lot of spots in main that might be good um if you want to go that far north but but the the the top things i'm thinking of are probably uh you know going to the coast is going to be your best bet for getting cool landscapes with with astrophotography in new england okay ed holt astro sent me this nice photo of the flaming star nebula in origa and said that his particular telescope setup gives him some trouble with halos on bright stars that's pretty common with certain filters and telescopes and things um so uh looking for a method to deal with those and i'm glad you use photoshop ed because that's my preferred way to deal with star halos like this and this will be a little bit involved for a critique but i'll just show the whole process because i don't know how i'd explain it without showing it so we're gonna start with uh the elliptical marquee tool you have to get comfortable using that start with it in its normal new selection mode and um you can leave these other things basically alone um i might turn down the feathering just a little bit i'm gonna turn it down to five pixels okay then we're gonna zoom in on a star with a very noticeable halo so this is the one that jumped out to me and you're gonna want to put your cursor right in the middle of that star halo and then click and start dragging out and you'll notice that it drags out in the direction that you drag out so that's not really what quite what we want but if you hold down the option key look what happens it now is uh dragging out in every direction using where you started as the central point so that's looking much better right now the other thing we can do is if you drag out like this you can see it can make all kinds of different ellipses but if you hold down option and then also add shift then it's going to be constrained to a perfect circle so i'm going to do something like this and i'm going to make it slightly bigger than the actual halo so okay we're going to do that and then i'll just center it up a little bit better i'm just using my arrow keys to nudge this okay then the next thing we're going to do here is we want to get rid of the halo but we don't want to affect the the central star here and it's natural halo which extends out to about there so let's subtract that from the selection we're still using the elliptical marquee tool but we're going to change it to subtract from selection mode and then we're going to center up on that central star there we're going to start dragging we're going to hold down option shift drag out let go okay so now our selection is just selecting the halo let's make it a little fuzzier by feathering it so we're going to do select modify feather let's feather it by two more pixels okay if i press q for a quick mask we can look at the selection here that looks pretty good okay now i'm going to add a adjustment layer and when you've selected something in the image and then you add an adjustment layer it automatically adds that as your mask for that selection layer so it's only working on that part of the image and so then what we can do is we can just desaturate and darken that part of the image and maybe also change its hue a little bit okay and then if it still doesn't look quite right what you can do is you can you can continue to feather the selection so if it looks a little bit too obvious still you can feather it a little bit more okay so yeah maybe you can still see it um you know zoomed in like this but let's zoom back out and i think that's much better you can maybe go even a little bit further with darkening it perfect and then here's before and there's after okay so that's the that's the basic idea we could i'm i could be more persnickety about it and try to get it even more perfect but i think you get the the basic idea of what we're doing there to get rid of those halos so thanks for sending that in ed edwin shot the m81 and 82 galaxies from a red zone with a basic zoom lens and a sky watcher star adventure processed them with serial and the new image manipulation program for this one i think it's a great start it's a little bit monochromatic so maybe go a little bit further with saturation and play around with the crop a little bit here's my idea for for that so just a slightly different crop a little bit closer in on the galaxies and adding just a bit of more saturation to them so these are all just sort of like fine-tuning kind of things um and i think you still with this crop include all the the minor smaller galaxies in the m81 group um but i i i'm not sure maybe i missed some of the smaller galaxies uh by cropping in so uh the crop is sort of up to you but i still think maybe try increasing saturation just a little bit to make those galaxies stand out a bit more all right ed just sent in a photo of the Cygnus region untracked with a stock canon 60d and a 70 to 300 zoom lens was wondering about the overall red cast to the picture and how to fix that so if we're gonna bring up we can bring up histograms here and if we look at those you can see um the the red channel is uh well established but the green and blue are sort of clipped over here on the left edge so what we want to do ideally is when we're when we're stretching the image we want to we want to bring the green and the blue channels so that the left edge of those as we're stretching matches up with the red channel so i think i cover this in the Andromeda start to finish series so check that out for more of a walkthrough but here's just an idea of what it would look like after you stretch those to have all three channels sort of at the same black point like this um but it's a very nice image for being untracked and shows you what you can do even with the stock DSLR and a basic lens so nice job edges okay here's Elliott Elliott sent in an image of the core of the Milky Way area done with an old manual 55 millimeter lens on a star adventure and the problem with these old lenses as i think i mentioned a few times now is the chromatic aberration some of the star distortion doesn't look as good um but since you mentioned you have Photoshop Elliott let me show you a cool way to get rid of some of that um you're just going to go out here into filter camera raw filter and go down to optics and then under optics there's this defringe and since most of the cut chromatic aberration in this image has turned out sort of orange just take the purple hue slider thing here and extend it so that it's including all orange and then just uh drag this over until you see it basically disappear in the image and click okay and there you go i think that's much better it really helps put that finishing touch on the photo so here's before and there's after now in this case it did i think eat into the nebulae a little bit um especially right there so uh what you might want to do in that case is just make a copy so i'm going to go back and make a copy and then apply this uh trick to the copy and then just apply a layer mask and paint in black on the parts where you don't want it to apply and then it will show back through to this background layer so if you if you do see it eating into something that isn't a star that's an easy way to fix that okay elisha sent in an image of the beehive cluster taken with a Nikon D 3300 dslr and a zoom lens and this was taken at 55 millimeter f4 on a tripod and i think this came out really well um when i processed it i got a very similar result uh so i i think uh this is what you can expect from this data elisha asked about the image um looking dark after stacking that's very normal uh if you stack with like something like deep sky stacker or under those if you if you just take the tiff file out of there it's still in a in a very raw state um where you have to stretch it out to to to bring the the picture out so it doesn't come out pre-stretched like you would normally out of a rock inverter so that's normal that's what you want to see my only suggestion is on star clusters like this um it could look cool if you want to try this to to tape some fishing line or some thread under the front of your lens and that will create these diffraction spikes and um it just allows you to see the star color in the stars a little bit better and makes them stand out because it's you'll see the diffraction spikes it's clear on the brighter stars and so then the star cluster will really pop out from the scene a bit more um and i did a quick video on that if you're if you're curious uh it's it's pretty easy to do okay erin erin sent in an image of the milky way taken with a nikon dsl r and kit lens at 55 millimeter focal length it's portal 4 sky and erin mentioned the milky way core though was in the same direction as a city light pollution dome so yeah we're seeing some um color gradients in here that can be worked on a bit um the image looks a little bit magenta in over here in this corner and then a little bit green in this corner um so uh and then a little bit blue on top so you know we can work on those with um yeah you know gradient masks like you can draw in a put in a curve here draw in a gradient so let's say i want to work on this corner let's draw in a gradient like this and you can see on the mask here it's just applying to that corner and then we go into the red channel and correct it a little bit um and then you can just keep going like that um it takes some patience to get to get that right um but that's one of the challenges in astrophoto processing is is fixing gradients uh so it's worth uh playing around with but i think this looks really nice i love how the the star cloud came out up here all right next up we have eric eric sent in an image of the elephant trunk nebula taken with a color astronomy camera an opt-along l-enhanced filter and a small uh refractor a william optics refractor and i think this looks very good eric said um he had trouble with keeping the stars round after reducing them huh so i'm not sure i'm seeing i think you're using photoshop um the only thing i can think of in terms of keeping the filled the stars round when reducing them is if you're using the minimum filter to reduce stars make sure it's set to roundness and not squareness uh because that could make stars very much not round um and then probably the other thing is just like you're using a mask when you um when you use the minimum filter to reduce the stars so how you constructed that mask um may be an issue too and this is all assuming this is how you're reducing the stars if you're doing it with a with a script or something then i don't know uh because i i usually don't reduce my stars um anyways my my only other critique is uh the transition from the nebula um to the sky uh i think looks good on the right side but then on the left side looks like a little too dramatic um well actually on the right side in this corner too it looks a little too dramatic just the this sky in these corners looks almost clipped um so be just be careful not to clip the blacks and then you'll have a nice softer transition for your nebula phobia and captured the interstellar flux nebula around Polaris and Fabian asked about the color of the dust and had seen others images where it was more brown while in his it turned out more gray um so i think that just comes down to processing you know i've seen it i've seen it more colorless and i've seen it more brown um i'm not convinced uh you even mentioned you used luminance layering i'm not convinced you need luminance layering uh in general i think it's hard to maintain natural color saturation with the luminance layering techniques it's not impossible i think it's just harder um so in general i'd maybe try a simpler workflow and see if that works better for at least capture bringing out the color and then maybe you could you know fine tune your workflow to a mix just as an example um i did look at your data and all i did was just an automatic background extraction a stretch histogram transformation and star net and this is what i got and i mean it's not very clean yet i didn't do any noise reduction or anything like that but it shows you that with just keeping it very simple uh the color balance is pretty brown i would say um browner than yours here uh so but you know at the cost of it's it's noisier yours is a lot cleaner so i don't know if i could just use some noise reduction to get to where you are about keeping it browner uh maybe um i'll let you try to figure that out but i would try just a simpler workflow just try background extraction and some you know stretching and and see where see where that lands you because i sort of agree with you that this might look better with a more brown ifn because i think that would look more natural with these very colorful stars it almost looks like you have a monochromatic nebula uh grayscale and then the colorful stars on top okay frigus frigus took this image of the north america nebula with a modded canon t3i in a mix of unfiltered shots and shots with an h alpha filter uh and frigus said they liked how the image came out in terms of detail but felt the image was a bit uniformly red and uh i agree with that assessment the the trick with uh with that is just color balancing as you work you know even with this jpeg which has clipped blacks i'm sure if i just go here into the blue channel and just try to raise that up you can see there is a lot of uh o3 signal here in the nebula just ignore that it what it's doing to the black parts um but even just that shows where your blue signal in the nebula is uh which is where i'd expect it to be and so you could you could just you know play around with color balancing um you know another thing you can do and not to tell you to go buy another filter is um uh with an l enhance filter instead of a an ha filter you would capture that o3 a little bit more strongly and that can help separate them out in processing but even just doing some color balancing with what you have i think if you're not using the jpeg but your original tiff file um just try to do something here you know i think you could get you could get a a little bit more uh dynamics in color uh in the nebula okay and then finley finley took a nice photo here of the whirlpool galaxy from a portal six sky with a zoom lens set to 600 millimeters focal length at f9 and finley said their issue was little color in the stars in the galaxy so i'm i'm guessing that's mostly a processing issue um you know you'll want to work with masks so that you're only boosting saturation where you want it boosted you know you can just make a copy of this image turn it black and white and use that as a mask as a luminance mask but there is probably nice color in there you just need to boost the saturation of it selectively i'd also suggest taking flats as it'll help with the uniformity of the field and you can see these rings out here it's like lighter blue than green and dark that flats will really help with that um so with flat fielding and then boosting the saturation i think you'll um you'll be much happier with it just to show you even in the jpeg that there's color here that you're uh that's sort of unrealized even if i just hugely boost the saturation you can see the natural colors of that galaxy in there it looks right to me you know the yellow yellowish gold in the core and out here and the blue and pink arms um you know it's mixed in with some noise of course but this is what wide field image so back out here if i wasn't also boosting these uh rings i think that would look pretty good um to boost the the galaxy and the stars with the saturation boost okay and then we have fixie rider fixie rider sent in an image of the sygnus loop supernova remnant taken with a canon rp camera and a radian raptor telescope the rp was oh the camera p was a stock camera and no additional filters were used so that's really cool um because this is a difficult shot without any kind of filters or a modified camera um because the whole uh supernova remnant is coming through i think really clearly despite this very busy star field so that's nice um so i did do my own take on this just because i thought it was an interesting shot um and uh i've sort of went to town here i guess um on the layers um i i guess just because i i got a little carried away with trying to get up looking how i wanted um so i um was i looked at this image and thought maybe um there could be a more interesting crop and then when i looked at your raw data i saw this bright star up here so my thinking for this was just sort of make a an interesting triangle with the the sygnus loop and the this bright star um i'm not sure if it really works that well but that was my intent um and then what i was doing with all these layers was just trying to bring down the noise of the background while bringing out the nebula and stars so i think uh this works well it's a very busy star field i was just seeing if i could maybe make uh the nebula pop a little bit more by um you know bringing down the uh the background and the and the noise um it may look like i reduced the stars but i didn't what i actually did was i just played around with the stretch and things like that um to to get it to look like that all right uh so this is from florian florian sent in an image of the north america and pelican nebulae it was shot with a modified dslr and a 72 millimeter refractor and an sv bony cls filter which is a type of light pollution filter it was processed in affinity photo uh which is a program i haven't gotten around to learning unfortunately i want to though and florian mentioned that the stars uh maybe weren't the best and i i agree i think that's one of the biggest um things that stands out about this image that i uh would critique is um this is a type of star reduction where i think the you know you have the really big stars look not reduced um but then all the other stars in the image sort of end up the same size and i think that just makes them sort of look like noise rather than stars um so to avoid that i i don't reduce i don't do star reduction in a typical way i either do it the adam block deemphasis method which is sort of complicated in pix insight or the way i do it even more commonly is i just use star net plus plus to separate the stars and the nebulae and then i blend the star layer in with a screen blend and adjust the stretch of the star layer just with levels or curves to sort of get the intensity of them right compared to the rest of the picture but they don't it doesn't change their size which is what i like um the other thing that florian mentioned is over here um on this bright star i can't remember what it's called let me go to it there's a this offset halo that's from the the cls filter it's very common with all kinds of interference filters um i already showed sort of how to how i reduce these in uh the ed holt critique so i just go back to that to look at it but it's basically you just um make a oops make a selection here and then if you want to get fancy you can subtract uh the star out of the selection and then you reduce the intensity of the halo like that so i think it it works pretty well if if uh for a quick way to do it and uh let me just show off and on so you can definitely see it and then it sort of disappears in the wide view if you wanted to make it look perfect you might have to do a little bit more than that but uh that's a that's just a quick way to show getting rid of those halos okay now we have frank frank sent an image of central sickness here and frank was wondering if there was anything wrong with their technique with capturing or taking calibration frames um from everything you sent in and what i can do no i don't i think you're doing everything right um the thing is with these diffuse emission nebula and sigma sickness they're very dim and um doubly so without modifying your camera so uh you know what happens when you when you stretch aggressively is you get bring up more noise as well as more signal um but the cool thing about astrophotography is that we can change the signal to noise ratio just by collecting more data overall and so that's what i'd look at doing is capturing more data even if that means multiple nights um under the night sky um and that actually leads me into the next picture which is by another frank and it's of the same uh thing so this actually is a good uh uh twosome um so this is uh this you know also sickness with a stock nikon dslr so not modified um but frank says he took this with a small mead telescope from a bordle eight sky um so this is probably you know tracked and everything um but it's from a light polluted sky but he but he put seven and a half hours into the image by combining data from four different nights and so when you do that when you put a lot of data into the image you can bring more out of it without the noise sort of taking over too much um and frank was wondering about all the variations in color and if the blues were real uh yeah the blues are definitely real they you don't see them as much um outside of narrow band imaging because uh when you modify the camera it throws off the color balance so much that the ha dominates so you don't see the o3 signal as much um but with a stock dslr it does uh it actually helps getting this nice color variety on this scene um the one thing i'd work on here though is getting the sky background a bit more even in color and maybe you don't you're not sure where to do that like for instance over here it looks a little weird to me with like too much color um and down here so just look at some other people's pictures and i think uh you'll you'll see where to try to sort of work on the background neutralization a bit other than that i think that looks good and then we have Gabe Gabe sent in astonishingly good photo i'm jealous of this one of Comet Neowice and natural air glow which is um you only see it usually from dark locations it's sort of like uh aurora in a way um it's it's it's a natural phenomenon in our atmosphere um uh so this is really cool this is from a portal one sky in canada and so you're seeing these streaks of natural red and green air glow and then uh they they contrast very well uh with the the vertical feature of Comet Neowice you know i think this is a photo that will definitely impress other asked photographers who know what they're seeing uh i'm not uh you know i'm not i'm not to say that it wouldn't impress other people i'm just not sure if uh you know non asked photographers would know what this is it reminds me of you know the solar eclipse in 2017 because when i saw there were sort of passing clouds i was so disappointed but then after i processed all my photos my favorite one actually is one where there's like clouds in the shot and then also the the diamond ring of the solar eclipse because it's it just makes for a very unique photo just like this is a you know incredibly unique photo it's sort of like uh lots of people have pictures of Neowice that looks sort of like this but no one has it with this formation of air glow uh over it okay uh Garunix Reborn captured the Karina Nebula in a wide field shot with a kit lens at 55 millimeter focal length on a Nikon DSLR and i think uh given the limitations of a kit lens um this looks very good uh Garunix Reborn processed mostly in SIRIL which is a very good free software um something i don't know though how to do in SIRIL is quickly reduce star bloating from chromatic aberrations in photoshop we have you know this camera raw filter which just makes it so quick to just go in here go down to de-fringe pick up the colors that you want to uh de-fringe and then just you know do a slider and uh just like that you've killed a lot of that uh fringing on the stars and it's pretty it's pretty seamless and so that so a lot of the more affordable lenses and kit lenses i'm going to have that sort of color um so then if you try to increase saturation overall on the scene the the the chromatic aberration really takes over but if you take it away and then you increase saturation um that works a lot better uh for getting sort of a nice uh star field a nice colorful star field all right and then we have george george sent in an image of the north america and pelican nebulae taken with a canon r a and a radian triad ultra filter and a small mead refractor and so i love how well you've brought out um you know all these dimmer details down here um due to the the narrow band the multi band pass narrow band filter um two things i'd probably look at differently in processing one is with with those multi band pass filters um like you have with the the radian um you should be able to separate out the red green and blue channels and then process them separately to boost the o3 signal and then recombine them and then you'll get a bit more color variety that way um then you have here it'll look more like mapped narrow band data so just to sort of show you what i mean really quickly if i just uh select and copy the blue channel and uh paste that on here and i'll set that to screen and then i'm going to turn it blue just i'll just colorize it here okay so just something like that um you can see that you get a little bit more color variety but if you if you really map the the channels um you'll get even more uh sort of variety than that the other thing that i noticed is that the stars within the north america nebulae look really muted almost gone and i'm not sure why they're not as bright as other stars in the image but i've i've found that when stars look too de-emphasized um they start looking like noise and so i just pay attention to that and see if you under know how in your process that that happened okay and then we have another george george from washington state and george from washington state did a narrow band image of the veil nebula complex also known as the signus loop supernova remnant and did it with narrow band filters and a full spectrum nikon dslr and george mapped the colors in an h s o mapping it's a little unusual um as uh you know sh o with sulfur in the red channel that's more common um i examined the the raw data you sent in george and uh one thing i found was that the o3 data was really sharp perfectly focus and the ha and s2 in comparison were a little bit how to focus so um just just keep that in mind um you know make sure you're i don't know what your focusing technique is but it worked well on the o3 and then on the ha and s2 it wasn't as good so um and that that might have been an over the night kind of thing i don't know if you refocused the the filters but you're going to want to refocus for each filter as you change them great geepard sent in an image of the north america nebula shot with a very interesting combination of gear the tear 3s soviet lens just a manual lens i own a copy too and i like it uh canon 500 dslr 500 d dslr and uh the cool part the open astro tracker which is a very cool 3d printed open source tracker system that i really want to try sometime um either buy one or make one myself is it's a very interesting looking star tracker and uh looks you know i think also looks like it does a pretty good job uh geepard asked about getting a natural color and i think this is not too bad in terms of natural color i think the blue needs to be a little bit stronger let me just sort of try that out on the jpeg here yeah i think the blue should be a little bit stronger and then um personally i like a little bit more saturation than this so just something like that and then maybe a little less magenta this i don't know if the less magenta is really uh uh you know well if we do less magenta then maybe we would want to do less cyan and the reds this is getting complicated okay but i don't know something like that i think is pretty close to natural color maybe it's the magenta and the reds that i don't i mean in the blacks that i don't like uh let's see here yeah i'm not sure i think that's getting pretty close to natural color um the other thing uh just to say about this uh quickly which is something you probably already noticed is uh compositionally i'm not sure if this is the best to have the neb sort of like cropped off like this just a giant halo coming through um so i feel like this is sort of a compromise where you wanted uh the neb in there maybe or and then but then the distinct wall gets so low uh in the shot so i don't know i would just try out a different comp composition next time um you know even if it takes a little bit longer to to find the right composition i think it's worth it um because this one just feels a little bit uh off okay okay guesser 000 has captured the carina nebula untracked with a canon t2i and a kit lens a 75 to 300 zoom just on a fixed tripod 500 lights at two seconds each iso 6400 and processed in seral and photoshop and i really don't have much of a critique for this image it's presented in a nice neutral color where the blue of the carina nebula is preserved the stars look nice um and it's really quite impressive for an untracked shot with a an older dslr and a zoom lens the only thing i might change is uh the composition i think you know you wanted if you if you want to make carina off-center like this um and so so that you can include this nice star cluster then i wouldn't use the square crop like this this is almost square um i would go to like a five by four or even a six by four vertical uh it just feels a little bit weird to have that star cluster so um um uh close to the corner there um and then carina just slightly off-center so i would just i'd try a different crop crop and then i think the composition would improve okay Giuseppe uh imaged the andromeda galaxy with the dslr and telephoto lens on an amagon mini wind-up tracker um it's about one and a half hours total over two nights