 Hello. Back in November, I asked viewers of this channel to send in their astrophotography, and 360 of you sent in photos for me to critique. And so it has taken me several months to go through them all, and I wanted to really give each photo submission some, you know, thorough consideration, and I've taken notes. My notes document is now over 100 pages long single spaced. So this is going to be a long video. I'm sure my longest video ever. I did look it up, and apparently the longest a single video can be on YouTube in 2023 is 12 hours long. So I'm on the clock. But I, the reason is I don't want to split this video up into multiple sections. For some reason, my mind works, it should be just one video. So I'm going to try to record this all in basically one take. I'll of course take bathroom breaks and meal breaks. But I like the idea of an astro critique marathon. And the last thing before we jump into the 360 image critiques is there is a camera giveaway associated with this critique. Everyone who submitted a photo was eligible for the giveaway. But you could also say that you didn't want to participate. So from the people that opted in, I randomly selected. And the camera to give away is this one right here. This is a Canon SL two that's been astro modified by night sky camera, which is an awesome business out of Vancouver, Canada, that sells these modified DSLRs and mirrorless cameras. But you can also send in your stock DSLR or mirrorless and have them modify it. And they ship worldwide. And I highly recommend them. So thank you so much to Max and night sky camera for donating this camera for the giveaway here. So without further ado, the winner of the giveaway is Zachary P from Texas. Congrats Zachary. I'll be getting this camera out to you tomorrow. Okay, so that's it. Now let's jump into the critiques and I'll be going in alphabetical order. And if you're watching this on replay, you can check out the video description where I should put in all the timestamps and then just jump ahead to your critique. First up, we have Adam. Adam sent in this photo. It's of the North America and Pelican Nebulae. And it was captured with a Nikon D 5600 and an Apertura 60 EDR Refractor. And that was all on a Star Tracker, the Star Adventurer. Adam processed this photo in Deep Sky Stacker and GIMP. And my opinion is this is wonderful. I love the contrast, the colorful stars and nebulae. All the colors are really spot on. Adam did ask how to bring out the nebulosity more without using StarNet plus plus and StarNet plus plus is a program for removing the stars and then you can add them back in. And so the nebulosity is actually really pretty strong already in your photo, Adam. So I think what you really mean by bringing it out more is the balance between the nebulosity and the star field. And so what you might want to look into is star reduction and star reduction techniques. Off the top of my head, I think the way you do it in GIMP is you make a mask, a layer mask, and then you use the erode filter on a separate layer and sort of blend them back together. And I think that's there's some tutorials out there, I'm sure. So look into that, look into star reduction in GIMP. And I think you'll be happier with how much the nebulosity pops. But I wouldn't want you to lose the colorful star field because that's really something special about this photo. Okay, and next we have AE Nature Photography, who sent in this very nice image of the Andromeda Galaxy. AE Nature Photography mentioned the issues being bloated stars and a soft looking galaxy. But I think this looks really good for the small aperture of the Red Cat 51, you really couldn't ask better than that. But since I asked for these images for critique, a new tool in Pixinsight came out from Russell Cromman called Blur Exterminator. And so you might want to look into the combination of drizzle integration with Plur Exterminator, because I think that will will help you get those really crisp details that you're looking for. The only other thing I'd say is you did send in your raw stack. I took a look at that. And I got this picture just from the automatic background extraction. And those large black spots, I think you could fix those if you took flats. So either take good flats or clean your sensor and you can get rid of those big dust spots. Okay, next up we have Aiden. Aiden sent in an image of Jupiter and the Galilean moons. And this looks very good. Aiden mentioned being unhappy with a limb artifact. I think that, you know, when you get enough data from Jupiter and Jupiter is slightly rotated, there's plenty of overlapping in the middle part of the planet, but then not as much along the edge. And so I think there's two major ways to solve those limb artifacts. One is just to use less data. So you mentioned rejecting 25%, but you didn't say how long you collected the data for. So you could limit your data collection, you know, just to a three minute period. And then there shouldn't be a lot of rotation artifacts. Another option that I've heard about is you can use a program called WinJupos. And that derotates frames. It's sort of like a little bit of an artificial kind of thing. But it helps with, again, correcting those limb artifact problems. Okay, and then we have AJ. And AJ sent in this image of the heart nebula. It was, of course, made with narrowband filters. And AJ asked about color framing and star color. And the lack of much star color for a narrowband image, in my opinion, is good. I'd rather have star colors that are close to white rather than having really funky, obnoxious star colors that sort of just get in the way with a narrowband image. But if you want more naturalish star color in your narrowband image and you don't want to take RGB stars, what I'd recommend is doing an HOO combination for the stars. And then you can combine that with the SHO combination for the nebulae. In terms of framing, my personal opinion is, when you can't quite fit in the whole object, like you haven't been able to hear, it looks a little bit awkward to just have a little bit cut off. So if you don't want to mosaic, another good option is just to pick an interesting crop, right? So you could do something sort of widescreen with this, like a 16 by 9 crop, and just go in on some interesting section of the scene. And I think that that looks a little bit more intentional than this whole thing. And then also by zooming in like that, you can avoid these sky gradients that are in the picture. Akron Astro sent in this image of the lagoon nebulae. This is a very interesting combination of gear used. It was a modified Canon DSLR, but also a clip-in H-ELFA filter for some of the data that was incorporated. And this was all on an Apertura 6 inch Newtonian with a Botter MPCC Mark III Koba corrector. So personally, I like the lagoon a little bit better in natural color. I think for some objects using that HA filter is really going to, I think for some objects using the HA filter is going to add a lot, but I'm not sure this one has improved that much by adding that. I think for my taste, the lagoon is very nice and just RGB. This is just screen stretch just to show what Akron Astro's RGB data looks like. But if you process just this, I think I might prefer it than the HA enhanced version. Akron Astro also mentioned that there was some distortion in the corners. I did take a look using the aberration inspector here in PICS and it does look like there's a little bit of spacing issue since all the stars are all going out away from center. It usually means you have to add some spacing to get better correction. So maybe just one or two millimeters might do the trick here to fix this distortion in the corners. Next up we have Alessandro and Alessandro sent in an image of Saturn taken by shooting video with an iPhone 13 attached to a Skywatcher Newtonian. I think it was a Dobsonian because he said that he was manually stabilized, which I assume meant he was sort of moving the telescope to keep Saturn in view. Alessandro said he was disappointed in the result when comparing it to others with similar equipment. Looking at this, I think the issue might be that you've overexposed to the planet. That can be really hard to control on an iPhone, but there is an app called Nightcap Camera that should help as it allows more sort of manual exposure controls on the camera. And then once you find the correct exposure setting, you can lock it in using that app rather than allowing the iPhone to auto adjust because it's often going to get it wrong with something like this. And then another Alessandro sent in this picture of the Andromeda Galaxy. This is with a stock DSLR, a Skywatcher EvoStar 72, and an EQ5 mount. And Alessandro mentioned only being able to dither in RA, and for this reason had the deal with some walking noise. So I think that it has been dealt with beautifully because I can't see it here. Maybe just making the background nice and dark is what worked. Sometimes I do encourage people not to go quite this dark, but I think in this case it has been done very well because the galaxy fades into the sky background and everything looks really good. I don't see any problem with that transition from galaxy to sky. So well done. I really don't have any suggestions for improvement with this one. And then Alessio. Alessio took this with a stock Nikon and an old Nikon Zoom lens and processed in DSS, Serial, and Photoshop. And Alessio mentioned that there was a red prominence when stretching in Serial. Usually those kinds of things come down to light pollution and then they can be fixed with just color calibration. It looks like you had no issue fixing that red cast. My only suggestion is here in Photoshop, what you can do is open up the camera raw filter. And this filter is good for chromatic aberration because I noticed some of these bright stars have a little bit of a purple fringe on them. And so you can make it more neutral by just playing around with this purple amount slider. And it can take out some of that purple fringe in your stars. Now it also can affect other things in your photo, but in this case I think overall your photo was a little bit purple. So I think using this purple amount slider pretty aggressively improves it. Okay, Alex A sent in this very nice photo of Andromeda taken with a red cat and an ASI 294MC camera. And Alessio said the stars were around over the whole picture, but then after using morphological transformation to reduce star size their shape wasn't as good. It wasn't as round. And so yes, that's been my issue with star reduction techniques, especially morphological transformation in Pix Insight. And it's why I don't really do star reduction anymore. I just use star removal techniques so then you can stretch the galaxy or the nebula separately and then add the stars back. But there are more modern star reduction techniques that usually still involve star removal, but you can look into them like Bill Blanchin's star reduction techniques that are in Pix Insight. He's described that on Luca Modico's YouTube channel, but he also has his own YouTube channel that's Bill Blanchin. So I think that that's the way that I would go is either don't do star reduction at all and just use star net to stretch the galaxy, put the stars back in. Or if you want to do star reduction, use a more modern technique like Bill Blanchin's. Okay, next up we have Alex. Alex sent in this image of Andromeda taken with a Canon Rebel XS and a William Optics 61, tracked with a Star Adventurer tracker. Alex processed this in serial and GIMP and it was taken from a Bortle V sky. And Alex felt that maybe he could have brought out a little bit more color. And so I totally agree. I mean, even if we just play around with your JPEG here, I can see that if I raise saturation, it's making all the right parts the right color. So you have, you know, perfect color balance and all you'd have to do is just raise the saturation and use masks and things to target it where you want it. So what I would probably do is boost the saturation in Andromeda a lot. And in the stars, not quite as much, but almost as much. And I think that will really make the picture pop. Okay, another Alex, another M31. And I've never seen quite this orientation of M31. It's very interesting. It really draws my eye to M110 right here, a satellite galaxy. I think this orientation also does a good job of making M31 look really huge, which it really is in terms of apparent diameter in the sky. I can see that you really want to bring out the blue colors, but I think you went a little bit overboard because there's now a lot of blue noise in the shadows of the picture. And when you have sort of a color cast in the sky that's a little bit distracting, you know, you could just use a simple curve adjustment. So for instance, if we just go to the blue curve and we reduce that, then we're getting a little bit into a green sky. So I might have to then also reduce the green. Okay, but something like that. So here's before and after. I think that makes it pop a little bit. But other than that, I think everything is technically good. It's definitely a bright Andromeda, but that makes it stand out. All right, Alex sent in this photo of the Pleiades and this was taken with a lens stopped down to F9 from a place with a lot of light pollution. And Alex asked a number of questions about noise and bringing out the nebula. But the main issue here is not your processing or even your technique, it's that reflection nebulae like the Pleiades are very difficult at all to do when you have a lot of light pollution. And then doubly so with a slow focal ratio like the F9 that you used. So the first thing I'd suggest is don't stop down your lens, leave it wide open, which in your case is F6. And then the second thing is, if you have any way to get somewhere darker to a darker location, you can save reflection nebulae for those trips to the dark site and then focus on emission nebulae with a filter when you're under a more light polluted sky. Because there isn't really any fix in processing for this kind of noise. It just comes down to target selection and light pollution. And if you can't escape the light pollution, well then what you have to do is just put in countless hours of data to avoid the noise. So it's really just piling on the integration. There's a video that I made with Quiv, the lazy geek, where he did get a nice photo of the Pleiades, but he was shooting at F2. So a very fast focal ratio and he did something like 20 hours of exposure to counteract that heavy light pollution from Tokyo. Okay, another Alex sent in this beautiful photo of the heart and soul nebulae and the double cluster. This was made with a Samyang 135 f2 lens, stopped down to f2.9 using front aperture rings so that there's no diffraction pattern on the stars. And Alex mentioned having trouble with the stars still appearing a little bit soft. And he says that this might be chromatic aberration. I agree. I think this lens is exhibiting a little bit of color fringing. I think that's typical to have a little bit of chromatic aberration. In Pixinsight, what you can do is you can invert the image, use SCNR green, and then invert it back. In Photoshop, what you can do is just go to camera raw filter and use this purple amount slider to I'll show you before and after. There's before and after just to get rid of that purple fringing. But that's going to make the stars look a lot sharper if they don't have that little bit of chromatic aberration left on them. For this image, let's see, I think just using a purple amount of two on the de-fringe is enough. So how much de-fringe you use is going to depend on how bad the chromatic aberration is. This is really not too bad. Okay, Amir sent in this single photo taken of the Orion Nebula with a phone attached to a telescope. This is something I've tried to and it is difficult. You know, I do a lot of fancy astrophotography and you might think, well, putting out your photo on an eyepiece is easy, but it's really not. There's a lot to it. But it can also definitely be a lot of fun. And Amir mentioned that it wouldn't stack. And I think I know the reason for that. For Deep Sky Stacker to allow you to stack, it needs at least three stars that are round and also not saturated. And this photo, I don't think passes that test. If we zoom in, you can see the stars are streaked left to right. And so Deep Sky Stacker doesn't recognize these as stars, basically. And then it doesn't know how to register the stacks to get. DSS doesn't know that these are stars. And then it doesn't know how to register your photos together. So you're either going to have to use shorter exposures so that the stars aren't trailed or something like that. You know, dialing this in can be a little bit of trial and error. But that's what you would need to do if you actually want to stack photos from a phone on an eyepiece. Andreas sent in this well-composed portrait of the Orion Constellation. I really like the composition here. It works very well. Andreas used a Canon RF 24-105 zoom lens, stop down to F.5.6. And Andreas was wondering if there was any way to improve the corner stars. Probably not. Usually lenses like a zoom won't be well-corrected like a telescope would be, especially when you go wide field and on a full-frame sensor. So I think this is probably the best you can expect from that lens. Andreas also asked about star reduction. He used something called the value propagate filter in GIMP to do the star reduction here. Let's see. Yeah, it's not that great. I mean, it's a little bit artificial looking when you really zoom in. But when you experience the photos zoomed out, I think it looks pretty nice. I don't really know that much about star reduction in GIMP or anywhere because I don't do it myself. But I have heard that you can use the road filter in GIMP. So you might try that and see if it looks any better or worse than the value propagate method. Okay, Andreas sent in this nice portrait. I assume of himself looking at the Milky Way core over some body of water. And this is taken with a star adventurer, a Sony a7 III mirrorless camera and a Sony 20 millimeter f 1.8 G lens. And I've heard really good things about that lens. This is of course very well done. I think the lantern provides a nice sort of bright anchor point for the composition. And then I love how Andreas left the processing of the Milky Way and the air glow and the light pollution all very natural. The foreground is nice and sharp and noise free. You know, that's something I often struggle with. I'm not good at foregrounds at night. I just never really mastered that. I did zoom in and notice that if you really zoom in on the sky, it does have the classic sort of Sony noise reduction that creates a lot of green and strangely colored stars. But when zoomed out, you know, how the photo is supposed to be experienced, that's really not an issue at all. And so I this is something that comes up a lot or can you use Sony cameras for astrophotography? And of course you can. You know, some people I think they're more well known for this kind of thing wide field where you're not really zooming in on the stars because for deep sky, it might make a little bit more sense to go with a different brand. So you don't have off colors. But when you're zoomed out and you're experiencing a picture wide field like this, it really doesn't matter if it has some noise reduction algorithm that makes funny star color. Okay, another Andreas sent in this image of the heart nebula. This was made with a modified Canon DSLR, an LX stream light pollution slash narrowband filter. And this was taken from a white zone, so very high light pollution. And Andreas mentioned that it was a dirty looking stack. So he did some heavy noise reduction, but then probably lost some detail. And so yeah, I can see that, especially in the highlights here. For instance, down here in the fish head, we're probably losing some some detail there. But overall, I think it still looks pretty good in terms of detail and the stars look nice. The one thing I would suggest is keep playing around with color. This color is common with narrowband imaging. I see it a lot. It's sort of like a goldish brown. This is not my favorite. It's not very vibrant. So if we go here to selective color, so for instance, if I just take out all the cyan out of red, this is just sort of a richer orange that I prefer over the more sort of brownish orange. So just something to look at. Okay, next up we have Andrew Lord Emperor. Andrew Lord Emperor captured the Pleiades and captured it with a Canon XSI and a 75 to 300 millimeter kit lens on a Skywatcher Star Adventurer tracker. Andrew mentioned having a difficult time with the noise in the image and this was shot from a Portal 6 sky. So my first recommendation is if you can get to a darker sky to shoot Andrew, definitely go for it. The light pollution is of course a signal that we can take out the light pollution gradient and the sort of the color of the light pollution. But that noise is still part of light pollution. So if you can get somewhere darker to shoot, definitely go for it. My other suggestion is to use maybe a higher ISO. You shot this at ISO 400 but usually Canon cameras, the read noise improves at 800 or 1600. So that might help a little bit. Okay, next up we have Andrew and Andrew took this with a simple setup of a Canon T5, a CLS filter, and a Star Tracker. But Andrew piled on the hours here. This is over 15 hours of integration. So that really helps bring out the faint detail that we're seeing here. And I really like the framing and processing. The only small flaw, and you would really have to know this area well to see this, is most of these dark spots are actually dark nebulae. But there's one here down here that I think is actually just some dust on the sensor that's moved a little bit during shooting. So if I just raise, for instance, the mid-tone level, these over here in sort of a row, these are all real features while this one is not. So not many people would see that. It's just a minor quibble. I'm not sure why it didn't come out with flats or something. But just another, if you don't want to shoot flats, of course, the other thing is just to keep your sensor really clean because usually those dust spots are on the sensor, not on the optics. Okay, then we have Andrew and Christina who sent in this image of the North America and Pelican Nebulae. And this was made with a Canon DSLR and Canon 300mm f4 lens on a Skywatcher Star adventurer tracker. My first thought looking at it was that the color balance and the shadows was very biased towards blue. So one thing you could do is just add some yellow to the shadows to counteract that. But maybe that was, you know, the artistic intention of Andrew and Christina. Andrew and Christina did ask about two things. One, how to make the Nebulae pop more. And for that, I would just stretch it more. You know, even working with just the JPEG here, if I just go in here and do that, that makes the Nebulae pop more, I think. So it's just about applying, not being afraid to apply more of a stretch. But then, you know, the problem with just doing that, right, is that you can see you have some halos and stuff. And you may not like that, that the stars get a little bit more glowy and bloaty. So one thing that you can do is you can remove all the stars with something called StarNet++, apply that kind of stretch to just the Nebulae in the background, and then put the smaller stretched stars back on. And then the other question Andrew and Christina had speaking of the stars and their halos is about these halos on the bright stars. And if there's anything they can do about that, that probably has to do with the lens. I think I know that lens, the 300 millimeter F4, does have a bit of what's called flaring on bright point sources. So there's probably nothing you can do. You know, personally, seeing a lot of astrophotography, I sort of like when data has a unique look to it. So it doesn't really bother me, but I can see how if you want just more technical perfection, you might be looking at getting a different kind of lens, or even better, a small telescope like a William Optics Redcat 51. Okay, next up we have Andrew Monite, who sent in this image of the Ring Nebula, taken with a Nexstar 6SE telescope and a Canon SL3 DSLR. It was processed with DeepSky Stacker and Serial. This looks very nice. It's a short integration, but it shows you what you can do with a DSLR and an ALTAS telescope. My two thoughts in processing is it feels like the Ring Nebula should be centered, because it's just like slightly off centered. So it would be pretty easy to just do that with a crop. And then for some reason, the green and blue channels are clipped to black over here, while the red channel is way over here. So I try color calibration before stretching or while stretching to see if you can fix that. Because now that it's a stretched JPEG, I can't recover detail if green and blue are clipped to black. But I just noticed that red bias, so I thought I'd mention it. All right, Andy captured the Orion Nebula and the Horse Head and Flame with a Canon 2000D and a 75-300mm kit lens on a Skywatcher Star adventurer tracker from our red zone. And Andy took 240 lights at 29 seconds each. And Andy mentioned that the biggest issue was the gradient here in the background, and wasn't sure how to take that out in processing with DSS and GIMP. So what I recommend is adding a free program called Serial into your workflow, that's S-I-R-I-L. And it has a background extraction process that allows you to get a very flat background pretty easily. You just put down these samples and play around with it, click Compute background, and it will sort of figure out how to flatten out your background for you. And you can use that right after stacking in DSS. It also has some other nice features, including stacking. So if you want to replace DeepSky Stacker entirely, you could just use Serial and GIMP rather than DeepSky Stacker and GIMP. Okay, Anish took a photo of the Andromeda Galaxy with a Canon T3i and a 75-300mm kit lens on a Skywatcher Star adventurer. And Anish took 120 lights at 60 seconds each at 75mm focal length and then cropped in. And my main suggestion here is for Andromeda, it probably would have been better to zoom in to 300mm because even though the focal ratio is going to be slower, you do have the Star tracker to sort of compensate. Because the issue when you crop in like this is the noise scale gets bigger. While if you were filling a lot more of the frame with the Galaxy 300mm, it should actually look better. And with your Star adventurer, if you get a good polar alignment, use fairly short exposures. 300mm should be no problem. But that's my only real suggestion. I think the processing does look really good here. Next up, we have Anonymous. Anonymous sent in a nice photo of the Andromeda Galaxy. This was taken with a stock Canon RP camera and a William Optics Redcat 51 on a Star adventurer tracker. This was taken from a Portal 3 sky and processed in Pixinsight. And Anonymous said that they really tried to bring out the stellar streams of Andromeda in processing and was pretty happy with what they achieved. And I agree, this is really nice. You do need a dark sky to bring out this extended halo. And to show that extended halo, you do need a pretty low contrast. I'm not sure if you needed to go quite this low. You see there's a pretty big gap here between zero and where your black level is. Just to show people what I mean. If I take a curve here and I start adjusting the black level, I think you have a little bit of leeway here before you really get any problem with the transition between the background and the Andromeda. So you might want to just darken the sky a little bit just to add a bit more contrast. Next up, we have Anshul. Anshul sent in this photo of the heart nebula and mentioned wanting tips for improvement that don't involve buying new gear. That's good. Anshul's processing was done in Pixinsight and Topaz, Denoise, and Affinity Photo. So this is my personal opinion. We're probably going to hear it many, many times during this critique. But I don't like Topaz, Denoise, AI. I find that most of the times when I see it being used, it doesn't do a good job. It destroys detail over smooth things, make things splotchy. So my opinion is skip Topaz. And for this image, I don't think you need to use Topaz or Affinity at all. You can really just use Pixinsight and all you have to do is apply a good background extraction, remove the stars, stretch the stars, stretch the starless image, apply saturation to taste, put the two images back together, do a final curve adjustment, and you're done. And if you do that, your image will look something like this. And so this is just my quick take on it. This is maybe not what you want to what you see in your mind's eye. But keep in mind, you're going to put your own style on it to your own taste. But I really just don't think you need Topaz, Denoise. I think it's a crutch. I think that what you should really be using is Pixinsight and improve on focus, tracking, get all of that, try different things in Pixinsight. Get more data, all of these kinds of just boring, normal things. And that will help improve your data quality. Okay, next up we have Antoine. And Antoine sent it also in an image of the Heart Nebula. Antoine took this with a Canon DSLR and a Redcat telescope on a Star Tracker. And mentioned thinking that there was more to be brought out here and that the reintroduction of the stars could have been better after using StarNet. You know, I'm not sure if there's really more to be brought out. The only thing I'd recommend trying since you use DeepSkyStacker, StarNet, and Photoshop is to try using also Cyril. In the new 1.2 beta version, there is the star recomposition process that's very nice for sort of balancing your star field and your background, your nebulosity, and seeing that all in real time. But to my eye, you've already done a pretty good job of bringing out what's what's here. Really, all the you could do to improve this and just be to collect more data so that the the faint stuff in the background is a little bit stronger, not not quite as noisy as it is. Okay, next up we have Antonio who submitted an image of the Corina Nebula taken with a Canon 60D and a 75 to 300 millimeter zoom lens on a Star Tracker. And Antonio mentioned stacking 100% of the data and wondered if that's why it came out blurry. Yeah, I guess my guess is what happened is you had some high clouds or, you know, high water vapor in the air that is causing these big halos on the bright stars. So if you wanted to, you could sort through your data, find any image where you see the big halos, and then just reject those before stacking. Often I think that, you know, it looks pretty cool to see the colors of these bright stars. My biggest critique is not that in your processing, it's more just that the sky background is very blotchy where, you know, around the edge, it's like clipped to black, but then in the middle, it's a lot brighter. And I know that this is in the Milky Way, so, you know, you do have parts of the sky that are brighter and darker, but you're really clipping to black everywhere but the center. So I would try for a more neutral approach to the background where you don't apply so much contrast. Next up we have Aourash who sent in a photo of the Orion and Running Man Nebula and the Horse Head and Flame Nebulae. And next up we have Aourash who sent in a photo of Orion and Horse Head and Flame, and this was taken with a Star Adventure stock Canon T3i and a Canon 200 millimeter prime lens. And Aourash took exposures of different lengths to do high dynamic range processing, but wasn't sure of the best way to combine these, so just stacked them all together. So I don't think that's the best way. What I'd suggest is stacking the set of short exposures and the set of long exposures. So let's say you take some at 5 seconds, some at 30 seconds, you would make two stacks, and then what you'd want to do is use layers and layer masks in GIMP and you blend the stacks together. So the longer sub-stack is going to be for all of these dim, dusty details like the brown dust and the Horse Head and Flame and the extended part of Orion. And the short subs stack is going to be for recovering details in the core, like the bright trapezium region here, maybe even the Running Man Nebulae and maybe also for star color too. But what you'd want to do is basically make a mask, it could be a manual mask that we just brush on, that softly transitions from your short stack to your long stack. They're going to be all registered together, but you want to then just sort of blend them together using layer masks. That's one way to do it. I know there are other ways, but that's an easy way that I've found pretty successful. Okay, Aris sent me this image of the Orion and Running Man Nebulae made with a Canon 70D, a Canon 70 to 200 millimeter zoom lens and a 2x tele extender all on a Star Tracker. So Aris is a Patreon member and I've seen their shots before and I've always thought a tele extender, you know, I never thought it could work this well is what I'm trying to say. Aris shows you that if you use a high quality tele extender and a good quality lens and L lens, you can produce excellent results with that pairing. The colors are really interesting and nice, I especially like the Running Man Nebulae and some of this area with the brown dust hitting Orion. I think that my one critique is I think that you went a little bit overboard with the selective sharpening and noise reduction. You know, this sharpening in this center part of Orion looks really cool when you zoom in, but then right to the side of it, you know, the dust is all blurred from the noise reduction so the contrast here of how blurry this looks and how sharp this looks makes it look a little bit artificial. Arjun sent in two edits of a photo of M31, the Andromeda Galaxy. Here's the first edit and then this is called the Cellphone Edit and I think the data quality looks good. I much prefer though this normal edit. I'm not sure what's going on with the colors. I feel like there's a lot of green and magenta. I'm not sure if you possibly debaired the images with the wrong Bayer pattern or if it's just something else in processing, but Andromeda should generally look more yellow, gold in the center and most of it with some blue in the outer arms. So to check if you use the right Bayer pattern, you want to google your camera name and Bayer pattern and see what it should be. The most common is going to be RGGB. Okay, next up we have Armando who started astrophotography just 12 months ago, so he's obviously making very fast progress. This is the heart nebula done with a full mono setup and neuroband filters and it was processed in Pix Insight. I think the data looked good. I can see there's promise in the high signal areas like the center of the heart nebula here called Malat 15 and also down here in the fishhead region, but I think you're trying to do a bit too much in processing this picture. The heart's difficult because there's a lot of different stuff going around with background nebulosity, but a lot of it's very dim, so it's hard to know what to bring out and what to make dimmer. It looks like what you did here was you really brought up the levels, but then you smoothed a lot of it out with noise reduction. So what I would try doing instead is use curves transformation or maybe the new generalized hyperbolic stretch so that the background nebulosity isn't an issue. You can just make it dark and make the heart really pop rather than bringing up some of this stuff in the background, but then smoothing it down. That's not going to look quite as good. Okay, next we have Aaron who mixed exposures some taken with an LX stream dual narrowband filter and then some with just a regular UVIR cut filter. And so that way Aaron got sort of a good mix of deep nebulosity in the sole nebula, but also nice star color. And this was done with a Sky Watcher 150 millimeter Newt and a QHY 268c camera from Portal 8. So this shows you you can get good star color from a light polluted sky even with a color camera. So and I really like shots like this where where they're filled with nebulosity. So for me, this is near perfect. The only thing I'm not sure about is the composition. It feels like you almost wanted to fit in the whole sole nebula, but then couldn't quite. So it's just like a little bit cropped off at the edges. You know, and then you have the dark corners in each corner here. But I think for it to be more of like a finished composition to my eye, I think you would just zoom in further. Okay, our pod is using a Sky Watcher short tube 120 which is an acromat. So it has a lot of this blue or violet fringing on bright stars. And our pod was wondering how to deal with that and processing, but only using free software. Currently our pod is using deep sky stacker, serial and GIMP. And so what I'd recommend adding to your workflow is adding star net plus plus, which is also free. Because then what you can do, I've moved over here to GIMP is you can make a starless version and then do a screen blend of the stars on top. But you're blending different amounts of stretch. And so you can really stretch your starless version of the galaxy and stretch your stars much more lightly. And that can really help control that violet and blue bloating. So just add star net and I think you'll be much happier with that telescope. All right, next up we have Asher. And Asher sent in this image of the North America and Pelican Nebulae shot with a modified DSLR and a Red Cat 51 on a star adventurer tracker. Asher mentioned not being satisfied with the stars. And my advice is I guess the same as the last one just try star net but also try serial. There's a lot you can do with that star recomposition tool that's in the new 1.2 version of serial. I do like the SHO look that you got here. I'm not sure about this composition the neb is looking so funky over there and it's not really adding that much. So I would probably just crop to this this interesting part over here because this whole part is basically empty except for the neb. So the composition feels out of balance. While this composition you have the sickness wall and the bright part of the pelican right down the center it feels a little bit more intentional. Okay Astra submitted a photo of a nice conjunction of Mars right here with the Hyades star cluster and then the Pleiades star clusters up here. This was stacked in Deep Sky Stacker but Astra mentions that their camera can't shoot raw or actually also can't manually focus. So they'd be autofocusing on Jupiter for each shot and then reframing on the Hyades and that's really some dedication. It came out very nice considering those limitations of the camera and you can clearly see that the color of Mars is a nice red and similar to Aldebaran right here and I think that nice orangish red color does contrast well with the blue sky. Astro Morph has sent in the North America and Pelican Nebulae captured with a small refractor a mono camera and narrow band filters and the details and the composition look very nice here. You know the orange and blue or the golden blue look isn't my personal taste but that doesn't really matter. It's just whatever you like is I think what you should do with narrow band imaging. You know what the this palette is great for is seeing all of this wonderful detail in the dark nebulae. Astro Doc MD sent an image of the shark nebula and it's cool to see the shark nebula all close up like this because you usually see it more zoomed out so it's nice to see the smaller details. My two suggestions here are one I would skip the topaz to noise as my guess is it's doing more damage than good. Here I can see some typical topaz artifacts around the bright stars on