and my main comment here is on the color of the galaxy so with a spiral galaxy like this um andromeda you have the um the outer arms of the galaxy are sort of uh more bluish with the hot blue stars are out here and the cores are sort of a warmish white they're like they're not white they're not pure white they're more of uh orangish yellow um but in general your color balance is just too red here and this is like sort of a fiery orange in the middle um but then the red is also making the outer arms go a little bit purple um so just look at your channels and curves and um and you know play around with with those to to to work on the color uh that's it okay and then gordon gordon has a nice image of the carina nebula here the carina nebula of course is one of the jewels of the southern hemisphere skies and this was taken with a stock canon dslr and a sigma zoom lens on a star adventurer uh gordon did mention he just took delivery of an heq five mount it's a very nice mount uh and you can do guiding and dithering with that which will help out with walking noise um and i do see a little bit of walking noise here but it's not too noticeable um walking noise is just when noise streaks into a pattern it's usually diagonal lines but it could be in any direction really it's just about drift of the system um my my only other critique of this image is the stars are a bit bright and sharp for my taste um you know they're they're they feel almost all white and then they just all have very like sharp edges like they're blown out um so since i see you use pics insight a couple things to maybe try are one trying to use star net plus plus in your workflow that allows you to work on the nebula and the stars separately um and then or two another thing you could try is just in the stretch um trying instead of a histogram stretch try masked stretch or arc sine stretch and both of those are stretching methods that tend to um preserve star color a little bit better greg sent in an image of the north america and pelican nebulae taken with a radian raptor telescope and a q h y 268 c camera and um looks like very nice data that's the processing i think looks a little bit too uh sharp and you know sharp and contrasty that's what they're sort of looking for for my taste um so i would just maybe ease off on both of those but i know that's sort of a personal preference kind of thing um and the stars i don't know look a little um bright maybe um so maybe just make the stars a little dimmer but um other than that i think it looks really good there's there's a big halo on this star um you can watch uh my ed holt critique uh earlier in the video to talk about reducing that if you're interested um other than that looks looks good all right grazy grazy sent an image of the row of yuki cloud complex taken with a stock can and t7 and a 75 to 300 zoom lens without tracking so we can call this an untracked image and for an untracked image of row of yuki this looks very good the only uh thing i might do a little differently in the processing is just go a little darker um you can just put a curve on there now just to show you what i mean so just something more like that um if you want to do try to increase the saturation a little bit you can make a luminance mask just by making a copy of this photo and turning it black and white and then applying that to a saturation layer so i'm just going to copy it go in there uh alt click and paste it and then i can just increase the saturation just a little bit on the nebulae and the stars only um so that's sort of just what i do differently is just a little a little darker overall and then maybe after that a little more saturation okay next we have greggory greggory sent in a nice image of uh you know the veil nebula the eastern veil with an elxtreme filter from a portal nine sky um i think these colors look great um you know good good balance so you're not plumbing anything out so you can really see a nice uh you know variation where the o3 and the ha are overlapping uh greggory asked about getting more details by shooting a luminance the luminance filter um i think well you know the luminance provides details that's true but shooting luminance and rgb in mono for instance works really well because then you get your details and the luminance um and then your color in the rgb uh so that's you know traditional lrgb imaging works really well for galaxies and things like that uh with narrowband imaging for mission nebulae like this um whether it's with a color camera or a mono camera we're always going to get more detail in the mission nebulae from you know this higher contrast narrowband data so to apply a luminance imaging technique to this kind of data i don't think makes sense um what you can do is you can create a pseudo luminance like uh you know just extract luminance information and then apply high pass filtering deconvolution sharpening all those kinds of techniques to your actual narrowband data um while it's still mono um but maybe the ha in o3 combined so it's representing both and then use luminance techniques on this um but i don't think it makes sense to try to shoot with a luminance filter for this target especially from portal nine that's not going to give you any favors so you're betting better off just getting more data with your elec stream or um saving for mono camera and three nanometer filters or something like that to get even more contrast from portal nine um the my only other comment about this image is i wonder if uh if you'd rotated the sensor in relation to the object you know uh you know the or the whole image the whole optical train in relation to the object if you could have fit uh it the more of it in diagonally um it seems like maybe you could have uh rather than just having this little tip cut off over here which looks a little awkward but that that's my only other thing i really noticed about uh about this one okay uh and Guillermo Guillermo captured the Andromeda galaxy with a Nikon camera and a 55 to 200 millimeter zoom lens on a fixed tripod and it looks like um you have very nice star colors here so i'd personally just go brighter overall with the image um let's see just what if i just add a curve adjustment here yeah you can see it's sort of clipped to black there yeah look at that so if i just apply a little curve adjustment see how the the galaxy um pops out a bit more so that's a that's a very small adjustment just to show you with a on your original tiff it'll work even better um okay Guillermo also asked about star aberrations um so i've pulled up Guillermo's full photo here and so there's some you know uh artifacts along out here that we should just ignore because it's like uh over time i over the time i guess you've combined data from different sets at different rotations and so it's causing some issues out there um so but if we just focus on the stars in the center and away from center i can see they do have some coma um but i think you might also have a little bit of trailing since all of the coma for all the stars across the field seemed to have a little bit of trailing up and down just a tiny bit but you know i'm not positive that's what it is it could be the lens um it's definitely not the worst i've seen in terms of distortion but it's not the best either in terms of a zoom lens um and you know yeah all with all these lenses as we get away from center uh it's going to get worse get more of this astigmatism um it's pretty common though there's not really much you can do to improve on that other than stopping down more um but you're on a fixed tripod so that's why that's why you have so much sort of distortion out here is because you're re-centering um and then when you stack all of that together uh if there's any distortion in the lens then when you stack it the distortion gets even worse uh when you without a tracker so i don't know i i think that if i were you i wouldn't save for a new lens yet i'd save for a star tracker then stop down your current lens to like f 5.6 and take longer exposures and that would sort of fix a lot of things um so that's that's where i would go uh if you have some money to spend on the problem hegel pig sent in an image of the lagoon nebula taken with a zwo dual narrowband filter and the details here are really excellent um and great that the the core details aren't blown out as you often see um hegel pig asked about how to bring out more of the o3 in the blue spectrum since it's a dual narrowband filter so there are different techniques there uh you can separate out the color channels uh and process them separately so you know you just bring in your data uh if you're in photoshop here you would just take the blue and the green maybe combine those together have the red you know take these things uh separate them out and and process them and then recombine them so that's what i usually do um you know short of that even just bluesting the blue channel uh with an adjustment will work because the blue data is in there so i'm just working off the the jpeg here so let me do bear with me hopefully you can even see just from doing something like that where the o3 signal is strongest um before and after um so it's it's a different look um you know it you may or may not like it but it but play around with it you can you can try just doing it on the you know a starless version uh playing around with curves or you can again separate out the channels another thing we could try here just as a just for fun is let's just take this blue channel and copy it paste it on here i'm just gonna then reset the black point of the blue channel and then turn it to screen and let's colorize it to blue oh and we have to clip this to just there okay and then i'll reset the black point again so it takes some finessing i'm not gonna i'm not gonna get it perfect with your jpeg uh here but um hopefully you can see uh some sort of ideas for techniques of of how to bring it back in um but you'd have to you'd have to finesse it further uh to to really make it look right okay high on sent in two images from a portal nine location in vietnam wanted to show that untracked astrophotography is possible from a portal nine location and these were done on a fixed tripod so no tracker modified canon 80d canon 70 to 200 zoom lens stopped down to f 5.6 and one of the key things high on did was not go to the maximum focal length of that 70 to 200 lens these um they shot this at uh 70 millimeters and this one at 100 millimeters um and so by staying sort of uh more zoomed out um that meant that they could do 3.2 second long exposures at 70 and 2 second long exposures at 100 um which gives you more light um in each in each picture and helps manage the noise better so great job high on i i hope this inspires others to try out techniques even if uh you know even if someone like me says they're unadvisable uh to shoot from shoot untracked from portal nine but i i think it's it's really cool that people try things like this and show that you can make it work so i don't really have a specific critique i think uh high on lefty's photo is a bit dark on purpose to avoid seeing uh the noise um and i think it worked well because i think they don't look overly noisy and the stars and nebula um look really nice in both images right hawken submitted the rosette nebula taken with a modded canon 60d a star tracker and a red cat telescope from william optics um and this was also shot from a red zone and but also with a nearly full moon out so i think given the gearing conditions this looks pretty good um the only thing i would probably do is try a less dramatic stretch um especially before you use star net because um when i looked at a raw a single raw sub you sent and then the final result the stars don't look very blown out in the sub but they do look a little bit blown out in the final result meaning that it's more from your processing and how you're stretching the data i think generally you can just go a bit softer and usually when i when i use that word softer i mean less contrast and when i meet when i say harder or sharper that means you know more uh contrast so the the stars become whiter the background becomes blacker um so doing a little a little less contrast might work well here okay and then we have haunts 304 and uh they converted a debsonian telescope into an imaging scope by mounting it on an any q6 mount uh which is sort of like uh an ecu6 r it's the the older version of that and they took uh this very nice detailed shot of the western veil nebula with a zwo 294 mc pro and an opt along el extreme filter and haunts 304 mentioned that they had issues with amp glow which i'm guessing is these lines over here sticking out um and i think that might be also why the o3 is sort of turning into a different color it's like a nice teal in the middle and then it's sort of turning blue over here maybe that's amp glow too not sure um i've never had trouble with removing amp glow from zwo cameras when i've matched both the temperature and the gain of the darks um but it but it it may be something else in how you're how you're calibrating um but i would i would try just uh something simple experiment might be just take a take a single light frame and create a create a master dark uh with those exact same conditions um so same temperature same gain same offset everything the same and try just doing a dark calibration with no other calibration frames and it should completely remove the amp glow if it doesn't then i don't know um the short of that there are some manual fixes you could do uh in photoshop but they'd be really workarounds and especially with something like these these lines here i think it would be difficult to get rid of those completely other than just you know cropping um but other than the the the color shifts uh and the the amp glow uh i think this looks really good uh and you have really nice sharp details and you can you can really see the details because uh you've kept the the black level pretty pretty high um okay and then we have harry 2597 and harry 2597 captured the milky way with a sony mirrorless camera and a lens at 16 millimeter focal length from a bordle five um and i think the the key thing i suggest in processing here is um not to go too heavy with the blacks um and the shadows um so i think there might be some data in the mids that we're missing out on here um i'm not going to be able to recover it all since i just have the the jpeg but just to just do a really crazy here um just to show you that you can see the whole dark horse there if we really push it while you're sort of losing it when you really darken the image like that um so i'd say it'd be worth you know and maybe the reason you did it the way you did it is because of these bright patches up here and down here that were hard to get rid of but i'd say even if you cropped it just to the middle section right here it would be worth cropping down and uh pushing your data to get more uh in my opinion okay here we have harish who captured the sater butterfly with a z w o mono camera 12 nanometer narrowband filters and an eight inch rossa telescope i think um the top half of the picture for me is working pretty well i like all the browns and then the pops of color with the stars and then you have all the nice dark nebulae intersecting and these golden tones um it's really down here that i don't i don't like these blues um i don't know i think it's the 03 signal it's just looking very broken up and too saturated uh compared to the rest of the picture um i looked through your workflow uh that you sent in pics insight and i think you're you're overall doing too many steps with your data and then some of them you're doing in the wrong order so for instance the deconvolution and the denoising techniques you're using should be done before the stretch on each linear narrowband master channel um so you do the decon and denoising if you want on on the ha on the 03 on s2 while they're still linear before you stretch them um but you did them after combination and after the stretch um i wouldn't really recommend doing it that way so but i overall i just try really simplifying your workflow um so to give you an example i would try just do just stack each narrowband filter and on each one do dynamic background extraction do a little bit of noise reduction you can do a little bit more on the 03 and s2 a little bit less on the aj then stretch each narrowband channel make each one starless combine them do the color mask and curves to taste and then blend back in the stars and that's it i wouldn't uh at this point focus on all the other stuff um and i think hopefully you'll see um be keeping it less complicated you might actually get a better uh result um but i mean i i think it's it's it's very nice and you have great details i just think that the processing um with the the color work here and it seems a little bit of finesse okay and next we have harry harry took this from hong kong with a star tracker and a stock canon 760 d and a canon 70 to 300 zoom lens and this was harry's first ever photo of a deep sky object and that's a it's a great choice uh of target for your first deep sky object i think if it's a winter i'd tell everyone to try or ryan nebula first if it's summer i try a lagoon nebula and harry asked for any tips on processing i'd say um just raise your your shadow shadows your dark part of the picture um to see more details you can see when i did that just on your image we're getting some green noise here so you might have to manage that um but that's that's sort of what i recommend is um raise up uh your overall brightness especially in the shadows um and then uh just play around with um removing gradients and um and stretching it a little bit and then you can also try the starless technique to bring out the nebulae but that's sort of you don't you don't have to go there yet um i don't think this picture really needs it okay another harry um this harry shot the veil nebula complex um with a star tracker full spectrum canon 800 d a samyang 135 lens and a cls ccd filter and harry asked about the star color and it being so red um i'm a little confused by that because i'm not used to there being so much chromatic aberration from the samyang 135 and with a cls ccd filter you should be cutting out the ir so um i don't know what so why you have so much uh chromatic aberration on the stars like this um i think what i'd try in this case is removing the stars from this image and then in the star image not the starless image um applying the camera raw filter pretty aggressively uh targeting the orange spectrum so like this that's going to give you pretty much um you know colorless stars but uh and you know usually i don't recommend star reduction but this this picture might benefit from it um and and you saw that i just by doing that what i just did it removed a lot of the red from the nebulae but again if you if you use the starless technique um then you can you can return that with uh with the starless image um so that's sort of how i would go about processing that one okay and then we have reman uh who sent in a really nice data of the crescent nebulae and the surrounding nebulosity you know i like anything in in sickness um one thing i'm noticing here is it it's it looks backwards to me um horizontal against across the horizontal axis so i'm used to seeing it like this uh not sure if you meant to do that if it was intentional or not but uh but anyways that's just a small thing um the color choice is interesting i'm not sure if i like it exactly like this um feels a little too alien maybe but i don't know it's interesting um you know you you can i'm sure it was intentional but uh you can play around with it more and see you know what you think uh by just going with something a little bit more uh traditional let's see here Iggy mentioned he's been having a lot of fun with astrophotography since getting a 10 millimeter lens for his DSLR so very wide lens and mentioned that Duda's eyesight he likes the slightly out of focus shots just as much as the in focus ones as it helps him see the natural star color that's very true you know i try to do something similar to this with diffusion filters to make the star the bright stars bloat um but just making them out of focus can work as well of course the difference is uh with the diffusion filter the bright stars bloat and you still get the smaller stars when you go this out of focus you just get the bright stars so that's the that's the main difference um i really like this picture though that it looks neat the glow over the mountain range um and then having the the tree come in it just gives it all a nice perspective and uh i like the colors so thanks for sending this Iggy i'm glad you're uh having fun with with astrophotography again all right and then we have Ika Ika took this photo of Andromeda with a Nikon D5300 DSLR an old Tamron 135 millimeter telephoto lens without tracking uh so i think it looks good lots of good detail and nice processing um my one suggestion is to look at the color balance of the black point i think it just looks a little too blue it might be hard to do this with the jpeg um let me just see here if i use selective color that might work so i'm gonna do it in my blacks i'm gonna bring down cyan a little bit and then bring up black yeah i think that did it pretty well so just an idea um just to bring down the blues in the in the blacks a little bit um it might help uh just even it out and make it make the black point a little bit more neutral all right IRN BRO iron bro uh took this of the heart and soul nebulae with a Canon 6D and a 100 millimeter lens on a star tracker they mentioned only using flats with no darks or bias files and then used sequader for pre-processing main thing that i noticed uh when looking at the raw data uh the raw stack that was sent let me pull that up was after subtracting uh the light pollution background um there were these colored rings of sort of alternating green and magenta and i am not sure what's up with that my first guess would be something to do with the flats and the way that you pre-processed so i would try just stacking just the lights and see if those rings go away um if that doesn't work then i don't know what's next maybe just see if they appear again in your next astrophoto i mean it's probably it's been six months now since you sent this in so you probably know if those have reappeared um but i'm not sure what they would be if it was not the flats could be some kind of light pollution artifact or something like that um but other than the these rings which would make processing difficult um i think your data looks really good so hope you can figure that out okay and then next we have island astro and island astro captured the north america and pelican nebulae with a modified canon dslr and a 75 to 300 millimeter lens on a star tracker and they mentioned not being able to recover good star color i think the issue there is one of color balancing um because even though the image is made up mostly of these red nebulae um the image overall looks like not particularly well color balanced you can see the red channel is just like super dominant um then more so than normal and the other giveaway here is that in the central part here this dark nebula should not be this red it should be more of a neutral black um so uh i would just you know early on in the process keep color balancing your channels a bit more um as you're stretching and you should be able to get these this red tone under control which will make uh the star color better too um and then i will also just mention that picks insight which is a paid program or zero s i r i l can make all of this easier um because you can do things like background extraction and uh photometric color calibration and all these tools that are specific to make your the colors in your astrophoto work well right away um but it's it's possible in photoshop too just by paying attention to your channels as you're stretching and making sure the red isn't sort of taking over uh too much okay and then we have ivan ivan sent in a photo of the satyr region insignis uh taken with a full frame stock nikon dslr and a william optics z61 with fladdener and ivan identified two issues one that he felt he might not have the right spacing on the field fladdener and then the second that the stars on the right side were leaving artifacts after running star net plus plus so i'd say these issues are most likely related um you may also have tilt issues um which are going to be more common with a full frame sensor like you're using um even half a millimeter of tilt can cause the stars to be not very round uh and you know on one side or the other um so the two steps i i do to figure this out is if you have the new adjustable field fladdener from william optics make sure that you've said it correctly uh to give you the correct back focus i mean that might be obvious but uh read the instructions try to make sure that you understand you know how much uh where the sensor sits in a nikon dslr and then what you have in between it should be pretty simple with your t adapter and everything like that but just make sure you have that set up correctly and then two look at your t adapter itself which is the thing with the t ring inside and then a nikon uh mounting and make sure there's no wobble there or rotational uh wobble uh because that might cause tilt and if there if there is anything um if it has like little grub screws make sure to tighten those up make sure that everything feels very secure and thread not threaded onto the telescope evenly um you know other than that with this picture um my personal preference is not to shrink the stars as much as you have here um you know i think that only draws attention to the stars being weird on this side since it's so they're much smaller on this side and much bigger on this side um so i would just more leave the stars alone and blend them in with you know blending mode and and see what it looks like after that and then if you don't like how they look or how much dominance they're taking on the picture just um play around with uh this the stretch on the stars layer okay next we have jacko and jacko captured the milky way from australia with a canon 60 mark 2 and a tamron zoom lens set to 75 millimeter focal length without a star tracker they stacked their pictures in serial and processed with photoshop and star net plus plus and jacko also sent let me pull this up and jacko also sent this nice summary of their image processing steps which is very useful um i think the one thing that stood out is that there should be a way to export from serial without a stretch applied um i'm guessing this is with the autostretch applied which is what's causing so many stars to clip and then in the final image they still look a little clipped so if you could figure out how to export the linear tiff from serial and stretch that in photoshop i think you could bring out even more detail um or you could also stretch it in serial but not as much as you did here i'm not sure why it's so stretched um but other than that i think it looks very good i like the framing uh with the you know the strong diagonal of the milky way and the color looks great the i would just work on the stars um and controlling the stretch out of serial uh should should help with that okay i've seen this one before uh james is on my discord um and james took 3600 photos untracked to capture this image of the sygnus loop which is the whole veil nebula supernova remnant over here and framed it with this very cool little star cluster open star cluster here um and i believe that's called ngz ngc 6 9 4 0 um and i think this photo is very impressive it's hard enough to shoot the veil nebula with a camera lens and stock camera because of the dense star field as you can see here but to do it without tracking even uh is really challenging so this is very impressive um my one critique of it uh is that there are some color shifts in the sky background that i think are not purely natural um or if they are natural they still just don't look quite right um you know it sort of is like an alternating red blue red blue red um so i'm not sure i mean there if there's going to be a good way to get rid of those without uh ruining sort of the naturalistic processing uh you have here so uh but that would be my one critique because if there would be a way to process it without those sort of color shifts which i think even if they are um correct they look a little odd um but other than that i think it's it's it's beautifully done okay here we have sygnus this is by jankowski who took this with a modified fuji camera a zoom lens set to 90 millimeter focal length and a wind-up omegan star tracker and once again this shows you can get great results with simple gear and the the framing is good the processing um this is one of my favorite kinds of framings for a setup where you have to manually center and maybe re-center since it was a wind-up tracker is to put a bright star right in the middle of the frame but then have lots of interesting stuff going on around that bright star uh you know there's not too many of these uh options in the night sky but but sygnus offers this nice one at 90 millimeter focal length on an apc camera i'm guessing um so we have the neb and then satyr uh and there you got a nice color shift there this is deneb looks blue and and satyr is more yellowish white so you can get big impact with these constellation shots if you know if you know how to frame them you know how to rotate your camera to get the right framing of all the objects and this is j j captured the milky way with a