this image that it's over sharpened some things and blurs other things. It usually messes up a lot of things but it leaves weird artifacts. My other critique is I think that your background extraction could be better here. I know that this top part is dusty but I think I see a pretty extreme or not pretty extreme. I see a gradient a light pollution gradient where this part of the picture the right side is going to be brighter and then the left side is darker so try out different background extraction techniques. If you're not getting a good result in Pixinsight you could try Graxpert or Cyril. Graxpert is just a standalone background extraction tool and I think you know Cyril has some things that were developed by the Graxpert folks but there's other things in Cyril that are sort of fun to try to. Okay Astrodrawn sent an image of the large Magellanic cloud and this was taken with a stock Canon DSLR and on a Star Trekker and so I'm jealous because this is an object I would love to take a photo of the Magellanic clouds. They've always fascinated me but we can't see them here in the Northern Hemisphere of course. My two critiques with this one are both related to processing. I think one is the stars look a little bit over sharpened to my taste. I'm not sure if that was from a sharpening filter of some kind but if so maybe just back off that sharpening a little bit. They're almost taking on you know a squarish look or triangle look and I think that's from sharpening but it could be an optical thing. My other critique is the color seems sort of weird in this photo like it's almost black and white but then there's a few orange stars but there's not much color in the galaxy so I'm not sure if that was done on purpose. You know maybe if you're trying to control noise that's maybe why you did it but I'd have to actually see the raw data to understand what's going on with color but the details are quite good so I would just try to focus on color and and star treatment. Okay next up we have Astrogeootography and Astrogeootography sent in this nice image of the lion in Nebula which is in Cepheus. It's a hard target and so Astrogeo put in 80 hours but then only stacked the 55 hours of the best subs and Astrogeo is mostly concerned with the image looking soft not detailed enough and wondering if that comes down to image scale he's at about two arc seconds per pixel. In my opinion no two arc seconds per pixel is perfectly sufficient for detail on Nebulae and stars. You know the only time where two arc seconds per pixel might be an issue is if you were trying to resolve something really really tiny like details in a very small galaxy or planetary nebula but something like this where you want the whole nebula two arc seconds per pixel this is perfectly fine. So I think that your frustration with detail probably comes down to how you're processing the data like how you're stretching the data at what point you're doing noise reduction how much noise reduction I think I've looked through your steps and you mentioned doing noise reduction last in Photoshop maybe it would be better to do it earlier like in Pixinsight there's a lot more to it so there's the star field how you're processing the stars how you're adding them back in there's new tools which you probably are aware of it sounds like you're very in-depth photography so I'm sure you're now using probably Russ Krowman's Blurix Terminator just to show you what that can do just in case you're not already using it. I used Blurix Terminator on each of the three filters that you sent in H, S, and O. I stretched each filter took out the stars recombined them here in Photoshop and just applied some different colors and then just put the HA stars back on top HA stars are generally going to be a lot sharper than making colored stars but I mean of course it's it's up to you know your taste whether you want color stars or just white stars from the HA um I didn't use any noise reduction on your data here and there's so much interesting detail of course this amount of noise might be too much for you but we could selectively go in here and uh and take out uh some of that noise like um some of it might be color noise that we could could try to get rid of with uh the color noise reduction filter but anyways I just wanted to show you that uh with Blurix Terminator and not doing too much not trying to really uh process the data too hard you do have a lot of really cool detail here at that two arc seconds per pixel I'm jealous of this data it looks it looks excellent Astro Joe's and next up we have Astro Numpty and Astro Numpty captured the North America and Pelican Nebulae from the UK with a Nikon camera and lens and a clip-in filter made by STC and they were wondering if I thought this was over processed or they pushed the data too hard I don't think I'd say it's over processed for my taste it's just too bright overall and a little bit flat um and so what I mean by that is the the mid tones are competing with highlights in the picture um and so that that's not over processed it's just you just have to stretch slightly differently to get the best result I'd also play with the color a little bit more you know this is just a jpeg so I'm not going to try to mess with the colors too much but uh there's an adjustment in Photoshop called selective color and you know taking the cyan out of reds and uh taking the yellow out of blues and doing some different things can really add some punch to the colors and make them more vibrant okay Astropolis ECU sent in this photo of the Orion Nebulae and Running Man captured with a ioptron star tracker a sony mirrorless camera and a william optics zenith star 61 this looks really nice there's nice round stars um nice colors generally a good uh contrast so this is uh two hours of data I'd say your next challenge is try getting 10 hours because with 10 hours you're going to be able to bring out a lot of this brown dust in the background that's uh not doesn't you don't have enough contrast yet to bring that out but uh with more data you could um Astro Astropolis ECU had a question and that was in serial after stacking the image it comes out green and in dss it comes out yellow after color calibration they both look fine uh I'd say that's normal nothing to worry about different stacking settings and stacking software could result in a different color balance just making different choices about how it handles the color channels but like you found after you do some color calibration they should look similar um so the initial color balance doesn't really matter I've seen astro images come out completely yellow completely green blue red purple any color you can imagine they just look solid that color and it's very alarming at first but it's really nothing to worry about after you after you fix it with a little color balancing they all end up looking fine astro sing sent in an image of the tarantula nebula which is a massive emission nebula within the large manjulina cloud so this what you're seeing right here is another galaxy pretty amazing that an amateur uh can do this and astro sing did it with an 80 millimeter refractor a mono camera and narrow band filters and I really don't have uh much to critique here I think this is is beautifully done uh the processing looks great there's a lot to look at here uh lots of beautiful colors you know the the color palette I think I've sort of said I don't like the the browns but in this case for this object it works quite well so I also I'll say my opinions about color palettes is really object to object I should have said that earlier in the critique some objects will look really good with more of like a yellowish brown and light blue color palette like astro sing did here while some I feel it looks a little bit boring and they could use a little bit more vibrant colors um if I was just going to have one nitpick uh I I don't personally like when bright objects are cut off on the in the corner on the edge so this top corner this little thing up here being so cut off makes it feel a little bit unfinished uh to my eye um which is too bad because you know this this corner looks so great uh with this this dim thing up here out here with this little red blob and everything so you know when I read this image from this corner up to this corner I just feel like oh I wish it extended just a little bit more but that's a that's a minor uh nitpick okay astro yeager astro yeager sent in this image of the veil nebula and this looks uh quite nice uh lots of nice detail this is the classic h o o color palette uh for this object uh my only critique with this one is I think the the composition looks a little bit weird um so I'd suggest cropping in and then that'll get rid of some of this uh stuff around the edge anyways maybe if we do a 16 by 9 crop maybe something like that uh I think it looks better um but play around with it I I think just it will look better a little bit more zoomed in and a little bit more um intentional with where the nebula is in the field okay at astro sent in this very nice picture of the ISS international space station transiting the sun this was taken with a canon 7d recording video on a celestron next star 4 se telescope the detail here is great we got the sunspots we got the ISS uh if we zoom in on the ISS we can see um the solar panels and the docking modules and everything are very clearly defined uh you know I don't really have much of a critique of this image though the only thing I'd say is you might look just as good just to do a single ISS uh instead of the the sequence and I'm thinking maybe this one like right in the center near that sunspot which seems to be be one of the sharper ones uh you can see that as the atmospheric uh conditions change you get some that are sharper and some that are a little blurrier so or maybe that one's sharper I don't know but yeah just sort of pick one that's the sharpest and and go with that and and instead of the sequence just just one because I think that you have so much detail that that might look cool just to do a single ISS okay next we have athervana 007 athervana 007 sent in their first astrophoto this is of the Orion nebula and Orion's belt or also called the belt and sword of Orion and this was taken with untracked with a Nikon DSLR and Nikon kit lens and athervana 007 asked what makes for a good lens and I'm guessing that they're thinking of upgrading from the kit lens since this was taken at f 5.6 so what you're gonna want to look for is mostly prime lenses the kit lens that you used is a zoom lens so it goes from 18 to 55 but in fairly slow focal ratios a prime lens like a nifty 50 a 50 millimeter f 1.8 can often be found for not very much money for lenses at least you know somewhere around a hundred us dollars or sometimes less if you can find a used one but with a prime lens you just have one focal distance you know 50 millimeters or 100 millimeters something like that and but the the nice thing with a prime lens is they usually open up to a much brighter aperture f 1.8 is common for wide lenses f 2.8 is common for telephoto lenses and so if you were able to shoot this same scene at f 2.8 you'd be letting in eight times more light than at f 5.6 so your images are going to come out a lot cleaner a lot brighter so that's my advice looking for a prime lens find one in your price range with a fast aperture so something like a 50 millimeter f 1.8 might be what you're looking for next next we have agi who sent in this image of the sole nebula and agi didn't immediately see anything to critique here but agi did mention some splotchiness and thought it was possibly over sharpened and that's not something I noticed at first but when I took a closer look I do see some of what you may be talking about there's like a little bit of it's a really zoom in but there's like a little bit of like granularity in the low signal areas that indicates possible over sharpening and then something I noticed when I was doing that was that the stars inside the nebula somehow have this like different look than the stars outside the nebula I'm not sure if you did some kind of selective sharpening or something but they they just have a slightly different look so just to give you an idea I tried processing your data tried to keep the process very simple but when I processed it and just sort of looked at the stars inside and outside the nebula I didn't see any issues with the actual data so that suggests there's something that you were doing that gave it a little bit of an artificial look belage sent in something unusual at least by today's standards this is of course done on film uh fuji color superior film superior film sorry and this is of my favorite constellations Cygnus and Cepheus and it's a 50 millimeter focal length and belage then photographed the negative with a Canon digital camera using some macro photography techniques and I think this one came out really well I like it a lot the composition is great by centering the what's called a northern colesack nebula here I think that makes a lot of sense belage did mention that this light leak of the red light over here was actually a mistake but I think in terms of light leaks this is a fairly nice one that doesn't really distract from the photo I've dabbled a bit in film astrophotography but I haven't produced anything that I've wanted to share yet so and I found that light leaks though are a common problem with this kind of photography so I've been taking my film camera and covering everything with black electrical tape so anyways I really enjoy this shot and I may be contacting you for for tips I especially like how you photographed the negative leaving in the sprocket holes that looks really cool okay next we have Ben who took this photo of m33 it's very nicely done this is lrgb plus two hours of h a to help make these nebulae within the galaxy pop and ben said that he struggles with star shape and color especially bringing out the blues in his stars so for star shape there are a number of different modifications that you can do for your six inch newtonian I'll just zoom in here so people can take a look at Ben's star shape I really don't think they're that bad but I know that we're super critical of our own work and less critical of others often so anyways those two mods that you can do for your newtonian you might already know one is a primary mirror mask you can have these 3d printed and then the other is you can replace the spider with something that's like a machined piece of metal in terms of bringing out the blues I think you've already done a great job considering this is a portal six sky but other than traveling to a darker location the only thing I can think of is waiting for the object to be high in the sky where you'll be shooting through less atmosphere can really help with with blues another Ben Ben took this photo of Andromeda with a 75 to 300 millimeter kit lens the same lens that Trevor and I used in our challenge video and was wondering about sharpness and whether it was worth redoing this at a lower focal length so that he could have a slightly faster aperture or just wait until he can get a rookie non 135 f2 so there are oh and this is untracked so there are two schools of thought when it comes to upgrading some people are always going to get the star tracker first or suggest getting the star tracker first and others say get a nice fast lens first and I think it probably depends on how much you are currently enjoying untracked so if taking and stacking a thousand photos is annoying to you then I'd go for the star tracker first and when Trevor and I did our challenge we were using a star tracker with this lens which I think helps a lot because then you can stop it down but yes in general for untracked having a fast aperture ideally under f4 is really ideal but once you add that star tracker then you could shoot it f6.3 and it's not going to be a problem so you know you're probably going to be saving for something new whether you go for the lens or the star tracker sort of up to your style and what you really enjoy but probably I'd suggest you know go get that star tracker continue using this lens and yes you can get more mileage out of it. Okay next up we have Benny. Benny shot the Orion and Flame Nebulae without a tracker using a Sony SLT a58 camera and mentioned leaving the SLR lens installed but also used a Sony 55 to 200 millimeter lens at f4. Okay and Benny asked about the green color and also about the SLT lens and whether it should be removed so I had to look all this up because I wasn't familiar with an SLT camera design it's a pretty interesting design so I'd say if you're comfortable removing that mirror that you're shooting through with an SLT I think it might be worth trying although I'm not sure how that's going to affect focus of your main camera sensor so it might be a risky thing to try if you know when else has ever done it for that kind of mod. In terms of the green color this is something you should be able to fix with processing you know check out SIRIL which lets you sort of adjust the color balance before you stretch the image which will will really help but then SIRIL also has a remove green noise command that just eliminates green noise just like what you have here so that should also work pretty well for you. Okay then we have Benny Ride. Benny Ride sent in a photo of the Crescent Nebula made with an Optalong L Extreme filter an SV bony refractor and an ASI 533MC and Benny Ride mentioned this was 6.5 hours and they're best photo yet and I agree very well done the processing looks good here Benny Ride mentioned there may be being too much green still I don't think so I'm usually pretty good at spotting too much green in an astrophoto and I don't really see it here and then Benny Ride also mentioned about the corner stars being a little bit funky so let's zoom in on those take a look yeah just a little bit a little bit worse in that corner and worse still in this corner so it might be back focus mixed with a little bit of tilt but I think it does look like you probably have a little bit of a back focus issue because the stars are radiating in towards the center and that usually means the sensor is too close to the reducer so you need to add spacers to to fix that it might be just an additional thin spacer like a 1 to 2 millimeter spacer might might help with that. Okay Banu Banu sent in a nice image here of the eclipsed moon and it was taken with an iPhone attached to an eyepiece of a Celestron Schmidt Cascade telescope and then the photo was lightly processed using GIMP and mostly to reduce the noise in the picture. So my only suggestion is you could maybe try a little bit of sharpening light sharpening you know just something like unsharp mask and it's not going to make a huge difference but you know it might it might help just a little bit you could also do maybe a little bit of a saturation boost just to really get that feeling of it being the eclipsed moon something like that I think looks good both pretty basic little adjustments that might just give it a little bit more of an edge. Here we have Bill. Bill sent in an image of the Orion Nebula. Bill mentioned he clipped the blacks a bit on purpose to get rid of the walking noise. I think that's exactly what I would do to get rid of walking noise so good call and Bill mentioned the core of Orion being blown out and not knowing how to fix it in GIMP. I think in my original Orion start to finish series I show this my suggestion is you basically duplicate your image right away before you stretch it and then you go ahead and do the normal stretching on one layer but then you take that duplicated layer that hasn't been stretched you put it on top and you stretch it ever so slightly so just the core looks good and then you blend that in with a layer mask using just like a soft brush at maybe 50 opacity and you can work back in the core details back into the image sort of an manual fashion just until it looks natural and good to the eye that's and that's how I approach bringing back the core is you don't need separate data you just need the same data but stretched in a different way okay another bill bill sent in this image of the heart and soul nebulae it was made with a canon mirrorless camera and an ascar acl 200 astro lens and he processed with Cyril and photoshop cs2 and requested that I really lay into this image so I guess here we go first thing I noticed is probably an obvious thing is that the composition isn't the best you know you've cut off the the soul nebulae here and then it it doesn't seem super intentional like if we just rotated we could get them both in the second is that the sky is very green and there's also a bit of a gradient left in this corner is too bright this should be easy to correct in Cyril you basically just put in different points on the sky and it can extract that that sky background which will get rid of both the green and the gradient in one go but then if there's still green noise left in your photo Cyril has a remove green noise process that will take care of it and then the last thing is I I like the star color you seem to have nice natural star color but the stars themselves are stretched a little bit aggressively for my taste so what I'd suggest is try installing star net and then you can work on a starless version and the stars separately combine them back together to get sort of the best of both worlds with your photos Burke sent in this photo of the Milky Way core area centered on the eagle and omega nebulae and this was done with a Sony camera and zoom lens on a star star adventurer and Burke asked if the dark spot on the right is an actual feature of the Milky Way or a mistake in editing it's a little bit of both I think this is an actual feature if this is the dark spot you're talking about but then there's also a gradient left to right where this looks too dark on this side and too bright on this side so again I'll talk about Cyril a lot just because it's free and it has a great background extraction tool but it should help you fix this sky gradient pretty easily and those sky gradients are going to be extra common with wide field shots like this okay I moved over to Pixinsight because Bob had some questions about Pixinsight so it'll be easier to answer them over here Bob sent in this image of the Andromeda galaxy this was taken with a red cat 71 and a stock Nikon D5600 DSLR and Bob asked for a general critique and also wondered if there's any way to speed up Pixinsight's weighted batch preprocessing script so let's take a look at it okay here's the weighted batch preprocessing script and the easiest way to speed it up is go over to the last tab at the top called pipeline and turn off most of these things these two are the normal ones image registration and image integration these other ones are they take a lot of measurements they take a lot of time to complete and they're not always necessary for every data set so I often of turning off local normalization I may or may not use subframe weighting I may or may not use linear defects correction all right I usually don't use that because I usually don't need it so I would really only recommend you know having these all on if it's something very important to you like an important data set that you don't mind spending a lot of time on and then you could just let WPP run overnight but if it's just something quick just turn all of those off just leave on image registration and image integration and it should go much faster okay and then to the general critique I would suggest doing less in processing to me your result here looks a little bit over processed too much going on and because it's a little bit over processed the galaxy is it has a little bit of a pasted on look like it's it's separate from the rest of the photo looking at your stack without much done to it I don't know if this is going to cross come across on the video but there's a blue ring here and I'm not sure what caused that you can see it just a little bit in your final picture but I think you've done some work to try to get rid of it but it'll be work better if you can get that out of your data to begin with I noticed your flats exposure is only 1 640th of a second I think I've found with very short flats like that they can often cause issues so I'd suggest adding diffusion like a stack of white paper or a white t-shirt until your flats are at least one tenth of a second and see if that helps with the ring I'm not going to promise it will but it's just something to try okay this is Boreum and Boreum actually broke my rules and sent in three images but I'm going to indulge them and show all three because they're actually pretty cool images Boreum shot these with a Canon 18 to 55 kit lens at 55 millimeters f5.6 untracked on just a tripod and I know that lens I'm usually not super happy with that lens but considering you know everyone who has a Canon basic Canon DSLR has that lens it's a very mass produced lens that's going to be everywhere so it's pretty cool what you can actually capture with this consumer object that's that tons of people have access to so this is the m31 andromeda which we're going to see a lot of in these critiques but let's look at some of the other captures here this is m81 and m82 again this is untracked with that Canon kit lens it's just fun to see you know what you can see out there with just very basic gear and then here's the Pleiades star cluster so I enjoyed this collection of three bright messier objects that you can shoot untracked maybe all in one night during the fall in the northern hemisphere you could get all three of those back to back okay we're gonna stay in the pics insight for one more image here this is brad's ghost nebula data and this is 20 hours of integration and brad's you know likes it quite a bit but the fields of the stars are a little bit soft and I was wondering if there's some easy way to sharpen them well since this critique what since I asked for the critique images we had Russell Croman's Blurix Terminator come out and if you're if you're not already using this brad let me just show you what it can do I'll just start it over here on your raw stack it's it's important that you use it on linear data because then it can actually calculate the the psf of the stars once you've done a nonlinear stretch it can't really uh do its work correctly it can still sharpen but it won't actually be doing deconvolution okay it's done so here is you know just zoomed out before and after before and after so you can see it definitely really sharpens up the stars but let's see what it does zoomed in and with some detail of the deep sky object here too so there's before there's after so I'm mostly seeing you know just that the the stars are getting sharper and smaller but if you look really closely at some of the fine details like right in here with this dark part of the ghost and then after it does sharpen up as well so it's a really nice plug-in it is a paid to plug-in but I think it's it's well worth it now you still have some of the common newtonian issues which it won't fix like the star profile isn't perfect I don't think you have any any serious issue with collimation I think it's just you know something in the light path is is causing a little bit of a of a disturbance to that edge but it's really it's really not too bad I think in the finished image here once you add the saturation and everything it looks it looks fine so I wouldn't get too obsessive but I would consider uh purchasing this blur exterminator for your images because I think for your data it will make a big difference next we have brandon brandon sent in this image of the milky way shot with a canon t1i and a canon nifty 50 lens stopped down to f2.2 brandon asked how to get more vibrant colors and asked about the star trails in the corners uh so the trails in the corners which I can zoom in on so you can see what it is so here's the center and you can see the corners the stars are a lot more trailed that's distortion from the canon 50 millimeter lens it is pretty evident the more wide open you are so at f1.8 f2 f2.2 any of these it's going to be pretty evident once you get down to around f4 or f5 it's uh not nearly as bad but I wouldn't necessarily stop down that much for untracked astrophotography but if if the distortion is bothering you you might want to stop down at least a little bit more f2.8 or something like that um but you could also just crop it out you know it's it only really affects the image out here so you could just go to a tighter crop in terms of vibrancy I actually think your stars are already very vibrant it's really just the milky way uh portion that uh is doesn't have much um contrast or color to it so what I'd suggest is try star net plus plus that uh allows you to take out the stars maybe pump up the milky way do something with it and then and then add the stars back in and I show that process in most of my start to finish videos including the one on uh the lagoon and trifid which is probably the closest data to what you have here okay breezy sent in this image of the constellation Aries captured with a smartphone and stacked with sequader and this looks good I think the stars look nice and in focus and have some color um smartphone astrophotography is something I have a little experience with but not much so I'd like to do more of it my only suggestion is maybe uh play around with curves a little bit more like uh you could try to make the stars a little bit more prominent but then the background darker I might even suggest clipping the background well it's a it's difficult you're gonna have to really play around with it but um yeah just keep playing around with maybe curves and uh and see what you can do that's just a slight difference but you can see it's a slightly darker background maybe the noise isn't quite as distracting if you if you darken the background okay Brennan sent in a photo of Orion's belt and sword this was shot with the red cat 51 a cannon 60 and on a star adventurer tracker and Brennan used an el enhance filter and mentioned finding it hard to get all the natural blues in Orion when processing so the reason for that is that Orion nebula is often just labeled as an emission nebula but it's actually a mixed nebula and it has reflection nebula components so when you use the el enhance filter you're blocking out uh plenty of that extended blue nebulosity in the Orion nebula and uh that's the reason why it's hard to then bring those blue those natural blues back out because you're blocking them but of course you're also blocking light pollution so that's what helps you so much with the contrast in this picture and bringing out all of this ha emission uh which came through very strongly but something you might consider in the future is uh doing a mix so take some el enhance data take some data without the filter and you can sort of get the best of of both that way Brian sent in an image of the lunar eclipse it was captured with a samsung s22 smartphone attached to an eight inch dob and pre-processed in pip for exposure or no just processed in pip sorry for exposure details brian said iso 800 a quarter of a second exposure and then asked why is there so much noise in the picture so if i'm understanding correctly this is a single exposure not a stack of exposures so to lower the noise the best way is to take many photos uh just like this one or take a video you align them with pip stack them with auto stackert and after the stacking process the the signal to noise should be much higher uh and and you won't see as much noise now for a normal full moon shot uh not eclipsed that you probably aren't going to have a problem with signal to noise in a single exposure uh but with the lunar eclipse where the moon is much much darker and we're a little bit more signal starved it's probably a good idea to get a stack of exposures uh to improve the signal to noise ratio okay then brice brice sent in a photo of the dumbbell nebula this was captured with a nicon dslr and zoom lens on a star adventurer gti mount and most of brice's questions about the image were about the star quality and asked why so many of the stars appeared orange and red and also asked about large blue halos uh so to me your stars don't look orange and red they look green um in this image i'm not sure if you were seeing orange and red stars and then trying to correct them uh and that's why they ended up green but stars should actually be mostly orange white yellow red uh that's the most common colors for stars then you'll see some blue stars blue stars are often brighter they're also rarer um but they are often more prominent because they're brighter but also our telescopes and lenses bloat blue stars uh so then they become even more prominent um in terms of halos and blue bloat i think that's just going to be the nature of your zoom lens if it does bother you you can try some star reduction uh in photoshop there is the minimum filter which works pretty well uh you know normally you would do a star mask and then use this but i'll just show you what it looks like without a star mask so here's before and here's after the minimum filter so you can see it very much diminishes the smaller stars so that's one thing you can do um eventually if star quality is something that you really care about you may end up ditching the zoom lens and getting something like a small telescope like a william optics red cat 51 these small telescopes are really well corrected for star fields so you might be happier with that okay next we have brody and brody sent in an image of andromeda taken with a nikon d3200 sky watcher evo star 72 on a star adventurer from a mortal five sky and so uh the first thing that i noticed is that this side of the picture looks pretty different than this side it looks darker and the colors look different so i'm not sure exactly what happened there like if it was just a gradient that you kept processing and it then the colors ended up very different brody asked why is this image so grainy for five hours of data i think it's partly because of how you stretched it and that you pushed the data pretty hard for five hours um the outer parts of andromeda are really quite dim i also noticed that you used iso 400 personally i would try at least iso 800 maybe even 1600 because the read noise should go down the nikon d3200 was before their cameras i think became more iso invariant so i would try a higher iso for lower read noise but overall i think this looks good i would just focus on background extraction as your first thing in processing because then this sort of differential between the two sides uh shouldn't be shouldn't be an issue and then if you if the noise in the image is really bothering you it doesn't really bother me too much but if it if it bothers you then just you just have to either get more data or don't push your data as hard as you did brian brian sent in a photo of the a ryan and running man tech taken with a canon zoom lens and a modified canon 80d on a star adventurer tracker this was from a portal nine city sky and brian mentioned shooting this at f eight and recognize that it it is pretty dark and i agree there's probably no reason to stop down to f eight you know the stars are going to be sharper and they do look sharp in your photo very pinpoint but f 5.6 you'll be at a nice middle ground where i think the stars will be well corrected but then you'll be letting in a lot more light at f 5.6 other than that i think this looks good i think your processing is tasteful and you're getting very good results from a city sky kaden sent in this image of the andromeda galaxy and kaden mentioned recently getting a star tracker and this was 106 lights at 40 seconds each at 5.6 f stop and with a zoom lens and kaden asked how to make it more noise free without any weird artifacts uh so the main thing the weird artifacts thing makes me think you're talking about noise reduction that's not actually what i would suggest suggest the main thing is actually to get more total integration time so this is one hour get four hours and your image is going to be a lot more noise free twice as noise free the other thing i'd recommend is uh download zero use background extraction use remove green noise and you should get a little better result after that too but the main thing is just getting more total integration time uh because this looks quite promising for one hour so if you got four hours i think uh it's going to look really good okay cap 10 pixel sent in an image of the elephant trunk nebula this was taken with a modified canon 800 d optolung l extreme and an optolung s2 filter with an ascar 180 telescope and it was mounted on an ioptron skyguider pro tracker and captain pixel wanted to emphasize that it's possible to get photos like this without spending too much money i totally agree last week i used the same little telescope that 180 ascar and uh canon modified dslr the one that i'll be giving away in this video and uh a very cheap dual narrowband filter from sv bony and i thought the result was amazing so and your photo of course is is amazing as well uh the color variety is very nice uh it looks you know like an expensive photo when the someone used a mono camera and everything for so it's it's nice that you just used a modified dslr for this um in terms of the processing my only critique is uh the the background is uh is too black for my taste uh the transition from nebula to space looks a little bit too dramatic while i think if you and maybe a little artificial while if you brightened the background um it would look a little bit more natural okay carl sent in an image of a ryan's belt and nebula and this was taken with a canon dslr a tamron zoom lens and carl 3d printed his own 3d printed and designed his own star tracker i have a picture of that here the celestial rotation mount v4 looks really cool so that's awesome uh i actually have a 3d printed mount kit from og star tracker i still need to test it uh but i i like this idea of 3d printed star trackers as for the photo looks good um a common refrain in this uh these techniques is i see a little bit of a light pollution gradient you can see it in this corner mostly uh and seral could take care of that other than that i think it looks good you have nice round stars so your your 3d printed uh diy star tracker seems to be working well carl has taken a nice photo of the milky way here and also sent an annotated version that i liked there's the annotated version it's always cool to see the constellations and all the different uh deep sky objects that you've captured it's also neat that the jupiter and ontary's sort of framing up this composition carl asked if this was over processed and said the more saturation he added the more he liked the photo well i'd say as long as you're you know happy with the processing choices then there's going to be no wrong way to go about it to my taste the saturation level looks good um but too high for how dark and contrasty you have the photo so i would like this saturation level but with a brighter less contrasty photo and that would be my personal preference so not making the blacks this black not making the brightest parts of the picture well the brightest parts of the picture would be this bright but keeping the mid tones and the and the shadows in more in the same area rather than extending that stretch so much is is my personal suggestion okay next we have uh carlos who sent in a photo of the andromeda galaxy this is actually sort of an interesting comparison back to back because i felt this one had too much contrast and this one has not nearly enough uh contrast uh so i would definitely darken this background sky level quite a bit uh if we look at a curve here you can see there's plenty of room to bring that background sky level over um i'm just working with the jpeg here so this is just to give you an idea of what that might look like um but