modified canon camera a star tracker and a sygma zoom lens set to 17 millimeters and they also took a three minute exposure without tracking to get better details on the foreground and i really like how uh the milky way and the clouds over here form this sort of v shape to or bowl shape to hold the tree and get and also sort of weed your eye into the tree and then back out to the milky way um so very nice framing my one critique of their finished photo is uh with this composition with the foreground being this dark i feel like it just uh too much of the photo is just sort of dark foreground that doesn't add much there's all this dark dirt down here um so i'd suggest cropping most of that away doing a something more like that um or if you want to include a little bit of it more of it maybe put the the horizon line at this bottom third but i think even something like that might be even better so that's just my preference i think that if you have a lot of the picture that's not really adding much then it's it's taking away from the part of picture that's that's important uh so the milky way okay another j that sent in a picture of the andromeda galaxy taken with a sony camera and a sony zoom lens on a celestron astro master mount with an added dc motor and j asked about bringing out the outer parts of andromeda more i think um what helps me in these situations is to use the the star net plus plus process um because it's really good at bringing out some of these fainter details in the shadows when you then screen blend the star later back on it really makes those pop without bloating the stars um it helps keep the stars sort of where they are now but boosting the the shadow detail now of course that also boosts some noise um but then you can use curves to push that back down a little bit while keeping the galaxy brighter so that's sort of what i'd recommend trying is the is the starless technique that i show in the in the andromeda uh start to finish video okay and yet another j also sent in an image of andromeda this one is taken with an omeghan windup tracker a canon dslr and a 70 to 200 millimeter zoom lens and j asked about getting more details in the galaxy and if it's just a matter of more total integration so more total integration that means getting more photos more total time on the target that helps change the signal to noise ratio which can help bring out dim details but i think the dim details are already out here pretty well so trying to think let me look at them a little bit better yeah they're already pretty good um so i think there's really sort of two ways to bring out the details better one is to examine all of your light frames all of your sub exposures and only pick the ones with the best detail the ones where they look the sharpest so that's one idea the other thing would be to use a lens or a telescope with a higher focal length and more aperture um but that might not work with your windup tracker so that that might be a big gear upgrade to do that kind of thing so yeah you might be sort of at the limit here of how much detail you're going to get with a windup tracker and a and a zoom lens on andromeda but um if you're in the nebulae there's a lot of nebulae that don't really have uh they have bigger details or or the details aren't as important as with the galaxy so i would i would go after some of those with your windup tracker like in sygnus or orion or things like that um and then if you want to get you know better at the galaxy stuff it might eventually require a a gear upgrade okay and then we have jive jive sent in an image of the milky way taken from a red zone wow so very light polluted untracked with a kit dslr and kit lens at f 3.5 so this is a very impressive image actually um to use that equipment and get this much detail on the the dark horse and the star cloud uh Sagittarius star cloud that's really cool um so we have some ring reflections here i'm guessing those are from they're sort of all over the image but they're most noticeable over here where there's not other stuff going on and those are probably from light jumping into your lens at odd angles and you mean you can see all this light stuff local light pollution here so and my guess is that that's what's happening is you're you're getting all these small reflections inside the lens which cause these rings and weird stuff um only way to eliminate those would be to like get some kind of blocking system you know so the that light isn't coming into the lens at odd angles like a i've used trash bins and things like that before but it's a little annoying but you could try that um other than that that is a nice job i think the eye is uh like i said really drawn to the star cloud here uh and it's it's interesting juxtaposing the night sky with uh this bright building okay and then uh this is jeff jeff captured the elephant trunk nebula with an apertura telescope and opt a opt along l enhance filter and the z w o 5 33 mc camera which uh has this square aspect ratio and uh nice job bringing out the blues it's sort of it's cool to see these deep blues here i'd suggest taming the saturation a bit um as the it's just it's a little bit um one note especially in the reds here um and i just have the jpeg here but uh what i'd aim for saturation let's see something like like that um will help bring out i think more variations in the color um the last thing is the stars look a little bit bloated and i'm not sure if that's a processing issue or a focusing one or is uh or what um but take a look at your single exposures to maybe find out if you think uh because i mean some of these smaller stars do look pretty tight but then the this it may and it might be overexposure too so maybe uh you might have to tame down your your exposure to keep the stars um not a little tighter than this um these big stars so i'm not sure but they just look a little bit uh fad and blown blown out to me okay then this is jeremy and jeremy sent in an image of the lagoon and triphid nebulae taken with a red cat telescope a canon dslr and a star tracker i think this looks good i like the framing a lot um you know it's nice to see this the lagoon extending into this cool nebula up here and then this bright star it has a really nice flow to it here um jeremy asked about controlling noise especially thermal noise with a dslr in the summer months so i have two suggestions uh one is to try manually do the dithering your star adventurer it's not something i've been particularly good about but i know other people do it so it has r a dithering which can be automatic but if you want to really get the best at a dithering you'd also want to maybe manually dither in deck uh with the declination bracket it's going to be too annoying to do it every frame so or even every couple frames i'd so i'd try every 10 frames um but just you know move the r a a bit with the buttons or whatever and then you can move the deck with the bracket um with the like the slow motion controls um i have not been like i said i've not been good about doing that but dithering can help with uh noise and thermal noise uh like hot pixels and stuff the other thing with thermal noise is to try shorter sub exposures at higher iso so let's say you're doing 60 second sub exposures at iso 800 then on a really hot night when thermal noise might be an issue try 30 second sub exposures at iso 1600 so have the exposure time and double the iso and that should give you about the same image brightness but with less thermal noise because thermal noise adds up in longer subs okay a different jeremy captured this image of the ryan constellation with a pentax camera and a takumar 135 millimeter lens at f 4.5 on a vixen star tracker it's about six hours total integration of 30 second shots i think this is very well done i think the the detail in the dust across the you know across the constellation is great um and and also the detail in m 78 over here and the horse head nebula are very impressive um my one suggestion if you have photoshop and there is probably ways to do this in other programs too is uh if you have photoshop there's this defringe option down here in camera raw filter under optics and i would just use this pretty aggressively something like that there's something that didn't work in this region as well well i'd have to figure out why but um i just think that uh the the purple the sort of overwhelming purple and orange nests of the stars uh it's the only thing i find distracting about your shot and so if you can tame those a bit i think it's uh it'll be better okay and then we have jim not carry so i i really like this one um you know at first you might think that this framing is a mistake but jim not carry said this is what he specifically was interested in was showing the milky way's transition um uh into just normal sky and how far these dark nebula streamers on this side of the milky way uh extended because we often see the other side which is the row of yuki side but this side is not as often image so i think that's pretty cool and pretty interesting um this was taken unfilled i mean untracked just on a tripod with a canon dslr and a canon nifty 50 lens wide open at f 1.8 so that's impressive too uh so it looks pretty good um star distortions don't look bad at all um i think i mostly with an edit for if i was gonna edit it um i would mostly just wanted to go brighter um just you know like even like something like that uh not quite that far maybe like that far so here's before and after um just to to show i think that shows off the transitions from milky way to non milky way better um if it was a little brighter and it also shows off the contrast with the dark nebulae uh a bit better um and then there's some little bit of artifacts down here and up here and i think you didn't want to crop those out because then you'd be losing too much of the milky way and you'd be losing the lagoon so instead you could manually go in with photoshop and try to correct those with a little masking but uh i'm not going to show that but it but it's pretty uh simple to do just sort of you'd just want a curves uh adjustment layer and then drawing a little gradient mask on the curves adjustment layer to fix those okay next we have juau andre bastos juau andre bastos captured the milky way um from portugal with uh panasonic micro four-thirds camera and a wide-angle lens and this was their first time photographing the night sky so this is great for your first time very interesting lots of nice um detail here uh i think you just went a little bit too hard with the noise reduction because it looks a little blurred in some places but uh really not too far off from what i think i would do with it um so uh and then there's some um stuff down here you know there's the the orange but then there's also sort of a green and i'm not sure how much of that is natural sky glow i'm suspecting that some of this green it actually is what we call natural air glow um and it's uh it's something you're gonna see um with darker locations especially low in the sky um and it can take on pretty interesting colors like very vibrant greens but it can also be orange so i don't know how much of this is air glow versus uh light pollution um one advantage that you have being in the southern hemisphere is that at certain times of year the milky way will be very high in the sky so if you can shoot it then that's really ideal and usually the air glow doesn't extend all the way up uh straight up at zenith uh where uh from what i've heard and seen and from what i've heard from other people uh even this core part of the milky way will get right up in the uh right straight up in the sky at times at certain times a year okay um joel joel sent in an image of the central a ryan area shot with a nikon d 5600 and a samyang 135 lens on a sky watcher star adventure and joel mentioned a green hue that he had trouble getting rid of um yeah maybe over by ryan i see a little bit of a green hue i think that you can just sort of uh you know make a selection of it that's a pretty bad selection but anyways just make some kind of selection of it and um you know drop down the green in that area and then it's going to look really obviously uh wrong maybe at first but then if you just feather the selection usually that works pretty well for me i'm gonna feather it quite a bit um so just where you see some kinds of weird little color shifts um usually you can just attack them with a little bit of curves and selective masking in photoshop um or if you have something like uh picks insight or zero then usually the background extraction can take care of color shifts pretty well too um all right well good job with this one i think the nebulae come across really well okay here we have m 31 with two meteors um and since stacking algorithms will reject uh meteor trails if you have them on you know sigma clipping or something like that um what uh johnson did here is he uh stacked hundreds of photos together and then composited uh the meteors back in with photoshop and i really like this anything that shows the scale of different kinds of astronomical objects always makes for a good photo and it was quite lucky to get uh two pretty brilliant bright meteors of different colors in 170 millimeter frame in one night so congrats johnson i i don't really have anything to critique uh this is a really cool capture you made here of uh some meteors and andromeda okay john captured the dumbbell nebulae with a sky watcher 250p and an sv bony 305 camera so big telescope small camera which is why this very small planetary nebulae usually is filling our frame here and i think this looks great it's an interesting technique using many short exposures with a small sensor on a big scope um the stars are a little bit funky and that they're multicolored but other than that uh i think this looks really nice i'm not sure where that multicoloredness is coming from um maybe i don't know uh because they're using a mirror mirrors maybe it's from if you're using a coma corrector i'm not sure uh but anyways uh other than that i think this looks really nice and i'm very interested in the the technique of using short exposures with a with a large uh telescope in us and and a fairly inexpensive sensor in the sv bony 305 okay yost from the netherlands uh captured sygnus with a canon dslr and a canon nifty 50 lens on a star tracker and yost had some people helping him with processing advice but they were picks insight users so he's wondering if i can show a workflow in photoshop um sure so let me jump over to this one and i'll start at the bottom here okay so first thing i did was um i stretched the data and made a starless version here and then i also made a regular version with with just the stars but okay so i started with the regular version sorry i stretched it and then i made this starless version put the starless version on the bottom here i made that with star net plus plus and then i'm just gonna work with some curves adjustments some hue and saturation and more curves to correct the color balance and so it's looking a little funky but um it's really just to bring out these nebula regions well and then a lot of the funkiness gets hidden when we add back in the stars which are stretched a little bit uh differently than maybe i started with but you can also control them here in photoshop by just applying a curves adjustment layer and then um just clipping it to the stars so here's before and then if i just hold down the alt key and clip this there's after and then the last thing is i just noticed there's a little bit of a red glow down here so i just tried to sort of fix that a little bit with a curves adjustment and a gradient mask so that's it and so it's it's not perfect but um hopefully you get the idea for a photoshop workflow that sort of helps bring out the the nebula details and uh uh isn't isn't really destroying any of the the quality of the image too much um yeah when i say it's not perfect there's some other things i'm noticing here like little green shifts and things that you could work on but uh that's that's the basic workflow for you okay next we have uh jr arquez jr arquez sent in an image of the ryan nebula taken with the dslr and tamarin zoom lens on a small sky washer mount looks good some nice details a star shape and color my one critique is the sky background is a little bit um um pink and and bright so just to show you what you could do with just some simple curves adjustments uh there's before and then after just playing around with the color curves uh to color balance it a little bit different okay and then we have j regs 85 815 j regs 815 captured the wizard nebula with a zwo 533 mc and an eight inch newtonian you know in the detail color uh framing all look good to me here um the main issue i see is with the stars i think you dimmed them um a bit aggressively um and i'm guessing the reason you did that uh is to hide the fact that they're a little bit funky um you know they're distorted in a way that's typical of needing a coma corrector um and then on the bright stars you can see this double diffraction line means they're that you're not in perfect uh columnation so uh i would just look into you know collimating uh your telescope uh better because then you'll get sharper details on everything too so there's different kinds of collimation tools i'm not going to go and do it here i'll just say i use a laser collimator that also has the attachment for barlowing it so you can do the primary mirror adjustment i think that's really easy uh works pretty well and pretty fast so work on collimation and then if you can afford it i'd also get a coma corrector to help with the stars okay julian shot the north america and pelican with a sky watcher 80 ed and an opt along ellen hands filter and then they they said that they used the autostretch and picks insight on the separated ha and o3 channels um and then also noted that the overall result was maybe more red than they would like so i think the the first thing to say there is to i would avoid the autostretch um instead stretch the o3 and the ha by hand using histogram transformation and just trying to sort of equalize the the brightness of them by looking at them and that way you'll get a lot more power over the balance of the blue and the red and and not have the image being so red but even if i was just to mess around you know here in photoshop i think we could we could do something interesting probably let's see so let's just go into reds and add more cyan to red and let's add it to magenta too and then maybe we'll add a little saturation too much okay so here's the for and after so you can see it's the it's in your data definitely to have bring out those blues um so you just have to work with it uh and in terms of the the stars it doesn't i don't think it really matters too much you could you could do this on a on the star uh layer the other thing i'm noticing here is the even the the dark nebula parts are a little bit too red um so what you can do there is you can just grab the black point ooh and that's really working well yeah look at that okay so that's that's i think a key part too there is just um add a curves grab your red channel and reset the black point on on the red channel and here's before and after so you can you can do a lot of this color balancing in photoshop after everything's combined but also you can control a lot of it in the stretch uh as well okay a different julian shot this image of a section of the milky way and messier 11 which is the wild duck cluster right here something i've never shot looks really nice though and julian mentioned pre-processing with searl um didn't mention searl's background extraction so if um if you if you're having issues with sort of color gradients and things like that i would try try the background extractor tool in um in searl i i tried it with your data and got a fairly different result than you did um i mean not wildly different just i i think that uh the a little bit more star color after uh running that um so i'm not i'm not sure uh exactly what steps we did that were so different if we both used it but uh tried out if you if you if you haven't and if you haven't tried it and it's and it wasn't working quite right try placing the samples differently because that makes a big uh difference to the to the result okay um justin and justin said they're still pretty new but they sent in a nice shot of the orion nebula done with a nicon dslr and a zoom lens on a star tracker and justin stacked in astro pixel processor just another program i haven't uh i own it but i haven't played with it too much and they processed in photoshop and justin only sent the jpeg um so there's only so much i could show here but um i think that they could go a bit further with the stretch so let me just put an s curve on here just to show what i mean so just to just to show i think there's more uh data in there to sort of bring out um the other thing that stands out are some of these black um marks like right hold on like here and here and in different places um so my guess is what's going on with those is you have uh dust or something on your sensor and then when you when you're shot slightly drifts across the night um that and then you stack all the pictures together based on the star patterns that dust is uh causing these streaks so two things to help with that one is to blow on your sensor uh holding it upside down with just a manual air blower to try to get rid of those and then the second thing to try is flat frames will will help a lot with that kind of stuff okay and then we have joule and joule sent an image of the pinwheel galaxy uh m 101 and it was taken with a 200 millimeter newtonian telescope and a can of dslr and they said they just got a coma corrector but this shot was taken before they got it okay and they wondered about their stars looking bloated when they think they have best focus so my guess is your stars may you sharpen up um with the coma corrector even in the center they might get a little sharper but especially away from center um and then i guess collimation i'm not i can't really tell with these stars how well collimated they are uh focus doesn't look off to me so i'm not sure in terms of processing i think this looks really great um i'd probably boost the saturation a little bit of the blues and the reds in the galaxy so something like that and um and then maybe make the sky background just a little bit darker for more drama um but i i'd be interested to hear uh for me if if the coma corrector has helped make your stars even the center sharper um or or not uh because i i'm not sure if the i've mostly you i've only mostly only used newtonians with a coma corrector so i'm not sure how big a difference it makes in the center cam who lives in denmark uh sent an image of the pac-man nebula and mentioned that it was taken in the summer months when it never gets fully dark in europe at their latitude and uh they also were using a stock dslr um on a target that's mostly you know emission uh itj emission um it looks like there's some nice uh good detail in here though um but it's it's lacking much color uh pretty much everywhere um but especially in the nebula i wonder if we could uh bring out more and cam did send the tiff so i tried my hand at processing it here and uh there's my attempt at processing it um i was able to bring up more of the reds um and all i did was in pics inside i did a single automatic uh background extraction i then stretched the data um and applied star net plus plus and then here in photoshop i brought the starless picture in and darkened the background then i added the stars back in uh just by bringing that layer in and setting it to screen blend mode and then uh adjusted the saturation and the black point again so pretty simple processing but the data looks really good really pretty clean for uh being shot in the summer and um the collimation looks spot on you can see the diffraction spikes is just a very classic uh sharp line diffraction spike so good job cam okay next we have camille and camille sent in an image of the andromeda galaxy and said they had mostly done wide angle lens work before this so this was their first astrophoto with a telephoto lens and they took about 300 shots untracked at f5 their issues where they thought the sky wasn't black enough i don't i don't think i agree with that and the image you sent the sky is very black to actually sort of too black for my taste um maybe you're trying to hide noise and you're saying um it didn't look black enough until you uh made it black i'm not sure but that's sort of inevitable with untracked deep skies we're going to get some noise um if you did go from 300 shots to let's say a thousand shots it'd be a lot easier in terms of managing the noise um and then color balance is a very hard thing in astrophotography my biggest recommendation is to use zero s i r i l it's a free program and you can use the background extraction tool and then the color calibration tool before you're bringing your tiff into photoshop and that will help a lot to get you to a sort of neutral starting place um and then my other tip for color calibration is just to look at other pictures of andromeda online like on astrome compare them to yours um i'd say um compared to other images of andromeda i'm seeing yours looks a little purple in these outer arms and you might want them to look a little bit more blue so uh we could go about that by trying to remove some magenta from the image this is just on the jpeg of course but something like that um i think it's due to a slightly better color balance okay another camille um this other camille sent in an image of row of yuki cloud complex taken with a sigma art 135 and a canon camera on a star tracker and camille said the biggest two issues were only one hour of data and that the object didn't rise very high in the sky from their location at 51 degrees north um i think the details in the nebula and the saturation level are pretty perfect in the in the nebula part here um my two suggestions or maybe three three suggestions are all in processing first is to work on the green noise a little bit i think that some of this green noise seems unnatural to me um and you can see it in a few different places in the image but i think in zero there's a green noise reduction tool that should work well um just to show you sort of what i mean let me just pull down the green a little bit okay so something like that um and then my next suggestion is to back off on star reduction so um i just think this the small stars are too small in your image um is they're sort they're starting to look sort of like noise um because they're so reduced and then the last thing is i think it's a little bit too dark on this side of the image compared to this side so i would just if you didn't take flats i'm not i'm not sure i can't remember if you said you took flats but um you could just try brightening up that side you know with a curve or something um and a gradient somebody just try that real quick here something like that i mean it's gonna look weird in a jpeg but just to give you an idea um so those are my three uh suggestions to try to get a little bit more flat removing green and back off on the on the star reduction okay next up we have carol carol sent an image of sickness region taken with a stock dslr and kit lens and this is definitely a challenging scene and untracked of course and this is definitely a challenging scene for that uh kind of setup uh untracked uh with a kit lens carol mentioned they did some processing on their own and then sent it to a friend who did some processing in pics insight and um i think the pics insight part got a little bit out of hand they were they were trying i can see what they were trying to do which is bring out the nebula and reduce the star field um but there's just so many artifacts from i think the star reduction and maybe they did a noise reduction i'm not sure uh that it got pretty it it's it's pretty messy i guess um just i just want to show you what it looks like with my sort of standard um way of processing an image uh just to show what's in it um so this is just a stretch a color balanced stretch um then i use star net gets me there um then i used curves and saturation to bring out the color finally bring the stars back in i really reduced uh the levels on this star layer uh uh to just sort of i get the big stars and their color and then i did another uh uh layer of stars and then we're going to reset the black point and finally i did um just sort of a manual uh burning dot you know there's the burn and dodge tool so i just did a quick burn of the center here to bring it down to flatten out the image a little bit and then a final curve to reduce the red noise in the background so i think that's um um uh a quick and easy sort of way to to process uh the gives you an idea of your your dataset here in terms of improving it um i think it's it's it's a lot about just sort of sickness is really hard untracked with the kit lens i think you'll have better luck on the milky way core and Sagittarius or the constellation of Orion um because those are a little bit a little bit easier with the kit lens um and then if you're looking to to step step up a little bit i think getting uh getting moving beyond the kit lens to a nicer lens uh but still going untracked would work well uh but i hope you keep up with the hobby and like to see more from you all right and here we have a ryan without tracking this is kartik's first astrophoto very good for first try and the perfect object to go after two is a ryan nebula um my suggestion for improvement is just to stretch it further as i'm guessing there is more data in here to bring out um so just um going further with the stretch you can sort of start seeing the shape of the ryan nebula here when i stretch it more and uh you might also be start bringing up the running man as well okay kent took this photo of andromeda oh sorry back up okay this is kartik's first astrophoto and it's very good for a first try it you know ryan's the perfect object to go after for your first astrophoto uh my suggestion for improvement is just to stretch it more um uh just to give you an idea of what i mean i processed it here and you can see i'll get a little bit more of the running man and a little bit more of the shape of the ryan nebula just by stretching the photo more and i did use the the starless technique i've shown a number of times here um so that gives you an idea of sort of a direction to to go with it uh but keep it up kartik and here is kent uh kent shot the andromeda galaxy with a wind-up omeghan star tracker and a canon dslr and zoom lens and kent mentioned having issues with polar alignment due to only being at nine degrees latitude was wondering if there's anything he could buy uh to help with polar alignment you know nothing immediately comes to mind um but a whole series of videos on polar alignment is something i definitely want to do but i have to research you know all the different ways myself um i know there are more and more software assisted methods uh some of which don't require a view of polaris so i believe if you want to look into that the free software nina has an add-on module for plate solving without a view of the pole and some kind of polar alignment method there i'm not sure how well it's gonna work um with a wind-up omeghan tracker um but i'll pay attention to the channel and and hopefully i'll have a video on this at some point i think but i think this already looks very good for the equipment that using in terms of uh processing i just would suggest damping tamping down this um bright area over here i'm not sure what it's from but i just used a curve and a sort of unusual mask i just made with a soft brush to tamp down that bright spot and then i brought down the uh overall darkness of the of the background a little bit more after that because of a little bit more of a dramatic look on on andromeda okay next up we have kerman and kerman sent in a nice image of the lagoon and trifid done untracked with a rokinon 135 and canon dslr and i'm very impressed that this is only six minutes integration from a portal seven sky because really pulled out a lot of detail in just six minutes and the one thing i'd say is just the the color is a little um dull maybe it's a little feels like there's still a bit of sort of like overall red yellowishness to it um so i went ahead and and tried processing your photo uh from scratch and see i did a fair amount of sort of work here to even out the field because this was shot untracked so that's sort of par for the course with untracked you get weird things because you're constantly re-centering it and all that but um you know if you had asked me is this tracked or untracked data i probably would have guessed tracked because it's really nice for six minutes from uh portal seven so um i think you you have a really a good copy of the rokinon lens here and uh i think you'll make some really nice images with it okay next up we have curiabelle a 15 year old astrophotographer from arizona who sent a photo of the rosette emula done with a canon dslr and zoom lens on an omegan wind-up tracker from a portal eight sky so that that combo had been getting a lot here canon dslr uh canon zoom lens and an omegan wind-up tracker i'm gonna have to try that out so for that setup i think this looks really great my one advice is that it's very hard to do the rosette from a light polluted sky um because it's hard to make the transition from the rosette to the dark darker part of the sky very natural since it does keep extending out there's very dim parts um but you sort of have to pick where you're going to start to clip the data to black um so anyways um it's it but it's still it's still a good target for bright skies because it's so the core part is so bright um so here's my attempt at sort of doing a natural transition into the dark parts of the sky um it's not perfect um but this is what what i came up with uh using your data just to give you an idea one thing i'd say is um on yours it's a little bit crunchy um a little bit um high contrast in here um which is so the the rosette doesn't feel very filled in um so what i was trying to do with mine is go a little bit softer um just to just to step through the layers for you here okay okay i think we use a lot of the same processing techniques it's just a matter of you know the details of how you how you do it um next up we have crunchy crunchy shot the andromeda galaxy at f2 with a yahika 50 millimeter lens on a canon 60d and this is really nice processing um this was uh there's crunchy pointed out that there's very strong distortion here on the stars in the corners um and that's you know really common with a fast 50 millimeter lens when you shoot it wide open like this um i actually i you know that it's the same thing on the canon nifty 50 if you shoot that at f1.8 i actually think though that it looks sort of cool uh in this kind of shot where the galaxy is centered like this because the distortion is so regular you know that it almost looks like a warp drive effect of like you know in star trek when you sort of enter warp speed and it and the stars start to to streak uh on the sides like this um so that's one way of thinking about it that maybe will make you enjoy enjoy the distortion a little bit um but to get yeah to get rid of it you'd probably have to start tracking and and stop down the lens quite a bit um maybe like to f4 f5.6 something like that um and then but then you're stopping down the lens so much that you're gonna want to track to get the long exposures um crunchy said he also uh has a kit lens was wondering if this is better or worse than the kit lens i'm guessing this is gonna be better than the kit lens so i'd stick with i'd stick with this one okay and uh this was sent to me by Kunal Kunal sent in uh here the california nebula taken only with a cell phone untracked um so that's cool i've never thought of the of doing the california nebula untracked with a smartphone i never thought i'd see it um so uh because just because it's a very diffuse nebula and i didn't think that a smartphone would pick it up with its small pixels and small lens but there we are um Kunal sent their trapped uh their stacked uh tiff file they so they stacked a bunch of pictures together from their phone and um i thought that was pretty interesting i went for a larger crop here um including the hiities and the Pleiades and the california nebula over there um so i i really like the wide shots like this so when i saw that this was wide i couldn't help but uh try to present it in a sort of wide field um but you still sort of see the the california nebula there i did i did boost its saturation a little bit when i saw it um yeah so thanks thanks for sending this Kunal this is really cool okay and Larry captured the eastern veil nebula with a refractor telescope a zwo 294 mc and an elec stream this is one hour and 10 minutes total from a portal five and Larry noted he sometimes feels that he over processes and if i have any tips for that sure so i'd say the two areas where i feel um most people over process and it's what i would say you're saying uh you're over processing here is um in saturation and in contrast um and so saturation is easy enough to show i can just go in here and you know bring down saturation and that gives you some idea of you know what we mean when we say it's over saturated but this is just the jpeg so you're only getting sort of half the picture here but really it's it's like it's a very delicate thing because um just changing it you know this much minus eight versus that might be all you really need to do something around there um just to feel that it's not overly saturated and you're not losing detail to things being over saturated and then contrast is about just how dark the sky is basically and then how the brightest parts of the picture your issue here is not really the brightest parts of the picture it's just the black level feels a little bit too low um so for that i would really just um you know something like this so this is just the jpeg but it gives you an idea from here uh something like here now i'm doing these on top of a picture that's already over or whatever so really you want it you just want to stop um adding contrast or stop adding saturation earlier in the process and then it looks something like this but it'll look better because uh uh you'll you'll have retained those details well if you've already clipped something to black you can't retain you can't bring that detail back just by changing the levels like i just did all right so but hopefully that makes sense um other than that i think this looks really good i like that the um the framing is not straight across but rather diagonal across the frame i like that better okay leonardo sent in a photo of the milky way taken with a canon t5i and a kit lens and this is actually a good follow up to what i was just saying uh with larry's picture um obviously you could go watch that one too which is for my taste this is too contrasty and too saturated so the two things that i would say are sort of over processing um so i'd prefer less of both contrast and saturation here um but again it comes down to personal taste so i'd encourage leonardo to try doing less try doing a more subtle edit of your picture and see what you think see if you like it more see if you or maybe you'd like it less maybe this is um exactly how you want it to to look so um but again by doing a more subtle edit not stretching the highlights of the stars quite as bright and and and not making the dark parts perfectly black um you often can keep things you keep things more in the middle of the tonal range and you can see more detail because when you take a star and make it completely white you lose all color when you make a dark nebula or whatever completely black then you again are losing gradations of color in there that might exist right so thank you for sending this in leonardo um i think that uh the the framing of it is is perfect with the dark horse there right in the middle in the diagonal stretch of milky way that's really quite impressive uh site i wonder what it looked like in person okay um here's the karina nebula and luke captured the karina nebula with a canon 7d a william optics red cat 51 and a sky watcher star adventurer and luke was wondering about how not to blow out the highlights of the karina nebula while bringing out the dimmest parts um so there are a number of ways that can be done one is you know you can use only masks to target the dimm parts bring those out just by selecting you know just the things you want and then processing just those using a mask it usually uh requires fairly complex masks um but it's possible another way is you know you take shorter exposures uh like 10 second exposures for a part that you know is very bright um and then you use an hdr technique to bring those back in um a third way um is you can this is sort of a lazy way is just use something like a burn tool or uh something or you know you could do it with masks and uh and curves or whatever just to bring down the the bright parts until they're uh more in line with what you you like um and usually if you do that sort of in combination with um starless technique and and the stars so this is sort of my attempt at processing your data you can get a fair amount of detail uh to pop out um so here's the background and i did do a little bit of uh burning on the keyhole region there and then i saturated it and then just added the stars back in to compare this to this here's a little bit more magenta i don't know which is the better color um but i also saw out here in this region um i think this is more natural star color for sort of the milky way and this looks a little bit too much red in there um so just i think overall there's a little bit too much red and magenta out here in your sky i'm not sure uh where it came from but this is sort of a more um naturalistic look if you want to call it that um of the milky way okay okay and this is louise louise captured the orion and running man nebulae with an old canon zoom lens adapted to a sony mirrorless camera and this was shot untracked with 18000 0.6 second exposures and louise noted that's 750 gigabytes of data for the project so yeah that's that's definitely a downside of untracked is the massive storage space required when you're doing several hundred or over a thousand shots um in terms of the processing here this is more um noise reduction um and star reduction no no not star reduction maybe just noise reduction and saturation than i would do um so here's sort of how i'd process it um it's a little it's quite a bit noisier than yours um but i don't know that's i just i i'm okay with a little bit of grain so i just took a starless image saturated it put the stars back in brought down the the black point then i did a little bit of noise reduction and then here's sort of the step where if you wanted to do more noise reduction than me you could so because this is with camera um raw filter so let me just pull that back up so if you wanted to do more noise reduction here you certainly could so i'm just going to pile on a bit more okay something like that and then just darken the background again and got rid of the green glow that was left over so just to compare i think um just has that intense sort of saturation mine is a little bit less intense but then more detail in the running man in the in some of aryan there okay and matty b sent in an andromeda galaxy taken with the red cat 51 a canon dslr and an ioptron skyguider pro star tracker this is about 40 minutes of data from a portal six sky at f4.9 looks really great um and shows that you don't need super long exposures or a huge telescope to resolve great details on andromeda again this is just a telescope that's 250 millimeter focal length um and the details in the core here are especially impressive my suggestion um for improvement is to take even more data like maybe triple what you have here uh so 40 minutes uh do three hours or something like that and um that should make bringing these outer arms out a lot easier and the color in them um bring to help bring out the blue stars even in a portal six sky i think if you you got to three hours or four hours on andromeda it would really be easier to bring out these fainter things at f4.9 okay here's mamange mamange captured the rosette nebula with a william optics telescope and a qhy 163 c camera and mamange mentioned that the stars with large halos being their biggest issue with the final image um so i looked at the tiff this is a pretty dramatic crop into the center of it um and that's one of the drawbacks of cropping in is the stars will look bigger in proportion because they're taking up more of the image real state proportionally um personally i i i'm fine with big stars especially when they have nice natural color like this uh in this image um so i don't i don't really mind them having nice natural big halos um it's funny when i started astrophotography i always was after the smallest star as possible and now i'm appreciating bigger stars more and i even use diffusion filters uh to produce big stars for my wide angle shots um but anyways the two things that stand out to me about this image for critique are that it should be a bit brighter so i tried to do that here and um that's easy to fix with just a curve so there's my curve and then the other thing i noticed when i was doing that curve is that the sky background was a little bit too blue so i just fixed that with slightly changing the black point on the blue curve and that's that's it just two quick fixes make the image brighter and change the black point a little bit okay and then we have mark and mark sent in an image of the pac-man nebula taken with a zwo 533 mc camera and elec stream filter and a sky watcher newtonian telescope on a sky watcher mount and this was during full moon from a light polluted city and i think um it came out very well um my first feeling was i wanted to change the intense orange color because it's not a color i've typically used um in astrophotography sorry my first feeling was that i wanted to change the intense sort of orange color here because that's not a color that i've typically used in my astrophotography but the more i looked at this image the more i thought that this orange and purplish blue really worked well for this object and i i don't always like pictures of the pac-man nebula but i like this one so the orange must be working for it mark asked about the star color and i think it's okay to have some star color in narrow band this as long as you know the stars are pretty small as they are in this image um how i treat the stars depends on the image sometimes i think narrow band looks better with just white stars so you could just pull them from the ha other times you know pulling in star color from the narrow band data even if it's not fully accurate uh to the color of the stars themselves looks nice and sometimes going out and really getting real star color by shooting you know with a color camera you can shoot without a filter or with an eye or cut filter um and getting the real star color is good i've had limited success doing that with uh from a city but if you can ever get away from the city shoot from a dark sky uh i think you'll you'll get good star color that way so anyways that's a bunch of words to say i don't really have much of a critique for this image other than um my personal preference would be to back off the saturation just a little bit let me just try backing it off um 10 percent yeah something like that is sort of where i'd rather end up um okay thanks for sending that one in okay mario sent in an image of the lagoon and triphid nebulae taken from let's see here they're taken with sorry a zwo 294 mc a 61 millimeter refractor and an idos nbz filter which i believe is a dual narrow band filter which isolates the ha and o3 emission lines and it's great how you have this ha bridge here between the lagoon and this nebula up here um i really like how that looks my only nitpick with this image is if i zoom in there's a lot of just like pure red stars um so i'd probably desaturate those a bit just because they think they look like noise um that's about it um you know another possible option is if you drive somewhere dark is to combine this image done with a dual narrow band filter with an unfiltered image because another thing this image is missing out on a little bit is some of the extended blue reflection nebulae here in the triphid um but also the yellows and golds that you get from natural star color um and that's you know especially true over here because this is the milky way um so yeah to get that natural star color maybe just using an ir cut filter with your 294 if you have one um would be good um but again like i said the last critique i found getting the natural star color uh really started requires darker skies usually okay marco sent in an image of the andromeda galaxy taken with a sony mirrorless and a minolta telephoto lens taken without a star tracker um my two suggestions for marco here are to ease off on the contrast the black is level is very dark um and then the stars and galaxy are very punchy very bright um the other thing i see here is that the stars in andromeda and directly around it about this much are brighter than the rest of the stars just by a little bit so i think that you probably selected all of this um with the stars in the image and brightened it and that's uh that makes it sort of stand out weirdly um so if you're gonna if you want to brighten the galaxy i would do that with the stars out of the picture or build a really good mask where you're masking out all the stars and just focusing on the galaxy um so either strategy building a really good mask where you're you're only selecting the galaxy and not the stars can work or working on the stars in the galaxy separately can work too and marcus marcus captured their rosette nebula with a full frame stock nikon dslr a samyang 135 f2 lens and a sky watcher star adventurer and it definitely shows uh how the rosette is this bright beautiful little nebula in the this huge field of stars um that are pretty non-distinct it's in monoceros so it's not there's not a lot of like asterisms going on um so it's an interesting uh framing uh i probably would have framed it a little bit differently i think you're you're right off of the um christmas tree cluster and some more interesting stuff up here so if you'd done it vertically i think you would have rotated you know this frame vertically i think it would have you would have caught some of those um better um you probably would have had to rotate vertically and not center the rosettes that might not have been your your goal here um anyways i tried it out uh from your tiff file there's my attempt um i cropped in further i tried to get as much color out of the stars and the rosette as possible push the blues maybe too far here it looks a little weird but um i tried to push the blues see uh how much sort of o3 signal i could get out of the rosette and then i um with the stars i i both put them onto their own layer and then screen blended them on and i chose to do it at a reduced opacity a little bit um bringing it down to 83 percent and then saturated them did a little bit of work with um desaturating the noise in the background and then saturating the nebula and the stars and um finally just i don't know what that one's doing i don't know if i like it better before or after there anyways um so this is just to show you uh a different sort of kinds of processing um focusing more on the rosette i guess by cropping in and also trying to tame the star field a little bit marnus took this picture of andromeda galaxy with a canon dslr and lens attached to a motorized dobsonian telescope so that's an alt as motor situation and um marnus took just lights and flats and stacked and processed them with sequader so that's not sort of a process i'm familiar with but i'd have to investigate it more uh to say what i think about it um marnus was wondering about these lines all over the picture of red green and blue um to me what those look like are hot pixels that uh didn't get rejected by sequader um and also didn't get rejected because you didn't use dark frames so if you use a temperature matched dark frame what should happen is if there's a hot pixel like like these ones then they should get rejected by the the dark frame which will have the same hot pixel if it's a the same exposure length and same temperature so without doing that um what's going on here is after you stack all of your pictures together those dark frame those hot pixels form these lines because um there's drift across the night drift both from the tracking not being perfect but also some rotational drift you can see the lines are going in slightly different directions because it's an alt as uh mount um okay so all that's to say let's say you want to know you already have these uh the lines of hot pixels how would you get rid of them um so here's one method i'll show you soon as zoom weigh in on just the hot pixels here go to select by color range in photoshop here and uh click on the hot pixels and then increase the fuzziness slider a little bit let's look at the selection now so you can see it selected that line pretty well okay i'm going to click okay and then i'm going to expand that selection just a little bit by going to select modify expand by two pixels okay and then i'll feather that by one pixel all right so now we have the the lines of red hot pixels selected and if we find another you know line of red hot pixels you can see it selected down there as well as we did it by color range then we just go to edit fill and choose content aware and this will take a little while but what it's going to do is across the image everywhere where we have that selection of those red hot pixels it's going to do a fill command to get rid of them um and then we would just do the same thing for the blue and for the green to get rid of all of those uh streaks of hot pixels but you can see now all the red ones are gone and then we would just repeat that for the blue and the the green ones okay hope that helps let me go on to the next one here and this one is martin you and martin you sent a photo of the sickness loop supernova remnant taken with a pentax camera sigma lens and a sky watcher star adventurer and martin you mentioned there being a lot of stars and wishing he could eliminate them so yeah that's a big issue when shooting the veil with a camera lens is just how many stars there are and how dense that star field is makes it hard to process without the star field sort of taking over the shot but i think you did a really nice job here my one critique uh is i think i'd like a slightly bigger crop if you have one so like especially on this side it feels that the um i always get these mixed up well whatever veil this is this veil seems very close to the edge so we can just expand the crop a little bit i think it would look a little better okay here's martin martin captured the Pleiades with an apertura 60 millimeter refractor and a field flattener and a cannon 80d with a sky watcher star adventurer that's a great little setup will make really nice data like this uh the apertura 60 with field flattener does a great job better than most lenses i think at that price point of around 700 dollars and it's a with the field flattener it's it's the field flattener is 1x so it doesn't change the focal length of the focal ratio so it's still at f6 360 millimeter focal length my only critique of this image is you brought the blue saturation up here in the center you know right to the edge and i think maybe just a tad over the edge so you're starting to lose a little detail the Pleiades you want them to look this really electric blue but i think just just maybe minus five or something like that might be better uh so you i just felt like you were just just a smidge over on saturation okay mate sent in this you know wonderful looking panorama of the sky over a mountain range in Slovenia and mate said that this was taken from the highest road in Slovenia in the Alps so this is a very impressive shot um it was all done without a tracker just a Tamron 35 millimeter lens and modified Nikon full frame camera d600 so while this was done without a tracker the processing for it sounds intense as mate used a number of programs to bring all this together and it's it's two rows of 14 images per row so it's a 28 panel mosaic and mate said that the foreground was taken during blue hour and then composited with the sky shots uh after um which are of course taken at night but from the same location and um i have no real suggestions for this image it looks perfectly planned and executed i mean you told me all about how you know things went wrong but um i think it it all came together very nicely um especially like seeing you know a natural interesting color shift in the milky way from the the bright core area here with its golden hues to the brown dark brown dust up here and then of course the Cygnus and Cepheus region is so full of hydrogens you get all that red it's just really beautiful seeing all these different colors um and uh you know the other thing is i think that you were very lucky with these clouds how they uh how they worked um because it really it really provides this nice middle ground between the mountain range and the sky uh so i hope you submit this uh image to competitions and uh that it it deserves uh because it really deserves awards and and i hope you uh you know do something with this image printed or or something because it's very special very nice and now we have Mateo Mateo sent in an image of the milky way done with a canon DSLR and a canon 18 to 55 kit lens and Mateo said his main issue was colors and getting strong colors out of his images which he often felt looked sort of monochromatic so i rarely say this but i think Mateo your skill is starting to surpass your gear here not the camera but the lens um because from my experience this is about as good as the canon 18 to 55 kit lens can do i think you'd be surprised if you get a better lens that the colors actually get much easier to bring out i think that kit lens just doesn't have very good color fidelity um and because i've never been able to get really great milky way images with it either i found even the canon 5050 which is like a hundred dollar lens um produce nicer colors than the than the 18 to 55 kit lens it must must be to do with the the glass quality or something um so that's not to say you have to go out and get one because i still think this is a a nice image but um your your issue we're talking about of getting the nice colors i think your kit lens might be to blame there not not your processing skill okay next up we have matt matt said in a nice image of pelican nebula taken with astronomic 6 nanometer ha and o3 filters and a mono zwo camera and a william optics refractor and matt said that he had issues with o3 being noisy and with lots of star net artifacts on bright stars and asked if switching to a different filter like one with a narrow bandpass for the o3 would help in