i would i would make this picture quite a bit darker but then also just add contrast globally you can do that with an s curve when i do that here with your jpeg uh the andromeda galaxy looks a little bit pasted on but if you carefully add this contrast while stretching your data i think you can avoid that that problem um and you want to start adding that stretching and contrast after you've done a careful background extraction and i think based on what i'm seeing here that will look good karson sent me in a photo of m 33 also known as the triangulum galaxy this was taken on a nikon dsr and zoom lens on a star adventurer tracker and what karson calls a terrible tripod and karson used sequader to stack and photoshop in light room to edit the colors and general processing here look really good to me um my only note is that i noticed while just sort of looking at this that the stars look quite good up here in the upper left hand corner and then they get gradually worse until they look pretty bad uh in this lower right hand corner basically the whole right hand side but especially the right hand corner well up here they look pretty nice so i wonder if this is a crop and the galaxy wasn't centered um if so uh you're going with this kind of lens it looks like you're going to get much better correction in the center of the lens so if you if you were just sort of hoping you m 33 ended up in the shot you weren't quite sure where it was one thing you can do is take a long test exposure find m 33 try to center it and and hopefully that will it will work a little bit better if i'm wrong and this is not what's going on it's not a crop then it looks like your lens has some kind of tilt issue all right kasey sent in this anamorphic uh iss pass so what that means is kasey used an anamorphic lens cinema lens on a sony a7s to capture this photo of stars and the international space station and uh typically with an anamorphic lens you use it for widescreen cinema but this is sort of turned on its side uh to get this uh tall vertical shot and i've always been interested in anamorphic lenses but i've never you know felt i could justify buying one so it's interesting seeing this uh this is a single exposure and kasey mentioned the the color this sort of bluish greenish color was on purpose for artistic effect i also noticed that the vignetting up here sort of matches the shape of the tree line which also is a nice artistic touch all right cat dog took this photo of the fighting dragons of aura with a stock cannon t8i a sky watcher star adventure and a sky watcher 72 millimeter refractor with a reducer this was from a portal to sky and cat dog described really struggling with both polar alignment this is of course in the southern hemisphere where polar alignment is harder and also struggled with finding this object after finding the object cat dog realized their polar alignment was bad enough that they could only do 30 second exposures and even that was sort of having a mixed bag but they went ahead and went for it uh was a little bit disappointed with how much data they actually got but uh i have to say i think what you've managed to save here looks really good i mean i guess nothing beats dark skies and even though you know you could only do 30 second subs you only got an hour and 15 minutes of good subs to put into an integration i think you've pulled out a lot of really nice details and uh my only processing suggestion just just a little bit more contrast i'm not sure exactly how much i think looks good i'd have to play around with a little bit more maybe that maybe a little brighter yeah i think i think a little bit brighter could be good okay cap fish astronomer sent in a high resolution moon mosaic made from 12 panels of about 40 images each let's zoom in on this oh yeah you can tell there's a lot of detail here this is still not at 100 percent there's 100 percent okay um and this was shot on an inexpensive pentax q10 camera attached to a celestron c90 telescope very well done we just looked at it up close there was no you know noise or grain uh we also don't see any stitching artifacts this was stitched with microsoft ice uh and i'm not sure if catfish astronomer applied any sharpening it doesn't really look like it i think that it's uh it's just a very tasteful processing of the moon uh without really anything artificial going on so that that's always nice i think when you just uh get a very nice image of the moon where you can really zoom in and you look at that crater detail and uh it reminds me of actually looking at the moon through an eyepiece this is the moon shots are one of the few things where it's like yeah you can actually see the moon like that with a fairly inexpensive telescope uh now the view on the screen is very still how still it will be through the eyepiece depends on your atmosphere and how much uh seeing there is but uh you know poor seeing or good seeing but but still it's it's a fairly close approximation of what it actually looks like when you're looking at the the moon through a telescope okay charles sent in an image of the double cluster in perseus with the sony a7 4 nikon 300 millimeter prime lens and no tracker and so this was just a tripod this was processed with deep sky stacker serial and photoshop and charles said he tried to make the colors of the stars come out as much as possible i think you were definitely successful there although you're getting some uh magenta color from chromatic aberration if you do want to remove it you could use the de fringe tool but that's gonna really make it not as colorful so it's sort of a mixed bag there charles asked if it's possible to pick up the nebulosity around the double cluster with his equipment i'll be blunt no uh you'd need both a star tracker and a narrowband filter to pick it up at all uh the ha emission around the double cluster is incredibly incredibly dim uh just slightly brighter than the sky itself and it takes many hours with a narrowband filter to uh to bring it out uh so untracked and with a with a normal stock camera you're never gonna see it okay this is charles charles sent in an image of the horse head and flame taken with a william optics z61 telescope a asi 71 mc and just a uv ir cut filter from a portal to sky i love this this you know the stars the natural colors this is my favorite kind of interpretation of this scene uh definitely one of my favorite uh horse heads that i've seen in quite a while so charles mentioned that the hardest thing in processing was to keep only talk which is this bright star right here from blowing out more of the picture but i think you've done a really good job of making it look uh natural the only thing i could find when i was like really trying to find something to uh nitpick was uh deep in the the shadow areas you do have a fair amount of green noise so one thing you might try is just masking to the the darkest areas of the picture and applying some sc in our green to get rid of some of that green noise if someone were to really zoom in but i think uh this looks great it looks excellent it shows off the power of dark skies and careful processing okay next up we have chris and brennan and chris and brennan are a father and son team of astrophotographers who captured the heart and soul nebulae here with a stock canon mirrorless camera a red cat 51 and an opt along el extreme filter and they processed with seral and photoshop including the russell chroman plugins star exterminator and noise exterminator i think this looks great uh the framing the color the contrast the star treatment these all look very good uh i think my only suggestion is i would have maybe backed off on noise exterminator just a little bit um what i'm looking at are some of the details like in here and what i can see is that it looks a little bit splotchy and then some details which i think should have come out a little bit sharper with a red cat 51 look like they've been blurred a little bit and so if you were using the default of 90 percent on noise exterminator i would try cutting that in half um the scale is a little strange i've noticed that you know going from 90 to 80 doesn't really do much at all so you might have to be pretty dramatic and how much you drop it to see any difference um but that's what i would try is just use a little bit less uh noise reduction because i think it might be blurring uh some larger structures chris captured the satyr region with a stock canon t7 a 75 to 300 millimeter canon zoom lens in an i exos 100 mount so the satyr region is definitely a challenging target for a stock camera without any kind of filter so you've done a good job of bringing out uh lots of dim nebulosity here you asked why it came out more orange than red i think that might have to do with it being a stock camera so a lot of the ha is blocked but the o3 signal which is more of a greenish uh teal comes through more strongly and that gives the nebulosity a little bit more of an orangish or magenta kind of look then we're used to seeing okay and then christopher sent a photo of the horse head in flame this was captured with an sv boney 70 millimeter doublet a canon t8i and a celestial on a vx mount and my first thought was that it looks a little washed out um so i'd increase the saturation on the brighter stars and the nebulae at least um i'll just show you what that would look like now you're seeing some color noise and stuff in here but this that's because i'm just doing this on the jpeg but i just wanted to give you an idea that it could be a little bit um more saturated than than you have it you had a question about star trailing and how to fix it in post i do have a video where i captured the dumbbell nebulae and then show an easy way to fix star trailing in photoshop uh but i'm not really noticing star trailing in your photo i mean if you hadn't uh pointed it out i would have not noticed it it's maybe a little bit up and down star trailing but i'd say that's pretty minor uh you also asked about blue bloat on big bright blue stars and whether it's more likely the telescope or moisture in the air i think based on my experience this looks like it's the telescope um but also keep in mind the iran belt stars these two right here are some of the brightest stars in the sky so they're going to get more bloated than many other stars in the night sky so you've probably noticed that uh with other areas of the sky this isn't going to be as noticeable as here but i i think this data looks very good for the equipment that you're using um so keep it up and and uh i think like i said you might want to add a little bit more uh saturation to your shots okay clancy sent in an image of the andromeda galaxy this was made with a star adventurer tracker the canon t7 and a canon 70 to 300 zoom lens and clancy said he thinks his polar alignment was not spot on which caused trailing in the photo but others told him it was coma from the lens so let's take a look i actually think it might be both um it looks like mostly coma but uh i think you might have a little star trailing too um so stopping down the lens should give you tighter stars you may also need to work on polar alignment to get rounder stars but i would start by stopping down the lens um you know this was two minutes at iso 800 you might stop down the lens but then do one minute at iso 1600 you know generally you only really notice it so much when you zoom in so it's nice i don't think it's that big a deal but that you if you're concerned about the stars that's something you can try uh with the processing you asked if you went too far i think the only thing you went too far on is the contrast so when you make the sky this dark and the galaxy this bright i feel like uh the galaxy takes a little bit of a pasted on look when what you really want to do so the galaxy look like it's it's part of the sky out there uh you know like you're looking out into outer space um so to do that i would use less contrast make the galaxy a little less bright the sky a little bit more bright okay clear night astro also sent in an image of andromeda this one was taken with a sony a6500 samyang 135 f 1.8 lens and a di y motorized barn door tracker so that's something i've been meaning to do is motorize my barn door tracker but it got on the back burner and i still haven't gotten around to it but it looks like you're getting great results nice round stars um and this is at 135 millimeter focal length so that's it's definitely impressive um my only suggestion is i think the galaxy looks a little too red maybe so just maybe a little bit more um green and and cyan in the color balance uh i'm seeing it really here in that transition between the blue and the yellow there's just a lot of red but maybe there's nothing to do about that um but anyways that's the that's the only thing i noticed okay clement sent in an image of the crescent and soap bubble nebula this was taken with an ascar fra 400 asi 2600 mc and and lea alp t dual newark narrowband filter so let's take a look at the details here there's the crescent and there is the soap bubble looks really good the details are definitely holding up well um i think in some areas you did clip the sky level to nearly black i think it would look better if uh you eased off on how dark you made the image um that's the only thing i think it would have a better impression if you if you it was more filled in with nebulosity zoomed out like this because i can i can see the details look really good um but zoomed out it just looks a little weird how black the sky is okay clock smith sent an image of andromeda galaxy made with an olympus camera a samyang 85 millimeter prime lens and a sky watcher eq 3 dash 2 mount and clock smith processes with all open source software and used many different programs to reach the result they wanted this included seral dss star net star net gimp and dark table and uh clock smith wondered if they were handling the chromatic aberrations well or if there's a better way to do it the way they did it was creating different versions of the image based on what looks best with different software and then blending these versions together well let's take a look it's not perfectly in the bright areas or you know here in andromeda i can still see there's some chromatic aberration and then on some bright stars it still looks a little funky that looks funky there but um but overall i think it looks really nice i mean there's only so much you can do when a lens has pretty um bad chromatic aberration so i think zoomed out it definitely looks perfect uh it's it's only if i really zoom in and pixel peep that i would notice anything so i think however you're doing it uh it looks good all right cn astrophotography sent in an image of the crescent nebula captured with an orion 80 millimeter refractor asi 294 mc and zwo dual narrowband filter and cn astrophotography mentioned struggling to bring out the oxygen signal so i read through all your processing steps and my big advice there is before stretching your data separate the red blue and green channels and from there you can either just keep the green if it looks a lot better than the blue or sometimes you can mix them together but anyways that's your o3 signal and then the ha is or the red channel is your ha and i would suggest stretching these two things separately because you can see what happened here is the ha is so much brighter than the o3 but if you start uh with them linear you can do a lot with stretching and then you can recombine them colorize them in photoshop and all of that and and get a really nice result um you can check out my last video um because i was showing that a little bit um on this same target so that might help okay colin sent in this image of the milky way shot with a canon dslr and a rokinon 14 millimeter lens and it was tracked with an omegan wind up tracker and colin processed this using affinity photo for ipad that's not something i know existed that affinity was available for ipad good to know i think the color here and the star colors look good for the most part there's a little bit of uh weirdness in the star colors like some green stars but zoomed out as you notice um for a tracked shot i would expect this to be a little bit brighter um i'm wondering if the steps that you described to reduce light pollution is what made it appear dark like this uh i've maybe try without those steps and see if you can get a brighter picture colin uh did mention struggling with focus with wide angle lenses and asked if a screen magnifier or a loop may help they definitely might help uh for wide angle and uh dslr you really it's really hard you just have to i think take test exposures zoom all the way in in playback mode to that several times and eventually you'll get an eye for when you're getting closer further away you know when you're really in focus but it really does take some experience i think to to get better at that focusing wide angle lenses uh but keep trying and and it will get easier over time okay this is from kurt kurt sent in an image of the sole nebula captured with his astronomy club's four inch refractor and his canon 5d mark 2 and uh this is definitely a difficult object to after with the stock camera and doubly so at f8 your the refractory shooting was f8 so my advice for next time is go after something brighter like messier object something in broadband maybe with an f8 telescope and a stock camera i'd also recommend either taking flats or clean your sensor window uh because uh i noticed you know you you did fine with what you had here but it would have been easier to process if you had a cleaner uh shot to begin with uh so it's it's it's going to be hard to go after this uh object but then uh doubly hard when when you're dealing with lots of dust spots and stuff so i would try cleaning your camera go after a brighter object next time okay does skywalker sent in an image of the rosette nebula this was taken with a modified canadia salara six inch newtonian telescope and an opt along ellen hands filter and all on an ecu five mount with on step motor drives installed which gives you go to on that mount so it's a nice affordable setup and obviously one that can produce great results based on this picture and to keep with the affordable nature here skywalker captured with nina processed with zero both of these are free software um i think this looks great it's very uh natural uh palette uh it might look cool to do a little bit more of like a dream palette by really boosting the blues since you used uh ellen hands filter daemon daemon shot the milky way with a canon dslr a sigma 20 millimeter lens from a dark spot uh and stacked in dss with no flats was wondering about why there isn't much color so the first thing i would suggest if you have uh all the raw data still is just don't use the bias frames bias frames are needed when we're calibrating flat frames um but not needed maybe when you're just doing uh when you just have darks because the bias information is already in the darks uh so you could try this lights and darks and see if that helps uh the other thing i'd try is use seral s i r i l and and try doing just a gentle background extraction and color calibration before stretching and then once you've stretched don't be afraid to crank up the color saturation see what you can get it this definitely looks a little odd but i'm not sure quite what what went wrong with your processing to not get much color uh so just try out some different things uh and and and see if you can fix that uh because i because i'm not exactly sure if you if you can't figure it out feel free to contact me though dan captured m31 with a william optics z61 telescope is sony a 6000 and this was from a portal seven sky and dan took six hours of exposures and was wondering how to make the color pop more while still keeping it natural um so i'd say this looks very natural uh that you know this is if you're going for the natural look of andromeda this is it you get a little bit of blue