my experience not really um you'll still have those same problems of it being noisy the star net artifacts may get a little bit better um with a very expensive filter but the issue doesn't really go away um we all face it with o3 um the star net has does i just heard has a version two so hopefully that will have less artifacts but the best way to deal with noise in o3 is just take more o3 data and under dark skies if it all possible i shoot my o3 from a dark site and all my ha from home um the reason for that is because the led street lights that are now in most cities and all kinds of artificial lighting is invading that o3 spectrum while it doesn't invade the the dark the deep reds of the ha as much so going to a dark site even for o3 is often a good idea in terms of processing it all looks pretty good to me um except personally i'd skip the topaz noise uh reduction process the topaz denoise ai kind of stuff entirely i don't think you need it here um and just to show my process with your data i'll pull that up here so i went for a much sort of softer look um different color palette a little bit more of an an orange and pale purple um so there is what is this this is the o3 add in the ha let's see what colors these are for the o3 i went a hue of 222 and for the ha a hue of six you know changing this can get you a pretty different look this is just one way of combining starless data um then i i messed with it a little bit in selective color the broad increase the saturation too um and then just added the ha stars and just white stars and then reset the black point and uh one thing i i liked and seeing in this is like all the variations even in this dark nebula rift um so that's one thing i was sort of missing out on in your rendition here is you you sort of clipped that a lot of that to black um but there's actually some interesting variation in color there okay another mat sent the row of yuki region around the bright star ontaries but done from a portal seven without tracking and this is a very high level of difficulty since this region is mostly very dim reflection nebula and dark nebula both very difficult things to do from portal seven without tracking um what came out the best unsurprisingly is the star cluster right there msca four um and so the really this whole thing is impressive given the high level of difficulty uh you know because of that light polluted sky so uh but if you did if you were able to drive you got to like a portal four you'd be amazed the difference because even from a portal four uh while this is a very hard object uh without tracking um you'd still be amazed at the difference um uh just because the light pollution brings its own noise uh with it and when you subtract that light pollution you subtract the signal but you're still left with the noise basically um and matt asked from a city where this object never rises above 20 degrees up from the horizon is this the best you can expect and my answer is yes unless you add tracking or uh get somewhere darker in the city i don't know uh but probably that's not gonna make much difference if as long as you're in the city or you have the same equipment in the city then i think uh this is the best you're gonna expect from the from this target um because it's a very difficult one um in terms of processing i don't know what we could really do here maybe removing some of the green noise might help let's see i mean i think that looks a little better just to take out some of the green um that's about all i could uh think of uh to really try on it but nice job anyways i i think it's impressive even if you might not be uh super happy with it just because of how much noise there is okay another matt um sent in an image of the milky way with a very nice foreground very dynamic i like the balance of the light painted um wagon over here and then the um the city or town i guess over here um the stars are a little bit one note um because they all seem to be very white and probably overexposed um i'm not sure if that's from the processing or if they were just overexposed to begin with my guess is it's from the processing you mentioned uh processing in light room so just be careful with the sliders it's very easy to go too far with adding sorry just be careful with the sliders it's very easy to go too far with adding you know contrast and you'll actually see more detail by keeping the contrast more restrained not not pushing your highlights uh so much so that all your stars sort of get white like this um which is even more noticeable sort of over in this region okay mattia sent in an image of the north america and the pelican region taken with a sky watcher az gti and a canon dslr with a 75 to 300 zoom lens from a pretty light polluted city sky um so this looks pretty good i think the framing is very nice for this focal length i definitely know this temptation we all have to really push uh the data um but a certain point the data is what it is you can't push it any further and i think the limitation that mattia is facing here is not their processing skill but the light pollution uh level um so one of those dual narrowband filters like the alan hands would do wonders i think for you mattia with this scene um but anyways here's how much i would push your data personally uh before stopping um so it's just a little bit more restrained than what you did in terms of contrast and saturation so pretty i think similar processing choices just not going as far with them matti s um captured the crescent nebula with a modified canon dslr an sv bony light pollution filter and the william optics 73 millimeter refractor and i think this looks great my one suggestion is to play with the color balance a bit more um while this whole region is filled with red nebulosity i think the shadows are a bit too red um and i'd also boost the mids in the blue channel just to show you what that can look like here's just playing with the jpeg so just boosting the blue and resetting the the reds uh black level and i think you'll you'll get a lot more out of this with the tiff so just to show you there's before it's just a little bit too red in the shadows there's after and you can see some of these interesting blue parts coming out by boosting the blue and uh yeah that's it um other than that i think it looks great okay next up we have max and uh this was very tricky data to work with um this is my best attempt to subtract the background and you can still see there's even with my best attempt there's still some color shifts here and unevenness that would have to be worked out so uh given that difficulty i think this is a really good job at processing this data um if there was a way to make the transition from the galaxy to the background sky a little bit more subtle um i think that would be good um but you you really pulled out all the details that were that were in there um i found so good job with the with the processing here and another max this uh is a nice milky way night scape done with a sony mirrorless camera and a law law lens stopped down to f 5.6 but max made a barn door tracker so the milky way is actually three five minute shots tracked with the barn door tracker and i think um it looks good it's an interesting foreground with uh these crops or whatever these are over here um and you know i think that the the sort of foggy light pollution looks natural nice way to transition into the foreground um max was wondering why all the stars were white and was wondering if that was in capture or in processing so i started i i wasn't going to do the full uh you know uh composite like you did here but i just cropped out the milky way and started processing that in pics insight and just to show you that uh there's indeed plenty of good star color in your images uh so it's all just about processing and and most of the the processing i did here was uh trying to find a good uh color balance but mostly just gradient removal you know a pics insight has this automatic gradient removal tool uh called the automatic background extractor if you're looking for a free program to do that serial has it too um but you know i down here you're not going to really recover too much because there's a pretty extreme sky gradient um so this might not be the best direction even though this is a portal for uh because of the light dome down here um but overall i'd say yeah you have a lot of uh good star color it's just about bringing it out uh if you want to okay and then we have max max sense max sense sorry then we have max sense max sense just started five months ago so this is pretty amazing uh image for just starting five months ago and max sense uh took this with a red cat 51 a z w o 5 33 m c and i opt on skyguider pro and an l extreme filter and max sense asked if it was over sharpened um and yes uh they made my job easy because that's the my one issue with this image is the over sharpening um max sense that they sharpened with multi-scale linear transform and a lightness mask so my critique is easy just skip that from your workflow entirely i don't think nebula shots really need sharpening with mlt um beyond like a little deconvolution if uh your data is still linear and well sampled uh go for decon but otherwise skip uh skip any kind of sharpening i don't think it's needed and just makes it uh looks sort of crunchy and not quite right um i mean from a in an instagram post i think this you know the extreme sharpening is cool but if you're really gonna you know zoom in and look at it like that doesn't that doesn't look quite right so that's my two cents okay here we have max r max r shot in drameda with a sony camera and a jupiter 135 lens tracked with 30 second exposures on an ecu one mount so i think the processing and color look good here the biggest uh issue i saw is with the capture you can see all the stars um zoom in are trailed in the same direction see how they're all trailed like this uh down into the right so when you see trailing all in the same direction it's either a matter of the mount isn't um accurate enough for 30 second exposures or your polar alignment was not on enough and you're getting drift that way either way if you see trailing like this you're better off using shorter exposures uh in higher iso so you know if you're doing 30 second exposures at iso 1600 do try 15 second exposures at iso 3200 and uh if you see you know less trailing that way you'll get a sharper picture overall and next we have mette and mette sent an image of the lagoon and trifid shot with a 135 millimeter lens and a nikon d5300 but without tracking and mette said they followed my processing steps exactly uh from my lagoon uh nebula uh untracked uh video so i think there's no wonder that i like the result because they uh if you use sort of my techniques uh exactly i'm probably gonna like how it looks um the only thing i'd change here is i think the blacks are too blue like if you look over here and down here they look too blue to me so i'm just gonna take a blue curve and do that that's it okay next we have michael michael captured the cat's paw and the lobster nebulae from the southern hemisphere i think it looks very good um personally i do less saturation so let's just try that here on michael's image now on a jpeg that's not going to look quite right um but michael actually did send me their um uh tiff so here's how i processed it just to show you so the the nebulae are still pretty um you know saturated but i'm just doing uh less saturation out here in the milky way uh so it's it's pretty similar but just a little bit different um just a little different look different look overall okay and what else did michael say here michael mentioned having trouble with polar alignment in the southern hemisphere using the octans and the reticule and star adventurer so yeah that's a common problem um if you want to throw money at it and you have a laptop you can use i can recommend the qh y pole master it's worked well for me it's an electronic polar scope um just so it's a gadget that works well there are other options though like if you wanted to eventually get a guide scope and guide camera or if you know you can get those and then once you have those you can use software like asi air sharp cap pro nina all these kinds of different things that will help with computer assisted polar alignment and that should make it uh easier than doing it visually through the polar scope this is from miguel miguel asked about his stars um being bloated and about color balance um so color balance with photoshop is hard i don't really have any great solution other than just trusting what you think it should look like um and then using any tools necessary uh you know like color balance or uh selective color or whatever it is uh to get you to what you think it should look like um in astro specific software like pics insight and seral they actually have something called a photometric color calibration which looks at the actual stars and identifies them looks them up in a catalog and then sets a white balance based on the actual stars in your photo um last thing you can do of course is look at reference photos of the of the galaxy from things like nasa or whatever and uh try to match that uh with the star bloating issue i noticed um most of the bloat is happening in the blue and the violet um so uh photoshop has a nice tool uh for sort of managing that um okay miguel asked about his stars being bloated and about color balance color balance with photoshop is hard i don't have any really um great solution other than just trusting what you think it should look like and then using any tools necessary to get you there you know there's astro specific software like pics insight and seral that actually have photometric color calibration seral is free so if you want to try it out what photometric color calibration does is it looks at like the stars and then it's like oh i know what these stars are i'll look them up in a catalog i know what color they should be and then it applies a white balance function based on that um other than that i think it's just you know looking at reference photos and and trying your best with color balance in terms of the star bloating um i don't know if you already use this but there is the camera raw filter with its uh defringe and so you can try to you know if this the for the blue and purple stars you can try to reduce them a little bit with that um other than that it's really just probably up to the specific lens you're using um i did process your tiff so just to show you my interpretation there's what i did with it uh i really like yours though too so i probably don't think mine is any uh better just a different uh look at your data okay next up we have mihalo and mihalo sent in an image of the milky way taken with the nikon dsl r and kit lens on a sky watcher star adventurer and mihalo mentioned they had an issue with the t-shirt method of taking flats because they can see the threads in the flats uh from the t-shirt so i think the key there is just um you need a tightly woven t-shirt and then also it can help to double layer the t-shirt material uh like that and that should get rid of those seeing the threads mihalo said their other problem was with the unevenness with some parts being darker and some brighter and yes that's a common problem um i'd suggest looking into pics insight serial serial is free they both have background extraction tools that work really well for getting a flatter cleaner result um that i can ever do in photoshop and uh so that's i think it for that one um but it's a really nice composition and nice details so yeah just look into serial or pics insight for a way to get a flatter field there okay and mike asked a photography he captured the sader butterfly and crescent nebula with a stock cannon 100 d a tamron zoom lens at 200 millimeter focal length and a sky watcher eq3 mount with auto guiding um this looks very good i'm really impressed with this star field considering this was a zoom lens wide open uh the stars look really well controlled uh no major aberrations or anything um i love this field too includes this blue reflection nebula over here this little guy um i think that's uh ngc 6914 um and then we have this you know this uh nice uh bridge uh you know between that and sader and this other nebulosity and crescent up here so i just think this this field is great um the the only thing uh i'm i'm thinking is i wonder if you rotated the field slightly if you could have gotten the crescent away from the edge that might have looked a little bit better but i don't mind it you know the crescent being close to the edge it almost looks like it's like trying to escape the photo um so uh yeah good job um let's go on to the next one here and this is mylo quisp mylo quisp captured the eagle and omega nebulae with a red cat 51 and a nikon dslr with an opt along el enhance filter on a sky watcher star adventure amount and it's from a red zone shooting 125 second long exposures at iso 2000 i really like this composition uh you know with the the eagle and omega um the one thing i'd suggest is to either work on polar alignment or balance maybe polar alignment and balance i should say order to shoot uh shorter exposures uh than 125 seconds because when i zoom in i can definitely see that there is trailing all over the field that's um up and down trailing so that suggests because it's the same basically everywhere you can see um that suggests there's an issue with either polar alignment or uh something else you know balance or uh yeah so um i would just try shorter exposures you know uh you know you probably don't need 125 seconds you can do 60 seconds half so half what you're doing now and bump it up to iso 3200 and try that um and i think you'll you'll find the data is just about as good if you take the same total integration and now we have met mj 07 and mj 07 sent this photo of the milky way taken with a star tracker a nikon dslr and a 50 millimeter lens and this framing is great i love how the the dark horse looks like it's walking on the bottom of the frame that's cool and it you know the milky way really fills the frame with the processing i think uh this orange here uh is too much it's too saturated but then the the big thing is that it's it's too big of a saturation shift from here to here that and then there's sort of like an artificial line all of a sudden where it's happening right there um so i tried to sort of uh tone down and then tone up this just to sort of show you where where i'd go uh with this um let's just try to make the whole thing flatter in terms of saturation i think that you know your nebulae are highly saturated and that's fine i think that looks good but in terms of the milky way um back off on that sort of selective saturation and just keep it more more natural all right navine sent in an image of the iris nebulae in cefius with a taken with a zwo 533 mc and a william optics 73 millimeter refractor so like uh the last photo um the saturation balance seems a little bit off here to me um um the blue reflection nebula uh you know here looks this is the iris but then is the blue part here just looks super saturated to me but then the rest of the image like the blue stars out here barely seem to have any saturation so it just like looks a little artificial when the saturation in one part doesn't match the other part but i do like how the blue reflection nebula looks so what i would recommend to navine is to just saturate the rest of the image like they saturated this part and this is just the jpeg but just to show you sort of what i mean something like that where just go for a super saturated look all over with the stars with the dust uh so you're going to get much more brown dust highly saturated star field and i think that will will match what you're doing with reflection nebula more um but the rest of your processing what you're doing here with the star repair you described in the the noise reduction and stuff like that i think all looks looks really good so that's my one recommendation is the saturation uh balance between the the reflection nebula and the rest of the field okay and then we have nico not me but nico from texas who said captured the elephant trunk nebula of course here uh with a modded nicon dslr william optics 61 with fladner um and an eye optron skyguider pro it was taken from portal 2 but with some moonlight and nico from texas was disappointed with the amount of noise in the photo well yeah i mean the the elephant trunk nebula is deceptively difficult to do without filters um you know to do it in broadband like this you're bringing it up so much because it's such a faint object that you're gonna bring up the noise too even even with good skies but i think this is a very good result the processing is very well done it looks perfectly correct for broadband um you know i i tried to do something a little bit different um and didn't fully succeed trying to bring out color you know bring out the blues in here a bit but um yeah so i think i like your processing better than what i tried to do here all right nicole nicole participated in my last critique and this is actually the photo they sent in that time because i want to show this compared to what they produced a year later there we go and so this is the same scene but through practice trying you know trying to do it again over and over and getting better they went from this to this and hopefully everyone can see that's quite the glow up uh and so thank you very much for sending this in nicole i think that's really cool to show how you improved from one year to the next um and this shot is really nice it basically has all the treasures of of sickness from uh this from all these this cool dark nebula complexes this one and this one um to you know the north america and pelican to the satyr butterfly to even has the veil over here a little bit the only thing yeah that's the only thing i wish is that the veil came through a little bit clearer but you know it is what it is that's a minor nitpick uh i love how the star field looks here with just like so many stars uh but doesn't feel like too much to me i mean it just feels right um and i think that is because you wisely stopped down the lens uh to get the stars nice and sharp which is is really cool i i have to try more of that to do tracked exposures with a a stop down lens to get a really nice nice tight stars but tons of them everywhere so thanks for sending this in and congrats on your progress okay and then we have nikolas nikolas said that they had trouble with star reduction because star net plus plus didn't cleanly remove the stars um so the way that i use star net plus plus it doesn't really matter if it cleanly removes the stars or not um and i found the same thing with with your data um let me just show you what i mean here with the process your data here so if i go down here to the starless layer you can see it did not cleanly remove the stars there's a lot of artifacting over here and over here um and it's even more clear when i corrected the color balance but when i add the star layer back in it doesn't matter because it covers this star layer covers up all of that artifacts completely because i don't do any kind of star reduction on the star layer and then i just do a final uh black point reset here and i think that looks really nice so i think your data looks really good really clean so i would just uh process it more simply i guess and uh and i think you'll be happy with it okay and then we have nico with two k's and nico sent in a photo of andromeda shot with a canon dslr a vintage takumar 200 millimeter lens and a star adventurer um and nico was having difficulty bringing out any color variety in andromeda so let me show some of my tricks in photoshop here okay okay we're starting with the starless image not a huge amount of color variety but then we're gonna make it sort of blue it makes the background blue too that's okay we then take a curves layer this is just global adjustments and we um reset the blot the blue point the blue uh black point but then we've we've blew it up the blew it up the galaxy a little bit then we can increase saturation on the galaxy a little bit um we're gonna add the stars back reset the black point again and then this is just a uh luminance mask so i just basically made a copy from visible and then turned it black and white with image adjustments um let me find that here image adjustments black and white filter then i copy this um black and white luminance mask onto here onto a the mask for a hue slash saturation layer then i turn this off so now this hue slash saturation layer is affecting everything below and then i just increased the saturation on the bright parts of the image and so that's how i got more color variety into your andromeda shot uh hopefully you could follow that uh and and hopefully also it's a little bit more simple than maybe what i showed in the andromeda video which watching watching it back i think i i go through too many steps and masks and things and this is hopefully a little simpler all right next we have nyx shutter nyx shutter or is it maybe is nyx shutter um anyways they shot the ophiuchus region untracked with a canon 200d and a 50 millimeter lens and they asked to see what i could do with their linear tiff file so here's what i came up with i think it's a bit noisier than their image so uh i don't think i did any noise reduction on it yet so if you wanted to do some noise reduction let's just open up camera raw filter and uh apply some here how much something like that i don't know if it made much change but anyways um my goal with uh processing your tiff file was just to capture the whole of what you of what you got here so i really like how these dark streamers look um and then the row fuke down here in that corner so i'm not sure why you cut that off but uh but i like it so that's maybe just because it was sort of a noisy part of the image um but you know i think it looks really cool um it's you know for an untracked shot at 50 millimeters um the way to make this better is of course just to capture more data um but all the dark nebula in this shot is what makes it so neat so that's from uh nyx shutter and then next here we have from nils and nils sent this image of the cygnus wall region um you know in part of the north america nebula and cygnus is taken with a nicon dslr an opt along elix stream filter and a sky watcher refractor and mount nils mentioned not being sure how to handle the color with the elix stream filter and was wondering if i thought the photo was too red so i think leaving the nebula very red like this is closer to a natural representation of it in the sense that if you took a long photo of this nebula with a modified camera it would come out very red um an elix stream filter is a dual narrow band filter though so if you want to play around with sort of narrow band techniques what you can do is you can separate the uh red channel from the green and blue channel so for instance if i look at here if i just click on this and then i look at the channels you can see there's the green channel uh so it's there's a lot of stuff going on in green but you can see the red channel is so much brighter so to equalize these a little bit what i can do is i can copy this green channel put it here and change it from normal to screen and then we have this so that already looks sort of interesting but then what i'm going to do is i'm going to colorize this layer this is with a hue saturation layer set to colorize and set to you know a blue green so this is to get a sort of natural representation if you wanted to make it more of a fantasy representation you can do a deeper blue it's up to you um how you know where you want to put this an actual really natural representation might look like that but i think that's pretty ugly so i'm going to do somewhere in between anyways then i'm just going to reset the black point with some curves and call it a day and so that's an easy way to bring out more color variety is just take the green or blue channel right from the data put it here as a screen blend colorize it and do some curves there's other ways you can of course do this but this is one way now this does have some downsides you can see it brought out some of this blue noise up here so you might want to crop and you might want to do noise reduction on this layer different things but this is the basic uh workflow next up we have noa who shot the pelican nebula with a small newtonian reflector and opt along ellen hands filter and a canon dslr and um my critique here will be sort of similar to the last one and that the ellen hands like the elix stream is a dual narrowband filter meaning it picks up oh three data in the blue green spectrum and ha data in the red spectrum so usually the way to get the most colors you separate the channels stretch them independently map them that kind of thing in this photo i feel like it all looks pretty orange so i don't see a lot of color separation noa noted they did use a palette uh a defined palette one by another astrophotographer named forax fora xx um i don't know how you stretch the channels before using the palette but it's just it's uh like i said there's just not a lot of color separation which is what i usually go for rather than this more sort of monochromatic uh look um so just to give you an idea of how i might do it um here's sort of my processing style i guess um so i started here with just your red channel applied a red coloration to it then i took your green and blue channel combined them and put that on as a screen blend and then colored that to taste so i did 216 on the hue thing