uh stars especially in the outer arms but it's the true natural color of andromeda isn't as overemphasized in the blue as we often make it that's more of a stylistic choice um but even if you were trying to do that sort of more artificial uh stylistic choice it's hard when you have a lot of light pollution to bring out any blue so portal seven light pollution uh is pretty bad for bringing out blues so other than driving somewhere darker because i don't know if that's an option for you my only other tip is to to try to find out when m31 is going to be highest in the sky you can find this out on telescopius.com and and shoot it at that time okay daniel shot the iris nebula with a takahashi 106 telescope and an asi 2600 mm with astronomic lrgb filters from a portal five location daniel's looking for processing tips to get more depth the image and any other pointers um okay so very dusty scenes like this one are often very difficult to process because there's so much going on in the background um that they can end up sort of blotchy looking uh you have light pollution gradients you have the dust and it can be hard to sort of differentiate between those two and then you can get into a situation where you have sort of imperfect background extraction then you use noise reduction and it all just sort of uh becomes messy um so what i would suggest is is try using background extraction on each filter don't combine and then do a background extraction try a very careful background extraction on each filter before combining um if you don't know where to place the points uh you can try using automatic background extraction with a low function degree you'll give you an idea of where the dust is so then you can know where to put the points for dynamic background extraction um you might also want to try graxpert uh some people are saying you know they struggle with dynamic background extractor in pix insight but are having an easier time getting a good background extraction with graxpert um then the the other thing i would suggest is to be very careful with noise reduction there's seems to be blurring of large structures going on in your photo uh and so i i would i would just back off that maybe try a gentle noise reduction technique like john rista's method which you can find on his uh website okay danielle sent in an image of m 31 and m 33 this was taken with a canon dslr and canon nifty 50 lens danielle processed with pix insight and gimp and is looking for advice on flats and general tips okay so let's start with flats um with some lenses uh especially lenses without dew shields it's going to be very hard to get good flats uh so one thing you might want to try our sky flats um so you point the camera at the sky during dusk or dawn just an empty empty patch of blue sky but before it's super bright and just use that for your flats these flats are usually going to be shorter than we would normally suggest but sometimes people find these sky flats solve a lot of problems um and then if all else fails you can try no flats if you wanted to know flats you just have to make sure that your camera sensor is really free of uh dust because that's the hard thing to to take out is a big dust spot on your sensor if it ends up in your photographs so and then in terms of general tips i really like this framing how you've done it i like the diagonal between the galaxies with the bright star in the middle here um my general sort of tip though is you've made the stars so uniformly small and dim that zoomed out that looks like noise to me it doesn't look like a star field so i think you have to back off on the star reduction um quite a bit and and it will look better this is just it when you try to reduce the stars this much it it ends up looking just sort of strange i think so something in between and you definitely have enough detail on the two galaxies that they they're going to stand out even with a much brighter and busier star field okay next we have dave dave sent a close-up of the pacman nebula taken with a sky watcher spree 150 and asi 2600 mm camera with astronomic neuroband filters and dave mentioned spending a lot of time on framing and he likes picking popular targets but then just framing them in unique ways and i think that definitely shows this is a really cool framing for the pacman nebula and i'm one i'm not sure i've seen quite like this before i really like how this this little globule right there is right in the middle left to right and then you have just a nice base here for the picture with nice vertical features going up drawing your eye from from the bottom to the top or the top to the bottom there's just a lot to look at here and so your processing looks quite good too definitely a lot of strong details you can zoom in on that but not doesn't look like overly processed nothing looks sort of out of place my one uh suggestion this is just my personal taste is that the the orange here is a little bit uniform we you have a an orange to yellow gradient but then within this orange you have big blotches which are just sort of there's no color variety right um so what i prefer is add in a little bit of more red i'm just doing this on the jpeg so it's not going to look very good but basically i would just try to get more reds or darker oranges into the shot you're still going to have this orange and blue look that you have but by adding in uh deeper reds i think you're just going to get an even nicer color variety in in some parts that way and see here it's like uh it's actually sort of more reddish over here than it is here and the way i did this is just selective color i went into reds and just messed around with that a little bit but again it's going to look a lot better if you did that on not a jpeg okay david c sent in an image of the eagle from a bordle five sky with a stock nikon d 3300 and a spree 100 refractor and on a sky watcher h e q five mount and this is about about 100 minutes of data david c would have liked more contrast on the pillars and less noise yeah i see it's a little noisy so yeah so normally in these uh you know critiques i'm telling people to use much less noise reduction in this case i would use more uh because you have a fair amount of color noise uh green color noise that you could get rid of um or at least reduce uh right so we just do color noise reduction and maybe also just take out a little green manually right okay so i mean i i think that already is looking better um something to look into it's just a little bit more noise reduction a little bit uh trying to take out any remaining green noise i think will make your picture look better um and then for the contrast issue in general what you want to get is a dual narrowband filter there's an inexpensive one that i recommend called the sv bony sv 220 it's pretty new and it's 160 but it works really well i think you'll you'll love it for emission nebulae like this david uh david captures the north america and pelican nebulae with a canon 550 d and a samyang 135 f2 lens on a star adventurer with a cls filter and david mentioned having trouble knowing how to handle stars when to separate them when to reduce them and all of that right now he's using star net and star masks in photoshop so i think whatever you're doing now you know is looking pretty good uh but my tool of choice is zero and star net they work together in the new version of zero 1.2 and then they have a process called star recomposition that i think makes this whole process of adding the stars back or even stretching the stars and the nebula uh from linear separately but seeing it all you can do all of that in zero 1.2 beta and i have a a video about it um so hope that helps i think this looks really good though considering your equipment i'm very impressive okay here's a shot of the andromeda galaxy shot by don and this was taken without a tracker just on a tripod with a canon 2000 d tslr and a rokinon 135 lens and don mentioned struggling with noise yeah noise is always going to be a concern when shooting untracked um but i mean it looks like you managed it quite well here you clipped the background to pretty much black i don't see much noise in the galaxy but there's still some nice details maybe a little bit more noise reduction than i would have done um but that's all you know personal taste i think it's hard to say if this is just how you stretch the data um but it feels like your data might be a little bit out of focus or at least some of it um one thing you can get for focus with the rokinon 135 is a custom 3d printed botanov mask and they sell these on both etsy and ebay they're about ten dollars definitely worth it uh it will really just help confirm that you're in perfect focus don also asked if i do any in-person training i'm just dipping my toe into that i do i've been doing a few one-on-one trainings uh with people in the northeast i haven't done any group sessions yet i feel like it might be hard because you're being you know torn in different directions uh it's also hard where i'm located in new hampshire to do something around here because we so rarely know when we're gonna have a clear sky uh so it's something i've been thinking about but i'm not i'm not sure when i would do group in-person training if you're interested in one-on-one kind of in-person training you can always message me and see if uh you know it can work out okay denis sent an image of the north america in a little bit of the or about half the pelican down at the bottom this was taken with an asi 1600 and sho narrowband filters i like this orientation the focus on the on the dark nebula the only thing i'd suggest in processing is take a look at bill blanchin uh for star reduction i think you are using the traditional method for star reduction using a star mask and morphological transformation but i much prefer bill blanchin's script for star reduction i think it looks more natural leaves fewer artifacts um in terms of capture i think you have some tilt in your system um because if we look at the stars up here they look sort of out of focus and then if you look at the stars down here they look a lot sharper so seems to be some left to right uh tilt that might need addressing um i don't i don't know where it is in your system it might be something that's pretty obvious that you can fix or it might be something more difficult uh tilt is always sort of a hard thing and another denis denis this denis sent in an image of the carina nebula shot with a cannon 500 d a cannon 70 to 200 f4 lens and an ioptron skyguider pro this was processed with seral picks incited photoshop so the framing the colors the contrast all look great to me here you know whenever a nebula has like a nice um base underneath it i always feel like it's like a floating effect which looks really good then i also i also really like when compositions have something that draws my eye from the bottom left hand corner up into the top right um my one critique is the stars look a little too crunchy for my taste what that means is they just they don't have like a nice natural shape to them they look sort of over sharpened um which is strange because the nebula behind them doesn't look over sharpened it actually looks a little bit like uh blurry uh so i'm yeah it's just an odd pairing to see sort of over sharpened stars with a uh nebula that doesn't have that sharpness um so i'm not sure if you use the starless technique uh it looks like you maybe do but if you if you do i wouldn't mess with the stars just leave them natural okay here we have dinesh and dinesh shows the andromeda at the top and triangulum galaxy is untracked with a canon dslr canon nifty 50 lens and this is 519 lights at six seconds each and the lens was stopped down to f2.5 dinesh processed this with picks insight and photoshop and this is really good i think um it really is one of the you know the better untracked shots we've seen so far it uh and the you know the framing is of course really interesting with this strong uh up and down straight line vertical composition um the background is a little bit uh noisy um you can maybe darken it a little bit i also like that you presented this uh how we would see these objects in the northern hemisphere uh you know andromeda is often flipped around 180 uh just a convention um but this looks really neat how you know the the triangulum galaxy is going to usually be for us lower on the horizon and then the andromeda galaxy above it uh so i really enjoyed this picture okay dv took a photo of the sygnus region this was without a tracker using a nikon d7500 a 35 millimeter lens and dv mentioned it was difficult focusing uh 35 millimeter lens yep that makes sense the wide angle lens like that's going to be very challenging to focus especially if you're new to this it takes a lot of practice i think to get good at focusing at night um and you know a lot of trial and error usually dv processed this with sequader and affinity photo but was hoping that i could edit the stack myself in pic's insight so since i was asked here's my version um it's just a quick edit um i did automatic background extraction made a starless version applied curves and saturation to the starless version and then screened the stars back on you can see there's still a little bit of uh unevenness in the background but uh i think by going starless and being able to control how the stars star stretch you know worked i think uh you can see a lot more i think the the northern colesack really comes across strongly here there's the elephant trunk north america and i should also say you know if you don't want to pay for pic's insight a lot of this kind of thing could be done with zero and star net which are both free okay here's dominik dominik sent an image of m 31 made with a cannon 400d and a cannon nifty 50 lens dominik mentions battling noise because it's a very old dslr and yeah the 400d is quite old uh but i think you know it still can work fairly well for long exposures on a tracker i i like your uh processing here uh you know you knew how to sort of uh conquer the noise by making the sky uh dark but you still have lots of nice uh star color right dougs dougs sent in the comic bat nebula this is a southern hemisphere object that i wasn't familiar with it looks pretty interesting dougs i think you've done a nice job here with uh balancing the different colors and the star field uh dougs mentioned i was having trouble when processing dark nebulae i didn't i didn't even really understand this was a dark nebulae it looks more like a mix of uh emission and reflection to me but maybe this part is supposed to be the dark nebula i'm not sure um but i think the key is probably just longer integrations you know this is three and a half hours to make a dark nebulae easier to process i wouldn't say easy but easier to process you're probably going to want 10 hours minimum to make it super easy to process 20 plus hours all right is you know not uncommon but this is a really nice start uh the only thing i change with what you've done here is there's a little bit of uh green left in the shadow areas i'm not sure if uh astro pixel processor has like a remove green noise command um but yeah if you could just take out a little bit of that green noise i think it would be stronger this is drew drew sent an image of the horse head and flame nebulae made with an a ryan 80 millimeter refractor an asi 2600 mm and lrgb filters and this is five hours from a portal six sky and these colors look really spot on to me uh i don't see anything really amiss with the color my only uh suggestion is on my monitor here at least uh i feel like you could move the black level a little bit darker without really losing anything and see there is a gap right there where there doesn't seem to be any data so i think you could do something like that and it just adds a little bit more drama but uh and a little bit additional contrast the dumpy day like observatory sent a nice image here of the witch's broom nebulae uh part of the sickness loop and this was captured with a rescued water damaged rosa 11 inch an altair 269c and an idos nbz filter on a sky watcher az eq 6 mount so this looks great uh dumpy day like mentioned the weird diffraction pattern has been solved let's see what talking about oh i see zoom in on that one see how there's sort of like a uh yeah a little bit of a weird diffraction pattern that's the best way to describe it um they got a holder for the usb and power cable coming off the camera at the front of the telescope so actually that star that we were just looking at that's the only thing in the image that i thought was a little odd looking and it's not just the diffraction pattern i feel like it's this star isn't quite bright enough right um usually that star in the witch's broom is such like an anchor so so nice and bright and a little bit bigger than you have it there and it feels like it's like been uh i don't know just it doesn't look quite right um maybe you were trying to tame this halo that came from the idos filter uh and then in trying to tame the halo the the star just didn't come across as bright but maybe maybe that's just how it looks in the data i'm not really not really sure uh but in any case that that was the only thing that i thought uh looked a little strange um and congrats on the rescued rosa 11 that's definitely a really neat uh telescope that can produce excellent uh photos like this very quickly edwardo sent in an image of messier 13 taken with the canon t7 using an 8 inch f5 newtonian on a sky watcher heq 5 and that's a pretty big uh long scope for the heq 5 this obviously looks great very nice color and details and i really like this uh field of view for the cluster as well these two colorful stars framing it as well as this little background galaxy i think really adds to the composition and uh and adds interest to the photo columnation from what i can tell looks good there's a bright star uh you know we have these gaps in the inner halo around the star that's really common with these newtonians i think it's from the mirror clips in the on the primary so some people will will print a primary mirror mask for that but not necessary if you don't mind the these gaps uh the cluster itself you know looks really good nothing's blown out we can see all the there's a lot of resolution there well done edwardo next we have edwin edwin sent in an image of the pleiades star cluster taken with a canon dslr and zoom lens on a star tracker this was from a light polluted location um so i just have two uh quick suggestions one is i would go ahead and crop and why are we cropping well if we look at the top and right these are registration artifacts uh pretty common uh to see and my eye is just trained to to see those when i look at an image so um you know it might just be me that finds them distracting but anyways i would just go ahead and crop in because there's not much out there anyways and then we get a little bit closer in on the pleiades uh the other thing the other quick thing is that there seems to be a little bit of a red bias to the picture if we look at the histogram you can see the red channel is a little bit over to the right um so there's different ways you know people people go about fixing this but an easy way to do it might just be something like that i just put a single point just brought it down a little bit you can see now the histogram peaks line up a lot better and here's before and after and you can see it's just removing that little bit of a red tint to the photo okay this is emmerix and emmerix captured obviously uh the milky way here this was with a stock pentax k1 with astrotracer function and a sigma 35 f1.4 lens this is their first stitched panorama image and uh this looks really cool i really like this image um you kept it pretty dark so at first glance you might think this is starless but it's it's just that the stars are really tiny and you're really zoomed out uh i bet this would look really nice printed but by keeping it really dark like this it really gives this feeling of being out there at night um the shadows are of course a bit blue shifted but i'm guessing you did that on purpose just to give it that kind of night scape photo quality um and just because it looks cool so uh i'm not going to fault you there um i like all the deep sky objects that that you've pulled out it seems like the pentax has very nice uh ha response there's north america satyr elephant trunk uh double cluster at the top and drameda over there so very nice job and it also shows how well that the astrotracer function on the pentax can work for this kind of thing okay and solidus dan and solidus dan captured the iran nebula with a sky watcher 150 pds newtonian the sky watcher eq 5 mount and a canon m3 camera uh and solidus dan asked about the pattern around bright stars in the image i think i've talked about this just a couple critiques ago but i'll mention it again here these gaps i think these are caused by the primary mirror clips um and so if you make a primary mirror mask most people 3d print them it's just an opaque ring that you put over the mirror clips i think it usually cleans those up the other possibility is the coma corrector is extending into the light path something like that but it's it's looks like something about you know in the light path of the primary mirror somewhere along the edge is causing that kind of thing other than that really nice details um i'm not sure about this sort of mustard yellow color if i like that but uh you really you definitely pulled out some nice details in the trapezium there i think this sort of reminds me of the the color treatment in the in the Hubble image um although the Hubble image i think has even more colors uh going on all right eric uh sent a six panel mosaic of the north america and pelican nebulae in Cygnus and eric mentioned struggling with the processing trying to get the panels to stitch without the seams showing um yeah that's definitely a common problem it's hard to match you know background levels when you're doing a mosaic and uh the signal to noise ratio of each panel can be different the software that i found works best for making deep sky mosaics is astro pixel processor so my workflow is i use pics insight uh to do most preprocessing and even placing the panels and all of that well then when it comes time to actually put it all together blend the panels into one stitched mosaic i use astro pixel processor and i do that for each filter then i bring the mosaic images for each filter back into pics insight for more processing so hopefully that workflow might help you a little bit if you're if you're considering doing more mosaics but i think you've done a really nice job here uh the only suggestion i have is i'm sure you planned on getting uh to neb here so you didn't want to leave it out since you planned on on capturing that is part of your mosaic but to me it doesn't add anything to the image it actually feels a bit weird uh to have this little uh bright star right in the corner like that uh so what i would do is even though you planned on putting that in i would just crop it out and i would maybe crop the top of this image a little bit too just since there's nothing interesting up there and by cropping the top and bottom you're putting um this dark nebula right in the middle and then the eye can be drawn in either direction to the pelican or the north america and you might also try you know different orientations i'm sure you've already tried different orientations but just to see what looks best i personally i think i like this orientation better uh the reason why and this is maybe just a personal thing is i always like compositions where your eye is getting drawn from the lower left hand corner up into the upper right so i don't care about having much stuff down here or up here but i want all the action to be in here and so that's what you're doing if you turn the picture this way so to my eye it feels like it has better flow okay here is m45 or the pleady star cluster from a mortal nine city sky shot by eric eric used an astrotech 70 millimeter refractor canon t5 and sv bony cls filter eric was wondering why so red uh for the pleodies i don't recommend you use that cls filter and that is why it's going so red um i know it seems like well i gotta use the light pollution filter it's portal nine but for broadband objects like the pleodies i found it's better just to wait until the object is as high in the sky as possible and then shoot short exposures um look at the histogram adjust your shutter speed until the histogram is around a third to half over from the left edge and even if that means going down to 10 seconds 15 seconds for exposures if you get the same four hours that way without any filter i think you're going to get a better picture in the end it might seem in many uh points in the process that you're going to get a worst picture but in the end i think you're going to find that uh even though there's a lot to deal with when you're shooting through light pollution if you're shooting a broadband object the the cls filter is not your friend um it's great for emission nebulae um because you know it's it's cut then it's just cutting out light pollution and you still are passing the emission nebulae at full strength but for broadband uh like the pleodies which is actually a mix of many colors not just blue i would go uh no filter okay eric shot the orion nebula with a newtonian telescope and dslr eric said he had some issues with his intervalometer acting up um i'm not sure exactly what happened but sometimes when that happens it's because you haven't allowed enough time between the pulses with your intervalometer uh so the camera hasn't recorded the last shot and then you have a big gap but it might also have just been a battery issue because it sounded a little strange so hopefully you figure that out eric acknowledges that he could have framed this better uh yeah you could have rotated maybe 90 degrees get the running man something i'd also look into eric is how you're collimating the newtonian your diffraction uh spikes are split meaning you know the collimation could be better but for no coma corrector you know i think your stars look pretty good here definitely pretty good in the center and you got a lot of nice detail all right ethan captured then drama to galaxy with a canon dslr a zoom lens and on a star adventurer tracker ethan asked about noise and how to avoid it when stretching so it's pretty simple the more you stretch the more you're going to see noise uh so the best thing to do is just collect more data because then the more data you collect the more you can stretch the image without the noise being super visible because the signal is overwhelming the noise the more data that you collect um that's about it uh there there's not the only other sort of consideration is you know if you shoot it higher in the sky if you shoot it away from light pollution all these kinds of things also will help um in terms of the processing here i think your colors on the galaxy look really good the only thing is there's a gradient here on the right it's a pretty easy gradient you really could just do a curves adjustment and then with the layer mask active just grab your gradient tool draw out a gradient and then darken that side of the picture so here's what the mask looks like that's what the curve looks like and uh here's before and after um that's the easy way to do it in photoshop and even better way to do it would be with zero before you even stretch the data okay here's another andromeda this is also another ethane so this ethane took 13 and a half hours integration with a 70 millimeter refractor on a sky watcher heq 5 mount a stock canon 90d camera and from portal 8 okay there you go so that's a good example 13 and a half hours and you get a really nice result there even from portal 8 um before ethane was using this 70 millimeter refractor he was using a canon zoom lens so he was very glad to see how well the stars came out with a refractor and they're processed to my taste which is uh even though they're quite colorful in the very core it's still clipped to white uh some people will fill in the star cores with color i think that's falling out of fashion but uh it's never looked right to me okay this is explosive who's also captured andromeda this is with a nikon dslr lens this is untracked and it's just 45 second exposures with a lens at 50 millimeter focal length so that's three and a half minutes integration pretty cool that you can see the shape and sort of outer arms of the galaxy with just three and a half minutes integration okay this is from fallbrook astro who took a modified canon t7 put in a clip in 12 nanometer ha filter and took 112 shots at 80 seconds each with an 80 millimeter refractor and got this shot of the satyr butterfly or as fallbrook astro puts it the satyr bug and fallbrook astro asked if the noise is excessive for two and a half hours integration um i don't think so but i mean because your ha filter is only activating the red pixels your uh green and blue channels are going to be just empty with noise right so um typically what you do with an ha clip in filter is just capture your ha just extract that red channel and then get a separate uh data set for unfiltered and then you can make an ha rgb image another popular technique today is to use a dual narrowband filter because then you're getting the o3 in the red green and blue channels and the ha in the red channel so you can sort of cut down on imaging time uh that way but you've obviously captured a lot of nice details here um but the noise issue is just going to be uh because you're only using one quarter of the pixels uh when you shoot ha okay this is finise 319 and finise 319 took an image of the veil nebula from a city sky with the moon out using a stock canon dslr and no filters at least not mentioned and i'm actually really surprised that the ha response was this good from a stock canon dslr finise 319 mentioned the noise being an issue and i've never seen noise quite like this in an astrophoto uh and it looked to me more like some kind of weird processing thing um so what i did is i took the raw data and just did my own quick process of it here and didn't find that that same noise pattern was there so i'm not sure where that was coming from finise 319 but it doesn't seem to be intrinsic to your raw data it must be something that's going on in processing your data okay this is fia photography and fia photography sent me an image of the horse head and flame this was taken with the canon dslr samyang 135 and star adventure tracker and this was 400 lights at eight seconds each and my suggestion um with this one the processing is fine for what it is but what you need to work on is polar alignment because if at eight seconds each you're still getting this much star trailing that means that your polar alignment is pretty off you should be able to get nice round stars with 30 second exposures at that focal length with the star adventurer so you might already be able to do that by the time you're watching this but if not what i'd recommend is get the one of these polar uh scope apps that show you exactly where um polaris should be on the reticule and then keep practicing with those and uh it'll get easier uh as you as you go uh and then you'll be able to be the the main thing is when your stars are this trailed that's how you're losing all detail in the nebula too um so it will really help get sharper pictures if you can master polar alignment okay this next one is by florian and florian sent this image of the heart and soul and the double cluster and this was taken with the samyang 85 millimeter lens um florian noticed the left side was much worse than the right side oh yeah i can see what you're talking about and wondered if the canon 85 millimeter e f lens is better than the sam yang from what i've heard it's not worth it uh it's not a great astro lens i have the canon rf 85 only available for the r series cameras and that's very good but also very expensive um for e f mount i think you're the best 85 is the sigma art 85 that's also going to be fairly expensive compared to the sam yang so if you want you could just uh keep returning a sam yang and and getting new ones until you get a better copy at least one that doesn't have this much tilt uh florian also asked about the halos from the high altitude clouds he mentions he likes the effect for a constellation shot but not so much for deep sky and if there's anything to do in processing um not really the only thing that you can do in processing is look through all of your frames that you're going to stack before stacking them and if it only is in let's say the last 10 frames but the first 50 don't have it then obviously just throw out those 10 frames that have the halos and stack only the the good data if all the frames have the haloing then uh there's nothing you can do you just have to accept this is what your photo looks like um when i opened this i thought it looked pretty cool it's it's definitely fun to see all these star colors okay this is for ye who captured the rosette nebula with a refractor an asi 294 mc camera and an opt along elix stream filter um my first reaction opening this is just that it's very red not only the nebula but like the background sky is is a reddish color too um so what i'd suggest in processing is separating out the red and green channels so you can stretch them uh separately and that that'll allow you to sort of balance the ha and o3 response but if i were just to adjust this uh manually i might uh but if i were just to adjust this manually i would maybe at least make the uh the sky level quite a bit uh more neutral just so that the rosette nebula stands out from the background sky okay francesco sent in this image of ngc 1530 this was taken with an eight inch f5 newtonian and an asi 224 mc camera all on a sky watcher heq five with no auto guiding and this is almost 1300 subs at 30 seconds each um that's really showing some dedication and showing how well a small sensor and a big scope uh can work if you know what you're doing so really nice job the only thing i would suggest um with your pics insight processing is to use dynamic background extraction before you stretch the image um that should help uh with this vignetting uh that i see here okay this is by fred oz and fred oz submitted this photo of jupiter and the galalan moons captured with an iphone attached to a telescope eyepiece using a celestron smartphone adapter and fred oz recorded video at the eyepiece using the night cap camera app on iphone and then stacked about 1100 frames to make this image and fred oz mentioned he struggles a lot to get the iphone aligned uh getting the telescope focused knowing right the right shutter speed is uh all these kinds of issues um but i think you've done a really great job fred oz i i always struggle with planetary imaging so i think uh anyone who is doing it well is is it's really commendable um i did take a look at your stacked tiff and i think you did a nice job of of processing here but the only thing that stood out to me was that maybe the uh the great red spot was a little bit too saturated and a little too orange i did look at other recent pictures of jupiter and a lot of them did have the great red spot as fairly orange so i guess that that's sort of the color that it is right now uh the colors in jupiter and saturn are always changing on us so it's it's always good to sort of be aware of what's what's happening with the planets um i don't uh unfortunately i don't have really any great tips for how to make things easier with attaching the phone and getting it all aligned because that's something that i struggle with too maybe with more practice i'll i'll have tips in the future but for now all i can say is just uh keep at it i think it's it's worth it for the kind of images that we're we're able to capture as astrophotographers okay here is this is by frostyth astrophotography and frostyth astrophotography has shared the horse head and flame nebulae and this was captured with narrowband filters so this is an sh o style image and uh usually you see this scene in full color uh sometimes h-a-r-g-b so it's always you know interesting to see a scene that you typically see one way in a very different color palette and you do you do miss out on some of the nebulosity here because i think this is a reflection nebulae but uh i do like this aesthetically quite a bit um i i find it especially interesting how colorless the the flame came out since usually in broadband that's so orange but it's it's almost black and white here i i don't i wonder what that means about uh it's chemical makeup uh you know there's this large halo around on the talk it's sort of interesting i think that'd be pretty easy to to minimize here in photoshop since it looks so circular but i also don't mind it uh it's it's sort of an interesting effect um and because you've kept the color so muted uh it sort of blends in with everything but if you if you wanted to take it out you know my technique is you just you make a circular selection around it and then you can use adjustments like saturation and changing the color slightly uh to help it blend in to the image gabriel sent in this photo of the lagoon in trifid it was taken with a dslr and lens but no star tracker and gabriel said he doesn't like how much noise or in his shots and he wants a tip for minimizing the noise unfortunately that's one of the biggest downsides to astrophotography without a tracker it's never going to be as noise free as as you know as astrophotography that we can do with a star tracker um so that would be i guess my advice is uh save up and buy a star tracker the least expensive ones like the move shoot move or maybe the omegan wind-up tracker are not super expensive somewhere between 150 and 250 us dollars um so i i think that that will help but i mean for untracked i think this looks quite good and and this is also a good target i think for untracked in terms of noise because it's such a busy star field that i don't really notice the noise um so i think going after things in the milky way like this could could be a very successful way to go about it okay next up we have garret and garret sent in a photo of the north america and pelican nebulae captured in narrowband with an asi 2600 mm camera and and lea shl filters and garret mentioned uh struggling with the balance between the stars and um accurate star color and mentioned collecting rgb stars but not being happy with how they looked when combined well i think this looks great in terms of the star treatment you know the stars are definitely apparent but not uh the star of the show the star is definitely the nebulae um and so for narrowband my personal preference is not super colorful stars because i feel like if you put in super colorful stars with super colorful nebulae they sort of fight um unless you're very selective about how you do it so i like fairly desaturated small stars like you've done here my only two critiques with this image are uh one that the composition feels a little bit off just because both the pelican and the north america are just slightly cut off on the sides um so maybe you would prefer just a slight change there um and then there's a blue gradient uh up here at the top that looks a little bit odd um you know you might have left it in because you saw that it was part of the o3 response but a lot of times with o3 we have issues with flats calibration or different things going on so um sometimes it's a good idea if you don't already do this to do a background extraction on each filter um and that that might help with that kind of uh blue in the in the sky background okay george captured an elephant trunk here with a canon 200d no sorry canon 20d a so that was the first uh astro specific canon camera a cls filter and an aryan 80 ed telescope with no field flattener on a vixen