here and then i used a selective color layer to intensify the reds even a little bit more um give them even a little bit more separation from this uh you know there's these blues and pinks out here and uh and then dropped the black point a bit back down i think i may be alone a little too far there i think something like that might be better um but that gives you an idea of how i approached it um it's a little bit more uh crazy maybe than your editing which feels very restrained um uh so maybe somewhere in between what i'm doing here and what you're doing here might be good um okay and then the other thing i'll say is you know i like working with uh picks inside i mean Photoshop for this because um it's just so easy to play around with color palettes when you can just have complete control over uh it and then see immediately what you're what you're doing when you set it to like that color versus that color whatever um while in picks insight it's like if you use pixel math it's sort of like you you put in a formula you you have to wait a few seconds then you see the result it just takes it's just not as fun um so i like Photoshop for this kind of thing okay another Pelican Nebula uh this is Ophir Ophir uh took this with the elix stream filter pretty similar uh to what we did last uh here and um but this was done within this spree 120 telescope and uh Ophir said the way they do the color uh is they unlink the channels and apply an stf auto stretch to get two colors that they like um but this was their first time doing so with an elix stream filter and was surprised by how much orange came out uh so i guess the reason for this is with an unlinked stretch it'll basically try to equalize the red green and blue channels as much as it can so since the elix stream filter is made up of just these two tiny parts of the spectrum in teal green and red uh when you put that together i guess you get this sort of orange uh luck uh orange and neutral sort of white almost very pale blue i guess so i won't go over this again because i just sort of went over it with the same uh object here but when i work with uh these dual narrowband filters i like doing it this way having more control in photoshop um but you know for uh uh not having much control just doing it with an auto stretch i actually think this looks pretty good um partly i think because you captured a lot of cool detail in the in the dark uh nebulae here uh with uh your spree 120 which is a nice big refractor so thanks for sending that one in of fear and then we have a win and this is a picture of the trifid nebulae nebulae sorry uh with his university's uh 32 inch richie criden telescope and an s big uh ccd camera and it was 15 three minutes subs each with red green and blue filters and i want to ask about the color balancing you know i think it looks pretty good the trifid and natural color should have this sort of pinkish uh red to represent the h beta um and the then there's the reflection nebulae down here and it's interacting with an hl for signal um and you it looks like your star color variety is nice um one thing i'd change in processing here is just uh the crop i think when you're this close to it being centered i think it's just gonna look better uh centered and i don't see really anything interesting over there so i would just do that um but that's really it i think uh you know i don't have that much experience with a 32 inch scope so i don't know if this is critical sharpness the stars like look a little uh bloated but that might just because you're battling you know seeing conditions and all that you know because the because the details in the nebulae do look pretty sharp so all right and this is by pascal pascal sent a single exposure of the milky way taken with a sony camera and a wide angle lens um i have a couple suggestions one is with a single wide angle shot like this it can be nice to include a bit more of the foreground you have a little bit of a roof here but i think i'd appreciate even more like if you turned your camera vertical if that's possible on your tripod if you could get more of like the horizon uh i think that would look cool um and then my second uh thought is that it's very blue uh i don't know if that was intentional um i i tried with the jpeg to maybe go back go to a sort of more neutral color balance here with more star variety color paulinho c88 shot the milky way core with the canon xti dslr and a canon nifty 50 lens wide open at f1.8 and this was all on a celestron alt as mount and they also use some custom programs on a raspberry pi computer to control everything and paulinho c88 mentioned that the chromatic aberration and the vignetting were likely a result of the lens and yes i can confirm with this nifty 50 wide open um this is the best performance to expect in terms of star distortion um and i think it looks pretty good uh for this lens so well processed with serial and gimp uh paulinho c88 did mention this glow in the bottom right here and was wondering if i knew what it is to me it just looks like a stacking artifact um you know i can sort of see it here too uh probably a rotational artifact since you're using an alt as mount so as the um night progresses it's rotating the frame slightly and uh you can see that down there now why can't we see it up here uh i'm not sure i think i can see a sort of red line right there so i think the whole frame is rotating and it's just clearer clearer down here so you know what i would do with that kind of thing is just uh lose about whatever 30 20 of the picture and get rid of that because i think as long as you still have sort of the key things you're going for i think it's it's fine and you still have the lagoon and trifid centered if you sort of crop in on all directions okay and here is from peter or petar i'm not sure which pronunciation but petar sent in an image of the eagle nebula um taken with narrowband filters and a mono camera and he said the thing that they struggled with the most was the color mix uh being new to narrowband i played around with the data that you sent in and you know i didn't get anything radically different or better uh than you got here i think that it's just that h o o hydrogen and oxygen only is sort of unsatisfying on this target since the pillars of creation shot uh literally invented the Hubble palette which is this more gold green and blue look um and we we can only achieve that once we have separation with the sulfur data too so i think that that's just becomes so iconic that this with this object that it's hard to feel like that it's finished at this more subtle h o o palette even though it's still quite beautiful um you know we could we could go further with making this blue but i tried that and it didn't look really quite right um so i think you did a really fine job here with very nice details and uh well controlled stars and a very nice field okay and then we have peter h um different peter sent in this image of the signus loop supernova remnant and it was captured with a nikon dslr a zoom lens and a sky watcher star adventurer tracker and the nebulae came out really well in your rendition here um lots of fine details the difficult part with this region is always how to handle that star field um since it's so dense and packed with stars it can overwhelm the photo and then you also have the noise from the dslr to deal with um which makes it extra difficult so here's my attempt um i think compared to yours i sacrifice star color a bit um to get a slightly cleaner result um in the background a little bit more uniform and free of color noise um and then the other thing i did is i just felt your crop felt a little bit cramped so i just opened it up a little bit uh in the corners here okay next we have prashant and prashant sent in an image of the marcarion's chain of galaxies this was taken with a 107 millimeter refractor a qhy 268m and lrgb filters uh so this is excellent framing uh you know i like that prashant was able to fit it in like this looks really cool and uh i think that you know with with a wide view like this you you want to try to be able to see differences between these all these little galaxies and that's hard to do because you're you're so far zoomed out so you really have to push things like saturation and contrast and things like that uh to make them stand out now of course that's a trade-off because when you when you really zoom in on them if you've really pushed saturation then you get sort of uh things where it's like that's just blown you know it's just a pink blob around an orange blob uh you know same thing over here if we really zoom in there's just like blown details but those those details actually look much better than not pushing them as hard when you're zoomed out like this so i think that prashant you know hit a good balance here by pushing the saturation so hard on an image like this because i'm often not satisfied when i look at marcarion's chain and i don't know wide field and it just looks sort of boring and this doesn't so i think the only the only way to make it better uh would be to shoot with an even bigger telescope like a mirror a mirrored telescope and um and then do a mosaic of this region but that's a lot of work so i think uh this is the best you can do with with a wide field refractor like he has okay and then we have pratulia and pratulia sent an image of a ryan and part of monoceros um shot untracked with a nikon mirrorless camera and a lens at 42 millimeter focal length and pratulia stacked in deep sky stacker extracted the background gradient and serial and stretched in photoshop i like it uh it's a very nice composition and uh you brought out the the interesting dark nebula structures up here um though the only thing i think is a little funky is over here on the right hand side you're getting some stacking artifacts i think so i might chop that off um huge sort of my rendition where i chopped that off and just added a bit more contrast and saturation uh compared to your rendition but i think that yours is definitely on the right track and looks it looks really nice uh so well done so it's a balancing act with wide field shots like this to you know control the star field bring out what you want to bring out and also work on the the noise and everything that comes with that with shooting untracked randall sent an image of milky way shot with a nikon dslr and an 18 to 55 kit lens on a star tracker and randall stacked 31 minute exposures with sequitur and then color corrected in photoshop and i think your color correction looks very good uh one thing i'm a little confused of was this little white line here next to this bright star i didn't see it in your stacked tiff file that you sent so i'm not sure what caused that it looks sort of like it could have been a satellite trail but then usually stacking with you know a rejection algorithm will get rid of those so i'm not sure what that is randall said that he struggled with how much noise there is and how many stars there are which are both common problems with milky way shooting um i wouldn't worry about noise too much with this image as it's not super visible when you look at the whole photo like this um the only thing i'd maybe do is just reduce the green noise a little bit photoshop you can just sort of bring it down a little bit like that um some you know ways to try reducing noise are to take temperature matched dark frames but the best way is just take more total frames uh more total photos so if you did 30 minutes uh if you do two hours the signal to noise will be twice as good and you won't notice the noise as much um in terms of the stars i i really like how your image looks with all the stars but i'll just show you a way to reduce the appearance of the stars which is different than a traditional star reduction method so i took your file i applied star net plus plus to it i then put the original image back on top set it to a screen blend mode and at first it will look no different but then if i just want to um reduce the appearance of the stars i can literally just take the opacity of that stars layer and play around with it a little bit to make them a little bit dimmer in the overall picture and i think for a milky way shot this works uh pretty well which is just to reduce the stars with opacity and a screen blend okay ray sent an image of the milky way shot with a candidia solar and kit lens on a tripod it's 45 shots at 13 seconds each from a green zone meaning green on the map in terms of light pollution it was processed in light room with selective color masks and ray asked about how uh would flats and darks have helped maybe a bit i don't honestly see you know there's a bit of vignetting up here maybe flats could have helped with that there's probably hot pixels in there but for a wide shot i don't know if it really matters uh if there's a couple hot pixels so there'll probably be some benefit but i often skip them for my milky way shots too um my main critique your shot is i think it's just a little bit over processed um with the saturation and the and the colors um uh but this is of course a more of a personal preference thing but i would have processed it a little bit more like this just to get the natural color of the milky way um it's more your yours is more of like a um a fantasy look i guess it's sort of this like blue and pink uh and then this is more of like a you know a naturalistic look i guess um so not quite as pretty uh so i could go either way but that's sort of uh if you wanted to see what it looked like with more the natural color of the milky way this is sort of the direction to go okay and then remiss remiss sent an image of the bubble nebula region in seafious i think this looks very good in terms of capture and processing uh for some reason when i started to process your tiffed i'm getting really weird banding i'm not sure if you're seeing that on your end when processing if you are try to get to the bottom of it it could be like a power supply issue uh with the camera or try a different gain setting if you aren't seeing that banding then just ignore this because it's i don't really see it in the end result that you have here so maybe something went wrong with the tiff file you sent i'm not sure um in terms of what else to try with this i try separating out the color channels to mono and um that's easy to do with uh a button in pics insight and you might be able to pull out some more separation of the ha and the o3 but honestly this this region is pretty ha dominant so this mostly red luck is mostly what i've seen for this uh region of the sky there there is more o3 in the lobster claw here but you've only caught sort of the part of it but the o3 you do have in the lobster claw is looking sort of green i i think i prefer more of a blue o3 so i just changed it here just to show you what that looks like so here's green we'll zoom in and then if i change it to like a little bit more of a blue looks like that um but there's not a lot of like i said there's not a huge amount of o3 in this in this region so i think this looks uh pretty good okay rendon says this was their first attempt at an ha rgb image and it's of the satyr butterfly um it's processed with pics insight followed by photoshop and rendon says their issue with the image is the dark circles around the stars as you can see um i looked through all of rendon's steps that they said they um made and i'm not sure at what point the the dark circles appeared and rendon said they weren't sure either my first guess is they mentioned a smart sharpen step in photoshop and sharpening could often cause these dark rings or at least accentuate them so i would just skip sharpening because i never i never do it to my nebula shots i don't think it's necessary um the other thing i'd encourage you to try is just process your ha however you want then make it starless with star net plus plus which is included with pics insight take that starless ha into photoshop set it to rgb mode um colorize that and then put the rgb image on top and use a blending mode like screen uh or lighten or whatever and then just use curves until the blend looks right um so that's just another processing idea but i i think probably your dark rings are from that smart sharpen step or because i didn't really see anything else in your processing workflow that was going to cause them okay and then rick rick sent in a photo of saturn and you know i'm not really the best to judge planetary images because all my attempts at it have been lacking much detail but this looks really good to me uh rick has clearly resolved the casini division which is this uh separation between the rings there and um my only critique here is that there seems to be a little bit of separation um between the going too far there between the red and the blue because you can see some red outline there and then some blue bluish stuff here and here there um and so that usually that happens uh because the atmosphere um so an atmospheric dispersion corrector and abc may help with that if you don't already use one i think zwo makes a pretty inexpensive one that's my only sort of planetary tip that i can i can think of otherwise i think it looks really good ricky a 17 year old astrophotographer from new zealand sent a great image of the ophiuchus region here taken with a stock canon dslr and a 50 millimeter lens and a star tracker and uh processed with pics inside a photoshop i think this looks merely perfect uh the only thing that stood out to me to improve is that there's still just a little bit of uh green noise left um the best thing to do for that is after your color calibrate but before you stretch use the scnr green noise reduction tool at about 25 30 strength um you know uh just to show the difference here in photoshop it won't be the same just something like that uh is the difference i'd expect uh if you just reduce the green noise a little bit um that's the only thing i saw other than that this looks you know perfect to me i love this framing uh that you have here with the the row fuke coming out from the uh from the bottom like a sort of like a tree uh looks really nice okay reshub uh reshub sent an image of the milky way shot untracked it's just 51 shots at 10 seconds each with a canon m50 mirrorless camera in terms of editing um i would just suggest cropping off um a little bit the sides here i don't think they are adding much uh and so just something like this i think and then i'd probably just try to fix this uh spike of light pollution in terms of acquisition i'd try doing maybe 10 times or more the number of lights if possible just to really bring down the noise in the final image uh but it looks like a great start uh just to manage the noise we just need more signal so something like 500 shots or a thousand shots is best for this kind of milky way untracked kind of image okay and then another uh reshub and another milky way image this one a single image shot from a city and they said that they they used the expose to the right rule to capture it so i actually don't suggest exposed to the right for astrophotography it will tend to just blow out highlight detail and make it unrecoverable so uh generally i don't recommend that maybe for a single exposure it's fine uh maybe that's but if you're gonna stack which is what i'd recommend you try next then don't expose to the right expose to the left uh not you know just above uh the the left edge so getting it you know getting that histogram bumped to about one quarter the way over is what you want anyways uh reshub asked if i could try to bring out as much detail in the milky way as possible so let's see here we go that's what i was able to do uh compared to reshub's shot you can see here i was able to bring out a little bit more of the dark nebula streamers but nothing i can do about these extreme gradients so it's really just trying to get this middle part is uh recovered as possible uh and i think that's it so that's sort of what you can expect to achieve from a single exposure from the city exposing to the right it's a good experiment okay and then we have rob rob sent in an image of the carina nebula taken with a canon r6 camera uh stock and the william optics 73 millimeter refractor and a sky watcher heq five mount and rob says this was their first time using pics insight they were struggling to bring out the depth of the nebula um but i think this looks really good especially with uh you know a stock camera i wonder when you're talking about bringing out the depth if you're comparing it to shots taken with a modified camera or an astro camera which is pre-modified because they're going to pick up a lot more of the dim hydrogen emission that extends out but it's trade-off because then if you're if you're using one of those then the h alpha will sort of dominate all this blue stuff in the middle and it will turn out a lot more pinker or red so anyways i don't really have anything to critique with this image it looks great to me and uh i can't wait to someday try this uh object out myself okay and then we have roger and roger uh sent in an image of the ryan nebula had some questions about his gear he's using an artist sky flattener reducer but uh wasn't sure it was flattening the field correctly because if we look at the stars here they do look pretty elongated especially in the corners so no that doesn't look right for uh field flattener the spacing should be pretty easy with a flattener it's 55 millimeters with that particular field flattener so with the dslr you should just want to get a 48 millimeter t adapter designed for cannon uh eos so your cannon 60 d you know screw that on to the flattener and then attach your dslr to the t adapter and no additional spacers and you should be right at 55 millimeters so hopefully that works to get the right back focus um if you're already doing that then i'm not sure what's going on there um other than that my only other processing note is it looks a little bit blue in the blacks especially towards the bottom of the picture here um so that's easily fixed with just like a curves adjustment just you know uh something like that i don't know just a little bit of uh bringing down the curves we might for this shot you know there's so much blue down here in this corner still we might have to do some gradient uh masking on the on the curves but that's the that's the basic idea is bring down the blue curve blue blue uh presence here a little bit in the background and next up we have roheats and roheats uh took an image of the andromeda galaxy with a red cat 51 and a zwo 183 mc from a portal three sky and i think this looks really good the overall color rendering is great and pairing the 183 with the red cat is a nice combo uh very good for pulling out lots of detail uh because you're sampled so well there my one critique is i think um at some point in processing you used a range mask or something to increase saturation in the galaxy and then but it also increased the saturation of the stars in the galaxy but not the stars outside of the galaxy and so then it looks a little bit odd because the we have stars that are in front of the galaxy not part of the galaxy and so if those are saturated and these ones aren't then it looks a bit off um so you need to when you make a mask like a range selection you also have to make a star mask and subtract the star mask from the range selection to get the best results there okay ronan captured an image of the north america nebula this is three hours of broadband and three hours with an ellen hands filter and i think the broadband component is great because the star color looks very good especially if i look at it sort of over here um but i'm not convinced this is the best palette choice for incorporating the ellen hands data i think it should be possible to get some separation of the o3 and ha uh but this looks sort of like all the want same color pink um so i think with a different stretch different combination of the channels you can get better uh color separation there and it will help um you know make the the things like the sickness wall stand out from the rest of the nebula here because right now it's sort of the details getting a bit lost in how same color everything is okay and then we have roan roan took this image of the milky way untracked with their smartphone and this was their first attempt um so i think this looks really great with the gear and technique that roan is using um they asked about calibration frames i i haven't had much luck with calibration frames on a smartphone so i probably would skip that um in any case i think it's really nice how well you captured you know uh some of the details here like the lagoon nebula um and the dark horse uh right here um i think next time if you re-center the milky way about five times uh over the night as you're taking more frames that should help eliminate uh some of this diagonal walking noise because i think that's maybe from if you just let the image drift pretty dramatically and then realigned it based on the stars you're going to get a lot of noise like that um so breaking up that noise could just be re-centering the milky way in a few different ways uh as you go and and that should help break up the the noise patterns and sage sage took this image of the m51 uh colliding galaxy pair with their william optics z61 telescope and canon t6 dslr on an ioptron sky tracker uh so this is a very uh impressive how much detail sage got on this galaxy with such a small setup uh the the only thing i noticed to critique here is just a tiny bit of tracking error sort of going up into the right hand corner it's very minimal though it's just slightly egg-shaped left to right um but i'm surprised there's actually not even more tracking error considering this is a z61 it's a pretty big hefty you know little telescope this is 360 millimeter focal length on an ioptron sky tracker so not their bigger sky guide or pro but the the sky tracker so uh really all i can say is you know keep it up sage because this is i love stuff like this of like trying to push the limits of your gear and go after you know the m51 with uh with a small package like that that's cool and sally sally took a great image of the trapezium region uh of the ryan nebula with a mead etx 60 and an sv bony 105 camera and sally said this setup is very challenging for astrophotography and hasn't been able to make calibration frames work with it yet and i mean i can imagine that would be very difficult really challenging setup to have a tiny sensor one of the smallest to cheapest cameras you can get and then pairing it with a long focal length altars motorized telescope i mean it sounds like a fun challenge but a difficult one and uh the trapezium though is the obvious choice for me for a deep sky object because it's the brightest deep sky object in the sky i believe and so a half second long exposure works well this is multiple half second long exposures stacked um but you know this you i think you've just split the the four uh trapezium stars there abc and d in the cluster and uh so i think this looks really good i don't really have any particular advice for improvements since i don't have much experience with this kind of gear but uh i do have a suggestion for another object to go after i'd like to see what you could do with the ring nebula m 57 uh i think it's bright enough so that half second exposures should work well for that too i don't know it might be harder to find than iran or i know it'd be harder to find than iran but if you can find it and uh get exposures going on it i think that would be a cool one with this setup and then we have sam sam sent in an image of the milky way captured untracked with uh smartphone uh sam shot 76 photos at 25 seconds each from a yellow zone so sam has how to improve but i feel like i should be taking lessons on smartphone astrophotography from sam because this just seems remarkably good to me uh considering the technique untracked smartphone and the sky condition being yellow um i mean i suppose it might be even better with like a barn door tracker so i have a video on making one of those but i don't know the processing here looks really great to me it doesn't look overdone uh there's a little bit of a a dark um darkening on this side uh and then a little bit of green down here but uh overall i think you know this just looks really good for for this technique so well done sam and here we have samuel um and samuel captured the milky way centered on the lagoon and trifid with a sony mirrorless camera roking down 135 and star tracker and samuel said that he shot this low on the horizon and therefore had trouble with natural color except for the reddish feel i'm not sure what that means uh i guess just that it looks reddish um i'm not uh so if you want to correct the red then um i mean a simple way we could just take a curves adjustment and go to the red and see that there's a bunch of room there and then just like do that um you know now it looks a little green so then we might have to go into greens and correct that a little bit too but then you know that's a simple way to correct the sort of overall red tone to it um i think that gets us sort of like 80 percent there if you want to go all the way i think you need to start with um a gradient you know reduction technically got a background extraction when the data is still linear so that's what i did here that gets us to an even more neutral uh photo and this you know you could process this further but i think it's pretty interesting that uh you know this is pulling out some pretty interesting little stuff this is the twiddle bug nebula right there i can sort of see it and then we have the star clouds up here at the top look pretty good so the program i can recommend to do this kind of work is seral s i r i l it's a free program or pix insight that's paid um but it'll allow you to extract the background while the data is still linear and that's going to look even better for color correction okay sandu g sent a wonderful photo here of the blue horse head nebula which is a nice challenging object very large reflection nebula near the more famous uh row ufuyuki region sort of just above it and sandu g said they had issues with star reduction leaving artifacts and gaps yes that's why i don't use star reduction for the most part i just use star removal with star net plus plus and then blend the stars back in as is but you can sort of control this intensity of them since they're on their own layer and you can control the stretch um i guess these stars seem to me to be like overstretched and then reduced uh they're like very bloated here and then they seem reduced after that so i don't think that's a good idea generally um then i also think you went a little bit too dark with the background here like if i look at your starless image you have a lot of dust out here and i i get that it's sort of broken up because of noise uh so maybe you went dark because you wanted to hide some of that um broken upness of the of that um but i don't know it's a balancing act i get it um so i'm not gonna criticize that too much because i i didn't go through the steps of processing this and so maybe you found you just couldn't bring out all that dust um uh so it's uh something to consider but the other thing i'd say about the stars is if you don't reduce them i think they can help hide actually some of that noise um rather than you know when you when you reduce the stars and then you have the all the dusty stuff it's it's really difficult because it's it's usually that very faint dust is noisy and so uh it's uh you're gonna have to do something with it and the gaps and artifacts you're talking about are just sort of the result of of processing the photo too much sometimes um so i think you this is a very dramatic look um but if you wanted to go for something a little bit less dramatic i think just putting all of the stars onto something like this and then just increasing the saturation might look good too all right sand more sand more shot the lagoon and triphid nebula with an olympus camera and nicore lens and a sky watcher star adventurer oh and a sv bony u hc filter ultra high contrast and sand more process this with deep sky stacker seral and snap seed so i think the lagoon nebula here looks great um not blown out but night in nice detail on that cluster um some of the stars or most of the stars i guess seem too saturated to me you know when they're this bright red uh sort of a solid saturated red that almost looks like a hot pixel uh i think that means your stars are are too saturated so just to show you how i'd process your image this is just um a crop background extraction and stretch and seral followed by just a small reduction in green here and that's it um and you can see the the star color is a little bit more natural so stars that have gone sort of red in your image are more of a orange in my image i mean they're sort of red stars but they they don't look that red so this is sort of a more natural maybe more boring look than what you have here but uh just to give you an idea of another way to go and then next we have sasha and sasha captured this wonderful dark nebula region with a 170 with a 107 millimeter refractor and a zwo 2600 mc camera so a color zwo camera and they processed it in pix insight and uh so they're most concerned with color and saturation and uh you know i think both the color and saturation are really well done uh the colorful star field always looks so good with this um brown dust stuff and then i think your your black is perfect i love i love this black um so i think that looks really good but my one critique is um you wrote out all your steps and personally i would have skipped the morphological transformation step at the end uh just because to me uh you know i think what happened when you did that is it made the smallest stars smaller and uh that that when you do that i think the smallest stars just end up looking sort of like noise because they're so small um with pix insight if uh to play with a star deemphasis just with pix insight i would check out adam blocks method um and there's now a script for it too which can make it even easier um but i found that the adam block method um instead of going after the smallest stars it's going to go after this size star like a medium size star and make that a little bit smaller um it leaves the big stars alone and it leaves the smallest stars alone it goes after those sort of medium ones which i think is is the best uh idea for a star deemphasis okay and then sasa undo sasa undo shot the milky way with a canon dsl r and kit lens untracked from a yellow zone processed with deep sky stacker and gimp and it looks like sasa undo pushed the saturation pretty far um and maybe before removing light pollution gradients which what which was giving us this sort of color shift from red to yellow uh to green even um and so i'd suggest sasa undo look into using seral s i r i l it's free and open source it has a background extraction tool and uh so that's what i was able to get out of it um it gives a much flatter image like this and uh and then you can continue to process and you know add saturation and do all that kind of stuff to it um but if you're if you have a pretty flat image like this to start out with then when you add saturation to your image you don't get these sort of extreme artificial uh color shifts because basically you're just uh coloring a light pollution gradient when you if you haven't flattened the the overall image first and sergey sergey shot the north america and pelican with a modded nikon dsl r a telephoto lens and an ops along ellen hands on a star tracker and sergey said that their main problem was with flats and thought that they didn't take them correctly and my first thought was that this picture looked a little bit soft um so i wondered if it was out of focus but when i processed the raw data that sergey sent it was much sharper so i'm not sure why it came out sort of soft like that but then also in the raw data um there are these little black artifacts sort of all over um um and so i don't know uh sergey didn't really mention those i don't think um so my guess is that the sensor or the lens are dirty i'm betting more on the sensor um it looks like a physical issue of some kind um but i guess if the flats were really wrong it could be that too um but without knowing more details i can't say but for flats uh an easy thing to try is just uh very short exposures on bright you know blue sky uh those are called sky flats uh try those if you if you haven't because i think you have really nice data here except for all these little black spots so i'm not really sure what those are about and then next we have shake van shake van captured the Cygnus loop supernova remnant with a canon 80d and a 200 millimeter lens on a star tracker with an sv bony cls filter from a yellow zone and i think this looks pretty good um as we've seen from past pictures in this critique the veil nebula is difficult with this dense star field and this is a pretty dramatic way to handle it it's like all most of the stars the small stars are gone because they're so dimmed um but i think um i actually think it looks pretty well done for the technique you used my one critique of this picture is that the sky background looks sort of blue green so i just maybe move the black point slightly on that um something like that i don't know might be slightly better um then but then you are losing maybe some of this uh o3 nebula city um by doing it that way so i don't know it's a trade-off okay and then we have shushank pincha shushank pincha um captured the eagle nebula with a zwo 533 mc and an opt along ellen hance and a william optics zenith star 81 on an eye up drawn mount from a portal seven in the sky and this was their first shot with the new equipment uh so they didn't have much time to set it up and they didn't have as much time for gathering the images only 49 minutes but shushank asked if there is anything to do in processing that can make up for having so little data not really uh the only thing i'd suggest is um your background sky is very bright here with like lots of weird noise i'm not sure the i think you did something weird with noise reduction um to get out like that so i would do much less noise reduction try not to brighten the sky so much try to keep it more dark um maybe some of this is actual ha emission um i don't know it looks weird to me um so i don't remember ever seeing a ton of ha emission like this above the eagle i think i thought most of it was low so but i could be wrong that could be actual ha but it looks weird um uh and then shushank also asked about deep sky stacker versus weighted batch preprocessor w bpp in pix insight versus doing a full manual calibration registration and stacking in pix insight and personally i've had good luck with any method um but what i do if it's just one night a one night project then i'll typically use the weighted batch preprocessor in pix insight if it's an ongoing multi-night project then i do everything manually because i find that easier and more flexible to manage the way that i do it and then you wrote a number of other things um i'll i'll note them down and try to address them in future videos okay and then shipwreck 88 shipwreck 88 captured the lagoon nebula with an ellen hands filter but actually didn't mean to use the ellen hands filter as they usually have installed for city imaging but this was taken from a darker portal five four site and then one thing shipwreck 88 asked is if the ellen hands was detriment to the image meaning yes and no in this case i'd say mostly yes since this is um in the milky way and so getting that natural star color looks really cool in this for this field because it really fills the field with lots of nice stars um and the ellen hands being a dual narrowband filter is pretty crappy for the stars they all sort of look white or red when like that this cluster here should be a brilliant blue for instance um and then also uh speaking of blue right here this should be a brilliant blue reflection nebula but because of the ellen hands it gets it gets pretty dimmed out because you just have that smaller 20 nanometer band pass for picking up the blue and most of that sort of actually tilted to the green so no filter probably would have been better but also a mix of this and the no filter would have been good too here's my uh crazy rendition just to really pull out uh as much detail as there is in here i know that it's like a very noisy uh outside of the nebulae um but i just wanted to show you that how much was in your data in terms of this bridge between the lagoon and this thing and uh even there's even more blue sort of reflection uh in there um so just to give you an idea of if you really wanted to push your data further um you could uh the best would be to do something like this like what i'm doing here and then make this starless and then put the good stars on on top of this uh with no filter okay this is simon simon captured the central part of the ryan constellation with a nikon z 50 and a zoom lens on a sky watcher star adventurer and simon mentioned that the right star here on the ryan's belt looking a bit funky but found it looked that way in all of their light frames and uh asked if that's about the lens and yes i can confirm that that's distortion that's common with camera lenses so uh nothing you can do about it i do like the saturation of the blue stars that looks cool um i think the saturation on the reds and magenta's across the frame is a little bit too much so just to give you an idea of where i'd put it i'd put it closer to there so here's before notice these very reddish orange uh saturated things and then there's after and even though this is just the jpeg i feel like i'm recovering detail in the flame there uh so uh that's the personal thing but that's where i'd put the saturation on those colors the blue saturation i think looks fine uh very highly highly saturated like you have it okay and then we have simon pepper 85 who captured the veil nebula or the sygnus loop whatever you want to call it with a red cat a zwo 294 mc and an optalong l extreme filter i think this looks pretty good um it's a very dramatic look lots of contrast the you know maybe this you're starting to blow details here in some parts uh with how bright this is um but it stands out very boldly and simon pepper 85 mentioned they're never satisfied with prints compared to seeing their photos on a monitor or on instagram and i think there are a number of reasons prints can end up not looking how we want compared to what we see on the screen i plan to do a series on printing options in the future including lots of tips for printing at home where we have a little bit more control over the process and can experiment a bit more to get the best results possible and so hopefully i can get to that this year and give people some good tips for printing astrophotography because it's pretty different than printing anything else i think okay and then we have stefan who sent in the eagle nebula taken with a full spectrum canon dslr and a combination of ha filtered exposures and ones with an astronomic um l2 filter which is a luminance filter so that's good for getting the natural star color which stefan has here um i did process this picture from scratch i didn't think that my rendition really looked any different than yours i think the only chase choice i made differently was cropping in just a tiny bit more than you did but other than that i think uh with the great sort of you know detail you got here and the pillars and the ha data i just wanted to crop in a little bit more okay and then we have stefan who is a 16 year old astrophotographer who captured the veil nebula with a sky watcher 200 pds reflector and a zwo 294 mc and an opt-along l-enhanced filter and stefan asked why the background looks so dead especially the lower right here and says their guess is that it needs more contrast i think the issue there is you're bringing out the details uh too much uh basically that this should be a fainter signal than the main part of the veil nebula here but because you're pushing it to be as bright as this then it looks dead in comparison um if that makes sense so because if we imagine the veil nebula is this big sphere that's what it is sort of is a supernova remnant um i think this part is probably the back of the sphere and then this part is like the front of the sphere and so this part should be a lot dimmer than this part um so uh here's sort of my interpretation given that of how i would change your processing so here's yours there's mine you can see i made this part back here this part here this part here kept those all much dimmer while making the the veil the main veil nebula here a lot brighter uh because it feels like it should be and it is i think closer to us um so uh just keeping it very simple uh don't oversaturate don't over brighten the background stuff focus your attention on the main event which will help it stand out and look like it is more uh in front and in charge um all right and it's you know it's a really nice data it was fun to process so thanks for sending it Steph okay Stefan captured the Andromeda galaxy with a Canon EOS R6 and a Canon fd 80 to 200 millimeter lens which is an old lens um he said no matter what he tried with flats he couldn't get rid of this very strong ring pattern um and so you know that's really those ring patterns are hard to get rid of sometimes you have to track down what could be reflecting i don't know if it's something with the lens um uh but i've i've encountered those ring patterns mostly with spacers that were sort of an anodized metal and shiny um even though they were black they were would reflect um of course in this image just cropped down to get rid of them but uh if you didn't want to crop them out uh they're hard to like i said they're hard to get rid of the way i'd sort of approach it is making these circular gradients and so then brightening the middle part i didn't quite get it right and then brightening the outer ring and then you darken the whole thing and you can see it's still there a little bit because i didn't quite do it right but um that's the basic idea of how i'd approach trying to get rid of those those rings uh very difficult unfortunately okay and then we have subtle astro subtle astro shot this at f5 on a static tripod with a sigma zoom lens and a stock canon dslr without any filters from a portal eight sky so that's a very challenging uh setup so good for you for giving it a go my suggestion with processing is to be careful with the star treatment um as it feels like lots of your stars have disappeared or sort of turned into a pattern of noise kind of thing um uh i did process your image from your stacked tiff file and um got a pretty different result because i kept in all the stars um but i i still think a very impressive result that we can really see the clear outline of the north america and pelican even some details within them untracked from a portal eight i didn't even know that was possible with a stock camera from portal eight so i always i always like to know that uh things i didn't know were possible are actually possible and then we have sons of cosmos who captured the north america nebula with a celestial rossa zwo 294 mm and border high speed narrowband filters and i like i like these colors for the nebula the green looks awesome here uh it's cool it's like a sort of bluish green i think um and uh has a nice subtle transition into the other colors into the yellows and the and the oranges um i have two small critiques one is that the stars don't need to be this saturated and the saturation i think is what's causing them to have these sort of dark ring like features on them which is most distracting like over here and in here uh where the the dark rings really stand out it doesn't really matter in the dark nebula and speaking of the dark nebula they they look this one especially looks way too blue i'm not sure why that happened but um be easy to fix just uh you know go into your blue channel and and uh break and fix that like that well maybe it's not as easy to fix as i thought because i'm now really changing the color balance so let's see if i do something like that no well anyways i that's uh i guess it's not working on the jpeg here but that that dark nebula there uh shouldn't be blue it should be black basically uh tottage uh captured the Cygnus region around the bright star dineb right here and i'm not sure if i've ever seen it uh like this this is feels flipped to me i'm just gonna flip it just uh just to show you what i mean so i'm used to it looking like that with uh uh the north america and the right way around um anyways um the only other uh suggestion i have in terms of i don't know you can flip it or not flip it i don't really care but uh just for me it feels more natural this way but uh the only other suggestion i have is uh here this um bright corner right here just feels a little bit uh unnatural i think that's a light pollution gradient um and it feels like um maybe combination of like a slight crop uh with yeah something in photoshop here let me show you what i mean so if i just do maybe a slight crop and then do a i know this is this is weird what i'm doing here this doesn't seem to make sense but then what i'm going to do is on this mask i'm just going to apply a little gradient like that and then the result is this taking out the that brightness of that corner you just get a nice flatter feel that way um but i think this looks really nice i should have mentioned this was shot with a nikon dslr nikon zoom lens and on a star adventurer by sky watcher and it's from a portal for sky and so yeah there's just that same process i guess i already did it once okay and here is talal talal is a 16 year old astrophotographer from kawait and talal shot the elephant trunk nebula untracked from portal nine sky wow with a stock camera and lens and this they took over 3000 shots wow i think this um that's dedication and this looks really good considering that gear and uh technique and sky condition um you can see a lot of the dark nebula and the sky and the stars look really good too now we're not seeing really any of the emission nebula but it's very dim uh to shoot untracked it's not the first one i would have thought of to try untracked it's it's a very dim nebula so i'm amazed at how much you were able to bring out and clean up uh here uh just uh what you did um so keep it up i think you're going to love that tracker you mentioned when you get it maybe you already have it at this point and i'm interested to see more from you okay and then we have uh tapfret and tapfret sent in a nice image of the enthrometer galaxy taken with a canon dslr a telephoto lens and an ioptron skyguider pro and tapfret said their issues they had in processing was the glows left behind by star net plus plus when it removes stars and dealing those without dealing with those without complex masks and tapfret specifically mentioned having issues with messier 32 which is this little thing right here it's a little satellite galaxy and so let me show you my approach here so let's start with the starless you can see here's the starless m32 we have that nasty artifact but when i add the stars back m32 comes back and i don't think it really looks that bad because it covers up that artifact um and then i just add some selective color and curves adjustments uh until it's uh done so it's there's more stars uh the stars are brighter than in tapfret's uh interpretation um in mine's a little there's you know it's a little bit more stars and like i said but i i don't find that star net artifacts don't really bother me because they get covered up uh as soon as i add back the stars um but with the benefit of the galaxy does pop out uh by doing it this way because like if i just use the star's layer let me turn this off turn this to normal you can see that doesn't look nearly as finished is if i turn this back on and turn the star's layer to screen okay next we have tensor and tensor captured the lagoon and trifid area with an aperture 60 ed at f6 with a zwo 294 mc and on a sky watcher star adventurer wow so just over an hour of data from a portal for sky and they said they were disappointed in various aspects various aspects of it but you know i really think that's just a matter of expectations being too high perhaps because i think this looks excellent for the equipment and sky conditions and amount of data i don't really see anything in the processing that could be improved in my opinion it's excellent you have really cool details throughout the field tensor mentioned they hadn't found many processes in pics insight that had worked well to improve their data with some processes making it worse for processes they mentioned making it worse they mentioned deconvolution and multi-scale multi-scale linear transform mlt so in my experience the only way deconvolution works well on under sampled data like this is if you get a ton of very well dithered data drizzle it at two times and then do decon on that drizzled data but this unfortunately won't work for you since you can't dither effectively enough with a star adventurer since it doesn't move in declination and so then i don't think drizzle is a good idea so i wouldn't do decon or you can but it's just not going to do anything mlt can be used for blurring or sharpening at different scales so i'm not sure which you tried it for with enough data i think it can be used to blur out some fine noise scales um the very like sort of small variations in noise um but with only an hour of data i wouldn't recommend it for that um i find that kind of blurring noise reduction with something like mlt or mmt that works best when you have like 15 to 20 hours of data to work with um so anyways all that's just to say i agree with you many of the processes in pixight pix insight only work well when we can really push the data um and to push the data it needs to have pretty high snr signal to noise ratio which you'll only get from gathering more data on the target an hour is uh going to be tough for a lot of processes now one you did use is the background extraction tools and i think uh that's a really cool feature in pix insight and you use them while here because this looks like a very nice flat field okay and then next up we have this astronomy enthusiast who sent in an image of the eagle nebula taken with a modded nikon dslr a 500 millimeter telephoto lens and a sky watcher star adventurer wow another cool one on the star adventurer this was from portal two and taken over three nights so about 12 hours total integration and the astronomy enthusiast mentioned the one thing they felt they could work on is star control well i'm glad they didn't try to overly reduce the stars uh they look good they look natural the thing i notice um is the stars are sort of one note in terms of color they're pretty yellow or white and i think that's a function of sort of blue in general being missing from this photo um so just to step you through how i would process this data let me switch over to pix insight so all i did was i opened your master light and i ran automatic background extractor on it to get this which i think has really nice star color and also nice um you know variation uh here in the you know in the main eagle nebula region um and then i just ran uh star net plus plus on it to get this then i brought that both these images back into photoshop here we go and i put the starless on the bottom put that masked uh stretch on top this is the stars set it to screen blend mode at 100 percent and then it was just a little too bright so then i just brought down the black point and that's it so that's an it's an idea of a very very simple workflow i mean you could you could keep processing from here of course um do different things add saturation whatever but um i think it shows you sort of a more natural look to your data natural color with all the star variety and everything um here i think you just yeah you went a little too far into the like the one sort of color scheme it's just sort of red pink and yellow only um and then here you just this is a lot more color variety um it was sort of like browns and pinks and reds and blues and yellows let's see what happens if we add some saturation to this too much let's do there i think it's pretty interesting um maybe it has a little bit of green parts if they'll deal with but pretty nice data 12 hours from portal 2 that's that's i wish i could uh have that more often okay next up we have the mad lawyer and the mad lawyer sent in an image of the shark nebula in cpheus taken with a canon r a and a william optics gt 81 telescope this is about five hours total of data at f 5.5 from a portal for sky and the mad lawyer said that they had a hard time processing dark nebula successfully finding it hard to pull them out without accentuating artifacts um and the like the last one i again tried to keep this very simple so i'll just step through my process here i just stretched your uh tiff file and ran star net plus plus on it that gave me this and yet you can see there's artifacts left over but i don't i'm not going to deal with those i'm just going to add contrast here to the starless image and then put the star uh filled image right on top of it set to a screen blend mode with the opacity set to 92 percent and anywhere there was an artifact like right there the star covers it right up so i'm not going to care about those artifacts and then i can reset the black point so we're really starting to get somewhere now um looks pretty good i think and then the last thing i'm going to do is i just made a new copy of this from visible so that's control alt shift e and then i turned that black and white by just going to image adjustments black and white and this is just to make a mask so i copied this i'm just going to do control a control c to copy that then do alt click and control v to throw it into this mask on the hue saturation adjustment layer turn this layer off so that this hue saturation layer is adjusting on everything below and this is the difference it makes so just adding some saturation and you know we could go even further with it if we wanted to and then this is how we can sort of see the brown dust and but also all the nice star color across the field by adding saturation to it so that's it um i didn't do any noise reduction i didn't try to clean up any artifacts i just went starless contrast stars with a screen blend mode reset black point added saturation right next up we have the stellar remnant who says this is their first photo with this setup and their second attempt ever at astrophotography they captured the north america and pelican nebulae here with canon e s r a opt along the extreme and a radian raptor 61 on a sky watcher star adventurer they said the outside temperature was 93 degrees fahrenheit but they didn't do any noise reduction just to see how well the camera the r a handles high temperatures well i think it looks perfectly well captured it's very impressive that this is only our second attempt at astrophotography the processing is good i um it's just a little one note uh red for my taste so let me just show you uh sort of what i would do with it um i would start with your you know red processing then go into the channels here and extract out this green channel just by copying it pasting it on here okay i'm gonna then change that green um layer from normal to screen gets us this and then i'm going to clip a hue slash saturation adjustment layer to that green channel extracted set to a hue in the blues here that's going to get us this and then it's too bright overall now so i'm just gonna reset our black point like that and i'm now noticing there's a bit too much green over there so let's do another curves layer go to the green channel bring down the green and then do a slight gradient here like that there actually there's too much green and almost the entire picture let's see and maybe we don't need a gradient mask at all let's just fill that with white yeah actually i like that take out all the green okay so that just to show you the before and after so here's before very red here's after bringing more blue back into the ebulae and now we have tim the astro nerd who sent in a nice rich field of the pleaties taken with a stock nikon d5300 a william optics red cat and the a ryan atlas mount and tim said they were pretty new to photoshop and process this with an arc sine curve preset and i like how you know how much the you got the dust to stand out i think overall the image is a little too bright and a little too blue so just to show you sort of where i would go i'd bring down the black level a bit like that and i would bring down on some of those blues now the image is too green so let's do something like this okay so i would go somewhere like that with the processing just to give you an idea some of these dust clouds which look very blue in your image because there's sort of like a blue wash to your whole thing should be more brown and uh yeah and the the sky background should be more of like a dark blackish brown it's looking you know because i'm just working on the jpeg now it's looking almost too red but you get the idea but other than that i think this looks really good looks very nice and sharp and in focus okay now we have tobias and tobias sent in this very well done star trails photo and it's a nice change of pace for this critique it was shot with a sony mirrorless camera and a sigma wide angle lens and it was over a thousand photos at 30 seconds each combined in photoshop nothing to really critique here looks pretty flawless to me i especially like how the color balance of the trails which is overall pretty blue plays against this more golden brown of the power here i do wonder about your technique as you said that it was 30 second exposures and combined in photoshop i've tried that kind of thing and um if you know between the 30 second exposures there's usually like a one second gap while it's taking the next before it takes the next picture and i found with that one second gap it would like leave little gaps that were visible in the star trails so i found a program called star stacks that fixes that by filling the gaps but i wonder if you have a different uh method in photoshop for doing that okay and then this next one this is by another tobias who captured the bodes and cigar galaxies from a portal six sky with a william optics 102 millimeter refractor a zwo 2600 mc and an ioptron sem 40 ec mount 12 hours integration time so this is really well done it shows if you put in the time even if you have some light pollution it's possible to get some really nice color and details on galaxies and get a very clean result i think um tobias said the only thing they felt there was missing from their photo was attention to the background since they'd seen lots of pictures where i assume what they saw was people bringing out like these little satellite galaxies and ifn and all kinds of stuff in the background i'm not sure i mean even though you know i just said you got this really nice clean result on the galaxies these are really bright these messy a galaxies and so i'm not sure from a portal six how much you're going to be able to bring out ifn or if it's you know worth worth doing worth trying um so anyways i think you made the right call here with how you processed it uh and and darkening the background to make these galaxies really stand out tom uh tom you captured the wizard nebula with a canon t7 uh sky watcher star travel 80 t telescope and a scar sky watcher star adventure tom shot 100 lights at 30 seconds each at f 4.9 and this is a definitely a hard object to go after with a stock dslr so hats off to you tom and tom said they struggled with details in the nebula outside the central part and also star color shift between the nebula and the rest of the photo so i guess they mean these sort of pinkish magenta stars here in the nebula i wonder if you were trying to do some selective adjustments and caught those stars when you were trying to change the color of the nebula maybe um i'll show my process for your data that you sent the stacked tiff for it's a pretty different look um what i did is i took your uh photo i did a background extraction in the free program serial s i r i l then i ran that through star net plus plus you know it left a fair amount of artifacts but it also isolated the nebula i then applied this color correction curve to that bring out the nebula a little bit more then put the stars on top of that and set them to screen blend mode and then just reset the black point and i kept the image a lot wider um than you did i know maybe that wasn't your intention maybe you always wanted to crop in a lot more on the wizard but i'm i like wide field stuff so that's why i did it this way um but anyways thanks for sending that in tom and here we go this is uh it's bright uh toshal sent in an image of the moon and clouds taken with a smartphone and an explorer scientific newtonian reflector and it's a single frame image but toshal asked about how to get sharper images so i think the key to sharper images of the moon and the planets is instead of taking a single exposure like you did here take uh video and then use pip uh an auto stacker to free programs on windows to pull out the best frames from that video that you can do it automatically you sort of tell them how to how how many you want to pull out and then you stack only those best frames and the way that that technique works it's called lucky imaging it works because the software can find frames where there are moments of great seeing moments where the air isn't as turbulent and stack only those and you get this sharper image then you usually ever can with a single exposure so that's my advice for a sharper moon image okay and then we have tyler and tyler captured the entramida galaxy with a canon x s i dslr a 55 to 250 zoom lens and a sky watcher star adventurer and this looks great especially considering that that's a very old dslr the first dslr i used to rest in photography was the canon t2i and this x si was an older rebel model i think three or four models before the t2i so it must have been pre 2010 that it was released anyways the processing looks very good nice work bringing out the colors the colors look perfect they know the exactly how they should uh with the the dark um nebula and uh and the blue star clusters and the the core everything looks great here um my one critique is i think you might have a little bit of polar alignment error because the stars all have a little bit of trailing up and down so you did 90 second subs i would try maybe 60 seconds see if the stars are are sharper and rounder with shorter sub exposures okay this is by ukles i don't know if i'm saying that right ukles sent in a photo of the lagoon and trifid nebulae taken with a canon sl3 70 to 300 millimeter zoom lens and a sky watcher star adventurer and they mentioned they limited the 30 second exposures because the ambient temperature was high when they took this so they wanted to be careful about not adding too much thermal noise that's a smart strategy my critique of this image is mostly to do with the color so i'll show you where i'd head with it um so here's just your original jpeg um i'd start by removing a lot of green because green is not a particularly natural color to deep sky there's no green stars so i would just first remove a lot of those green uh stars like this and then overall i'd remove i'd lower the saturation which i think will actually help recover it detail even in this jpeg i feel like by lowering the saturation i'm seeing more detail in the core of the nebulae here and but also i think it helps the star color the star field look a little better okay v like the letter v sent in an image of the sygnus region taken with a zwo 1600 mm uh zwo 7 nanometer ha filter and a canon nifty 50 lens on an ioptron skyguider pro all controlled by a raspberry pi mini computer and this is just five lights at five minutes each so i love this it i love sygnus and but it also this picture shows the flexibility of astrophotography today that you can pair an inexpensive lens on a relatively inexpensive star tracker uh it's like a skyguider pros like five hundred dollars maybe but with a dedicated mono camera and ha filter and get results like this in 25 minutes uh that's amazing uh how good this is and perfectly framed you know the the veil is a little tight but you did get it in there he also got the tulip up here that's so cool um v plans to shoot o3 and s2 and i think it's gonna look really great if you make this full color in narrowband you know 25 minutes is relatively little integration time but it already i think looks pretty nice um don't really have anything to critique about this and i think it's a really neat idea for a kit all right valentine captured the triangular galaxy messier 33 had 85 millimeters of the sony mirrorless camera and a sky watcher easy gti in equatorial mode from a portal seven location and valentine said they did not have the disk space to stack all their shots at once so they would stack groups of 200 exposures and then delete i think the individual 200 exposures then stack another 200 and keep doing it that way and then stack all the resulting uh masters together and they asked if this was okay and yes i think it works pretty well i mean i still need to do a more rigorous test to see if i can actually see any difference between doing it that way versus stacking everything at once but theoretically i don't think there could be there would be a huge difference between the two anyways i think the processing looks really nice here um my only critique is with color i just think that m 33 shouldn't be quite this blue um so i processed it from scratch just to show you sort of the color i'm thinking m 33 should be closer to which is more of a neutral with pockets lots of pockets of pink um because it has a lot of hydrogen emission so just to show you the difference here before and after and i zoomed in a little bit or a cropped in a little bit i guess uh but i actually sort of like your crop better so maybe i should have left it like that because i like the seeing the sea of stars and then the little galaxy in the middle okay valter valter took a photo of the lagoon and triphid nebulae with a canon 600d sky watcher 72 millimeter refractor and a sky watcher eq three mount and i think this looks really good the data looks very nice um my only critique of it is that the processing feels too dark um the lagoon here is within the milky way so there should be more faint stars sort of popping out um so let me show you what that would look like this is the same data just brighter basically um and but i think that by making it brighter you can also see more details and things like the blue reflection nebula around the triphid and some of this extended nebulosity in the lagoon and then van city asked a photography captured the pillars of creation at the center of the eagle nebula with a celestial eight inch s ct and a 0.63 reducer on an alt as mount i'll take in with canon 60d and i think this looks really nice uh van city astra asked about why the stars looked funky around the edges my guess is it has nothing to do with your optics and all to do with your mount with an alt as mount you're going to get field rotation it's uh unavoidable and this looks just like field rotation so uh the only answer there is moving to an equatorial mount uh unfortunately but i wouldn't worry about it i don't think it detracts from the shot very much um you could also always just crop in because i don't think the you know you have so much detail here in the in the nebula that just cropping out those sort of funky stars would actually maybe be good let me just go here something like that and the only thing with uh processing i'd recommend is just maybe just a tad brighter so i just did a slightly brighter version here where i brightened up the the nebula but this is really cool it's one of the better natural color pillars of creation shots i've seen okay and then next we have vlad and vlad captured the milky way untracked with a stock canon dslr canon nifty 50 lens and stacked 41 four second shots with sequitur and then processed them in photo shot and my thought on this one uh is it looks a tad on the green side and could use a little bit more contrast so just to show you that that direction i just put a curves layer here on your photo and uh did a little more contrast and took out a little green and there's the result so before after other thing i could recommend is if you want to add another free program other than sequitur to your workflow uh ciril s i r i l has a background extraction tool that should make getting good color and get rid of some of these gradients um very easy to do okay yannis captured the row of yuki cloud complex with a sony point and shoot camera an rx 10 version two on a move shoot move star tracker so that's a really neat lightweight kit there it probably all fits in a small carry-on bag the moveshoot move is one of the smallest trackers i know of and i think the sony rx 10 is a very compact camera as well my suggestion for improving this shot is either shoot flat frames uh because there's a lot of vignetting or um you know uh if you don't want to do flats or they don't work for you you could just crop in uh so i cropped in a little bit here just to show and doesn't look too great but um get the idea you can bring out a little bit more color in the nebulosity have to work on the noise a little bit i think in the background but that's the idea yeah because i think this might be uncorrectable vignetting it looks too dark to probably correct because now i'm i'm actually liking your crop better so maybe just leave it as is i don't know okay and now we have yantung yantung bemo yantung bemo captured m 101 uh also known as the pinwheel galaxy with a canon dslr and a celestron next star 102 slt telescope in its default with its default alt as mount and yantung bemo processed with zero gimp and light room mobile and they said that they found the noise hard to deal with in processing especially in the background and would end up just dealing it with crushing the blacks and you know that's exactly what i would do too uh and what i did i think galaxy shots look good with nice black backgrounds um well with nebula shots and i was telling people you know don't crush your blacks but here i think let's see where you put them yeah i think uh putting them around 15 15 15 something like that is good with a nebula shot i'd recommend 30 30 30 but i think crushing the blacks a little bit more to deal with noise is fine um i processed this one too let's see looks a little noisy but um what i was trying to do i guess was um get a little bit more color variety into the galaxy because i know that this galaxy does have these ha regions which give the inner part uh some of this sort of like pinkish look um so i thought that was interesting to try to try to bring that out um as for your question about being at the limit of your gear um i don't know you might be close because i think this looks very good for that telescope and dslr i think the best thing to save for if you're looking for a gear upgrade would be a star tracker or an equatorial mount um because an alt as mount is probably going to be limiting uh in some ways um so probably one of those would be something to save for and now we have zan zan sent an image of sygnus taken with a canon dslr a canon nifty 50 stopped down to f 3.2 with a barn door tracker and zan took 20 light frames at three minutes each for one hour total and they were wondering about how to get better especially when it comes to noise but zan already put in the caveat how to get better about hiding noise without taking more data so they knew i was going to say yeah just triple your exposure time um well so maybe i'll just mention it again getting more total time under the night sky is always going to be the best because that's going to increase your signal to noise ratio and then you can push the data further in processing the only good way to hide noise without getting more data is just being more conservative in how you're pushing the processing so zan did a really pretty cool job of really pushing the processing here the stars have almost disappeared uh how much you know this is pushed um it's almost like a starless edit um but stars themselves can sort of hide noise so i don't think that actually looks any better when it comes to noise but then compared to zan's edit but i guess my idea here was that if you know if you do a more conservative thing maybe it hides some noise i think this just is a different kind of edit uh not really necessarily a less noisy one so well it depends what you mean by noise i guess i don't know visual noise or or actual noise but anyways different edit uh keeping all the stars in gets you that it's a balancing act you know between bringing out these dark structures in wide field bringing out the stars if that's you're interested in that bringing out the emission nebulae um but i really actually do like this edit even though normally i don't like the ones where they've taken out all the stars this one looks really tasteful to me for some reason okay and then we have zane kite photography this is uh the last photo in the critique and it's of the central orion region taken with the nicon dslr on an eye optron skyguider pro it's just 14 exposures at two minutes each and zane kite said that they couldn't get rid of this airplane flying through in the lower right part of the frame down here um that actually i'm surprised by with something that bright with 14 exposures stacked i wonder if in deep sky stacker you were using the average stacking method rather than the default kappa sigma clipping because i i would think that with kappa sigma clipping that those pixels would have been um bright enough that wouldn't they would be rejected and same thing with this um meteor strike right here i would have thought that would have been rejected from the stack if you're using kappa sigma so my my guess is you were using average or something like that um i don't know of any good way to manually get rid of uh plane trails or satellite trails um i always just rely on the rejection algorithm when you stack um but other than that aspect um i think this photo looks really nice um really well processed bringing out all this brown dust in just a 28 minute total exposure and the saturation level looks pretty nice um just right on the edge you know like it's uh bringing the saturation right up to that limit uh but not uh over that limit where we'd start losing details to the saturation for anyone that's has stuck around to the very end congratulations and i've decided i want to do a bonus clip here at the end where i critique one of my own astrophotos this is something i just remembered that i did on the last critique video and i thought it'd be nice to keep up the the tradition um this time i'm going to critique the astrophoto i've by far spent the most time on to date um which is an ongoing mosaic project in the constellation Cygnus and it's but it's centered so far on a part of Cygnus that i don't think it's as much uh attention and it's definitely a project that has helped me learn a lot of troubleshooting and processing techniques and even new software because at some point i added astrophixel processor which was really actually invaluable for doing some of the mosaic construction so to start out let me explain for anyone who doesn't know about this project that originally i planned to stop with this which is hopefully you can see is the central part of this right and so this is just eight panels and 46 hours total integration across ha o3 and rgb filters and i finished this in 2018 and it was very very happy with it i thought wow that's my best astrophoto to date i really like it um and so i was thinking originally when i was just making this that i that's that would be it but then as soon as i was done i was like i felt this feeling of like i'm it's done i want to keep going and then people you know encourage me to keep going too so i thought well okay maybe i'll expand it um so i thought of different ways to expand it like i could expand it to the right to the left uh down up whatever um decided to expand it in one panel in every direction so if you have eight panels and you go out one panel in every direction that would make it 24 panels total um so big undertaking but i managed to actually gather all that data um to make a 24 panel mosaic in 2020 um because i took 2019 off but then when i tried to stack all of this uh all 24 panels i was still working on only laptops i had a mac laptop and a windows laptop and that's it and i tried it both on the mac laptop the windows laptop no luck both pics inside an astrophixel processor both told me there's not enough memory 16 gigabytes or 32 gigabytes or whatever it is was not enough and it just crapped out it would sometimes try to run all night and crap out other times like astrophixel processor would just tell me when i click the button no way i'm not gonna stack it for you um so uh by i ended up um gathering more data in 2021 while i was saving for a new computer which i have now it's just like giant pc uh with 128 gigabytes of ram and a really good uh processor uh horizon nine processor um so but by the time that i bought that computer i'd gather 214 hours of data so that's what you're seeing here um and over 24 panels i got it all stacked and processed like this and guess what after three years of waiting i was disappointed with the result um maybe that was inevitable i don't know i just didn't feel that artistically it was that much of an improvement over the original eight panel uh release despite probably being i don't know 15 times 20 times the effort and time put into it i mean in terms of just integration going from 46 to 214 that's like something like five times more total but when you think of all the setup time and and all the processing and all the time spent saving for the computer and all these different things i think it was probably a lot a lot more uh than that um so there there i'm not gonna say it was i felt that they're equal in all ways like there are definitely some things um that i'll point out here that i think improved in this new rendition um so in in 2021 one thing that happened because i was waiting to buy the computer was i had more time on these 24 panels so i spent some of that time um gathering more 03 on the Cygnus shell area here w 63 which definitely helped with um making sure it wasn't noisy or too noisy at least um compared to the original and it also sort of beefed it up a little bit like i think it looks a little bit more filled in in this one the other thing that i did that i really actually thought was pretty cool was i gathered s2 data um and figured out a way to incorporate that into this and it's pretty subtle but there's a couple areas where it just helped a whole lot and one of them is right here in the propeller region um you see that there's like sort of like pinks and it's just very subtle what it did well in this one this is the area um right here let's see right down here that i thought stuck out like a sore thumb i hated that so much how this looked the 03 edition right here but i just i couldn't figure out how to handle it how to bring it out without it just looking dumb like that but it so i think that in this one that's really improved um but to me um the drawback of this one artistically is that the focus is still the w 63 supernova remnant that's what i spent the most time on and i also really loved how um this pair of stars looked with this and then this streamer right here but now this central feature takes up so um little space compared to the overall picture when you compare it to this one where it's really in your face that i feel just artistically it's sort of a wash i don't think that this one is any better uh than this i love how this more fills the frame with interesting stuff to look at and this one it just sort of feels like okay you're drawn right away to that blue center and then your eye doesn't really know where to go next because there's just so much going on um so i i even thought well okay well maybe i could draw the eye better in an sh o version so i did this it's cropped in a little bit um i don't know if it's better i don't i don't like it at this point right now i'm just feeling sick of this so maybe maybe that's why but i i don't like this version that much um i i did release it because i thought i'd get some feedback but uh i don't know i don't like it so uh this is sounding like a downer it's really not meant to be though um i just sort of want to talk through artistically this project since i haven't really before um and i think that i'll wrap it up by saying that even though i'm somewhat disappointed in the result i still find this project really exciting because when you go really deep on a project like this it sort of takes on a life of its own and at some point you just have to accept that your vision and and the reality of what you actually have captured might not always match up but that's okay it can be more about the journey of creating a large project than the final result being the most satisfying part and in any case like i did in 2019 i took a break of all all of 2019 worked on other other things i did a cave a big thing in the on the cave nebula which was fun and so i'm going to be taking a break from this sickness mosaic in 2022 um to work on other things but hopefully in 2023 i'll feel energized to pick it back up with some fresh ideas and uh i'm thinking you know if i could expand it to to some of the more recognizable stuff in sickness like the north america which has a lot of o3 signal maybe that offset of another big blue object will really uh be cool i'm not sure um that would be expanding it mostly down so i'm thinking that might be what i do um rather than just keep going out uh which i'm i'm thinking maybe wasn't the best idea so anyways um this is a very long video i've been working on it now all day and into the night um so you are now seeing the names of all of my patreon supporters um because whenever we have a long video on the channel um you get to see the credit in the credits all of the names of everyone who supports me on patreon so if you want to see your name in the credits on any long video you can sign up over on patreon.com slash nebula photos and in addition to having your name in the credits uh as you're seeing now there are lots of other benefits to joining us uh with us over on patreon um the one one of them is there's a direct chat feature right through patreon so as soon as you sign up you can start chatting with me um but then there's also it's linked to our discord server so that's where you can meet all the people who are already part of patreon all the people who you're seeing now and they'll chat with you too about astrophotography where there's everyone on there is just really dedicated astrophotography people and so i they know you know collectively way more than i do and can help you out with all kinds of things i also organize a monthly imaging challenge um where each month i'm going to give you a challenge like shoot something in a ryan shoot something uh that's a reflection nebula so that kind of thing um so it's a prompt and then you go out and shoot a picture and do it in one month and submit it on the discord server and it's it's a lot of fun and we pick um winners and the winning images each month are published on my instagram and on astro bin i also do monthly zoom chats so this is an opportunity to come in live and ask me questions um i usually do a short presentation we also sometimes have community presentations so if there's something that you feel you want to present on um that's great too um and then there's just a bunch of other stuff i do if there's some exclusive videos that are only on patreon i'm going to be doing some patreon giveaways um they're oh and then new uh also new is we're doing a group imaging project so this is we're all going to be shooting or we all are shooting m 78 messier 78 in a ryan right now and then we're gonna try to put all of our data together and see what we get so i think it's really worth your while to sign up um so you don't miss out on all of this uh activity uh if you're into astrophotography it starts at just one dollar per month um and then there's a three dollar tier and a seven dollar tier and i'm gonna i'm gonna keep it that way i don't i don't plan on really changing it uh for a while at least um but it's been it's been really fun and hopefully you can join us on patreon well until next time this has been nico carver clear skies