sphinx mount and george processed this with serial and photoshop and mentioned trying to get the sky more neutral while still bringing out the red nebulosity and also trying to get the stars smaller and wondered if the central bright stars are still too big um my opinion with the stars in this image is not that the central stars are too big but that your medium stars are too small uh if we zoom in a little bit to me this is uh too much star reduction of your medium sized stars so you're losing variety basically you either only have big stars or small stars well you to me what looks better is to have still this natural mix of star size uh and then the overall redness i think works well here since it is a close-up of the nebula um so even if this isn't completely accurate when it comes to color i think it it works well in this case i might uh crop this because you know you did have the no field flattener and i'm not sure how much the the sides of the image are really um adding for me so i would maybe uh crop in to a more vertical composition like that or even or even more uh just because you you really have a nice elephant trunk there so something like that uh and then you wouldn't have the issue with the distortion i'm someone who is is very willing to crop i wasn't always that way i you know i used to be i want to keep everything that i that i captured but now as i've uh been in the hobby longer i'm i'm more into if it's makes it a more interesting composition where we can really focus on the important things in the photo let's go ahead and crop okay g part uh sent in an image of the pleiades star cluster taken with an open astro tracker and that's a 3d printed astro tracker and let's look at how round the stars are they look nice and round so the the 3d printed astro tracker is working well uh g part also used a tear 3s which is an old soviet lens and a modded canon 500d this is about five hours of fine bit five minute exposures from portal four um so i think this is very well done the two things that i would do are increased saturation in everything but the sky so you can just make a simple luminance mask and then increase saturation um and then i see a little bit of a gradient from left to right with this bottom right corner being the brightest you know there there is uh also i think more dust in the background that you could bring out so i would just suggest a background extraction it should help with both dust and and gradients yannis sent in an image of the andromeda galaxy taken with a nikon z5 camera and a tamron zoom lens on a sky watcher star adventurer and yannis processed this with zero i think this looks quite good um i feel like the the color could be tweaked a little bit it's a little bit muddy uh in here like a little brown where i think it could be a little bit more vibrant maybe um and yannis asked if there is an easy way to know the ideal iso aperture and shutter speed yeah sort of i'll try to explain it quickly with a star tracker and a lens what i would suggest is uh just put your camera at iso 1600 that's a safe iso for uh most cameras uh for astrophotography and then after you set the iso to 1600 set your aperture to around f4 or maybe f5 if you want very sharp stars uh i would start at f4 and only go to f5 if you find that the stars aren't acceptable at f4 after that just adjust the shutter speed with a test exposure until you're finding that the histogram peak falls about one third over from the left when you take a test exposure so how long that's going to end up being with the shutter speed depends on your location but let's say you have a reasonably dark site maybe uh portal three or four at f4 iso 1600 i would expect your exposures would be about one minute to maybe two minutes uh with some cameras especially newer sony and maybe your nikon z5 you could use a lower iso and longer exposures if you wish um but that doesn't necessarily result in better photos it's just a choice and part of that choice is if you want fewer photos to stack uh to make the process easier and you have no issue with star trailing then there's no problem with taking longer exposures at lower iso with some of those newer sony and nikon cameras so hopefully that helps but my sort of go-to would be iso 1600 f4 and then just adjust shutter speed until uh the histogram is one third over okay next we have geo geoscent in an image of the crescent nebula and it's surrounding nebulosity uh and part of the the satyr butterfly up here in the upper right and this was taken with a canon r.a camera and a radian triad ultra filter and geo mentioned separating the channels using selective color multiple times to get this result um yeah and i think you were quite successful in getting lots of color out of the the image and um it's a definitely an exciting color palette the crescent really stands out and uh yeah i think there's maybe a little bit of a gradient from top to bottom uh that you could work on and then the the other thing i would um be careful of when you're processing is if we look like here see how some areas just have gone flat like there's no texture left they're just like a flat color and it sometimes we call this posterization that's probably in this processing using selective color multiple times so just just be careful every time you apply something like that uh just look at what it's doing to the image and maybe back off on certain things if you see this kind of uh issue uh just because overall i think the impression is quite good but my eye is drawn to to issues like that there's another um example of it in this top corner see how that it just becomes sort of this flat color uh and and it is avoidable so you can through careful processing avoid that kind of thing glenn captured in drama with a canon t7 a canon 75 to 300 kit zoom lens and a sky watcher star adventurer and glenn mentioned his images always coming out softer than he would like and wondering if that comes down to the lens glenn also requested that i take a go at processing his data so i did i'll show you that in a second here but first let me just address some of your other questions the canon 75 to 300 is a good lens for what it is at the that price it's a it's a nice lens but if you were to upgrade to a small well-corrected telescope like a william optics red cat 51 or an ascar fra 300 or an apertura 60 edr with flabner any of those small 50 to 60 millimeter refractors you are going to be a lot sharper much tighter well-corrected stars and better details than you would get with a comparable lens at the same focal length that said there are things that you can do to keep your data as sharp as possible you mentioned getting the astronomy tools action set and that you used noise reduction in here i like the astronomy tools action set there's a lot of good stuff in there but i would probably not use noise reduction if your concern is sharpness because noise reduction techniques typically blur detail they don't preserve detail so with that said i'll show you my try at it so i maybe went a little bit overboard with uh taming the core uh because the galaxy is a little bit dark but since you were asking for maximal sharpness that i could achieve that's what i was going for and you can see there's this little cluster of blue stars here where i think i even yeah you can sort of see like individual stars and then i was also just really paying attention to the dust lanes when processing but i didn't do any noise reduction at all i did apply plenty of sharpening in different stages along the way but i didn't i didn't do any noise reduction so just to show you maybe what you can achieve with that lens uh looking at it up close here i might also uh have should do some chromatic aberration reduction uh that's available in the camera raw filter and that would even sharpen it up a little bit more okay gordon shot a nine panel mosaic of the witch head nebula using a sigma 150 to 600 zoom lens and a 1.4x teleconverter which brought the lens to an effective focal length of 840 millimeters gordon used an asi 294 mc camera and a sky watcher he q5 mount and gordon asked about the tradeoffs between mosaic imaging like he did here and again this is a nine panel mosaic between capturing the same amount of uh integration but if he had zoomed out to 150 millimeters and done a more wide field shot so it's an excellent question i think uh it's one of those it depends kinds of answers though it depends on both the the scene the object and also what your goal is because a mosaic is going to be ideal for printing for resolution but and then also with a busy star field the stars are going to be much sharper because they're better sampled um so there's a lot of potential advantages to mosaic imaging but uh you do need patience there's a lot that can go wrong uh it's a can be harder to process um so i think there are our tradeoffs but i think in the end if you're if you are okay with sort of spending more time in probably both acquisition and processing the it's worth it to do to try mosaic imaging so i think uh you've done a nice job here um i'm impressed uh that this is done with a camera lens and teleconverter and it looks it looks quite good so thanks for sending it in and and for the question okay graham sent in an image of the milky way this was captured with a motorola one fusion plus smartphone and this is 10 images of 30 seconds each stacked with sequader and edited in photoshop and graham asks what more could be done considering this is a 220 smartphone good question and first off congrats this is excellent i think this is a really really well done smartphone milky way capture um i suppose what more could be done given the quality here is you could try stacking photos so or stacking more photos i should say this is already 10 photos stacked but maybe if you stacked 100 photos and um or took 100 photos and stacked the best 50 that had the best focus and and composition that would bring down the noise in the background a little bit more because you can see there is a little bit of uh of noise still even though it's a nice bright photo and then another possibility and i'm not the best at this but is to find a very interesting foreground so you have some trees here to sort of anchor it but there maybe if there's another interesting thing you could put in the foreground with the milky way that would be another uh sort of one up to this photo okay then we have greg and greg sent in a very nice image of the wizard nebula in seafious this is 52 hours of integration with a sky watcher spree 120 from portal one and greg captured this with sho narrowband filters and rgb filters for the stars and this is great the wizard is actually one of these targets that i've never captured in a close-up like this despite really liking how it looks and uh i guess i've been saving it for the the right moment i don't really have much to critique here because i think the colors and composition and and the processing are all to my uh taste if i really uh zoom in on the stars uh i guess one small nitpick is some of the brighter stars seem to have a little bit of a purple uh magenta fringe you did mention you used rgb for the stars uh so that kind of thing would be pretty easy to take out uh in picks inside if you separate the stars from the rest of the photo invert them run sc in our green and invert back the magenta fringe should be pretty much gone while we're zoomed in you can just see that this has lots of really nice details and i think i mentioned in some earlier critique that i don't always like rgb stars with scho narrow band in this case i think uh greg has pulled it off it looks really good and because greg's rgb stars here aren't super saturated and colorful right i think if you go too saturated with the stars it does distract from the nebula but in this case i think this is how to do it and the other thing i would say is um greg's color palette here with the scho is sort of a rainbow color palette where you get all these different colors like red orange yellow green blue all all these browns all these different colors in the nebula and i think that style works better with rgb stars uh as well great gracy sent in an image of the heart nebula taken from a portal nine sky with a small refractor and asi 294 mc in an opt along ellen hands filter and gracy mentioned having trouble with processing due to not enough integration time and wanting it to look more hd but the processing ending up making it look worse and gracy also asked about the best method for star reduction and gracy uses pics insight and photoshop so my big advice here is when you don't have much integration i think less is more in processing it's very easy to want to fix pros problems you see and then you sort of end up overdoing it trying to fix those problems but you know with with little data from a city you're just going to have to accept that it's not going to be perfect so try to just work with what you have in terms of your question about star reduction i think the best thing out there today if you want to spend some money is russell chromans blurricks terminator plugin you use it on your data when it's still linear and it does a really good job of deconvolution which will make your stars smaller in this very natural looking way but retain their relative sizes i just did it on your data here just to show you what i what it did so here's this your processing and then if we just look at sort of the star sizes you can see they got slightly smaller tighter but it's it's nothing super dramatic if you wanted to go further than this with star reduction i recommend bill blanchins scripts and you can search on youtube to find those in terms of what i did with the processing here i tried to keep it pretty simple i noticed in your processing that the the background had a lot of sort of discoloration so i tried to just keep it fairly neutral and but i did do a little bit of cheating here with desaturating the sky in photoshop with a mask so here's what the mask looked like and then here's before and after i was just sort of taking out red and even though some of that red might be actual ha signal for me it just looks better with a more neutral sky behind the heart nebula okay next we have gerga grga and gerga sent in a sequence of photos of jupiter and a transit of the planet io and this was made with a sky watcher moxitav a 2x barlow and an asi 178 mc camera and this is great grega i i'm not much of a planetary photographer myself but uh this definitely makes me want to try again uh because you know this this equipment is affordable for a lot of people and these results are quite amazing showing you all this detail in the cloud bands and then uh this is a sequence of photos showing the planet or the moon io starting to transit in front of uh jupiter in between us in jupiter so really nice result i i like how the processing doesn't feel overdone it's not over sharpened the colors are beautiful but not oversaturated so really well done okay gregory sent in an image of ngc 133 and or 1333 uh in orion and this is another object that's quite beautiful but i haven't captured yet myself i've always wanted to it has a really nice mix of reflection nebula dark nebula young stellar objects her big harrow objects all this kind of stuff going on the only suggestion i have i think it's a very nice image is that there's a little bit of green noise left in uh the shadow areas mostly you know here in the dark nebulae uh so there's a nice tool in picks insight called and i'm in picks insight because i know this is what uh gregory uses it's called scnr uh i think it's chromatic noise reduction or maybe it's selective chromatic noise reduction something like that uh and there's you can remove noise of different colors and but the most common one we want to remove is green like in this image and there's an amount slider usually don't want to do it at 100 percent because then it'll affect the star color too much and you might want to actually remove the stars and apply this and then put the stars back in but i'll just show you what's going to happen if we just apply it at 50 percent okay so here was before and after and hopefully that comes across in the video that there was just some sort of dark green noise i'll do it again zoomed out see the sort of greenish noise in the dark nebula and then if i remove that it looks better overall now one consequence is that maybe now the sky background is a little bit too blue biased so sometimes it's a little tricky you have to work it a little bit you might have to then go into curves and and add a little green back but it does it does work pretty well and you can try it both when the data is linear or non-linear sometimes both um and and the the key thing though is is trying to sort of perceive is there any green left in the image and and take it out the other strange thing i'll say about this topic for people that might be colorblind is uh you can run things like photometric color calibration they apply a white balance function but there could still be a lot of green noise in your picture even after a photometric color calibration so i'm not sure the best way to know if you're colorblind you know that there's still green in your picture because you might not be able to see it maybe just showing it to someone else and say do you see any any green here okay Guillermo uh sent an image of Andromeda taken with a Nikon D3300 Sigma zoom lens and Skywatcher HEQ5 mount and Guillermo used deep sky stacker topaz denoise and photoshop to process Guillermo said he was happy with this image and i agree it looks quite good uh Guillermo is wondering what i would do with his data so i'll show my quick process here's Guillermo's there's mine um i maybe went a little bit overboard i think it looks a little over processed today with today's eyes but what i did here was i used blur exterminator to make the stars really small and give some nice detail boost in the galaxy and uh let's see what else i did oh i stretched the stars and the galaxy separately uh using generalized hyperbolic stretch i then recombined them here in photoshop and applied some saturation boost uh to the galaxy the one thing that i think looks a little odd uh today is that the the core uh doesn't have much of that nice uh golden yellowish color the so i'm not sure if i i messed up the color balance a little bit here but anyways this is my sort of take on your data for what it's worth okay now we have Guy and Guy sent a nine panel mosaic of the core of our milkyway galaxy with twin canon 6d's and twin rokinon 135 millimeter lenses on a sky watcher az gti mount and this looks like uh quite the big project very impressive Guy requested that i give him some uh feedback uh you know some suggestions i think uh because he felt there were things to improve in the image but he couldn't really see what they were the only thing that he could see that was sticking out was the lagoon didn't look quite right and i agree the lagoon doesn't really look right um Guy said that's because he shot very long exposures because he his goal was to really expose for the dust so then the lagoon got blown out and then he had to sort of try to recover uh details in the lagoon because he didn't like it blown out either so if he was going to do it again he would probably mix in some shorter exposures so that makes sense to me um that's not really what stood out to me though uh my critique is more about sort of compositionally um with a big mosaic like this to my eye this composition doesn't really work um the the problem with many mosaic images mine included is you get so excited about just expanding the mosaic and capturing this huge amount of sky that uh you start missing what works compositionally because you just include more and more stuff in the frame and when you include more and more things in a photo like this the eye doesn't really know where to travel um and the this picture for me lacks what we call flow and part of the reason that it lacks flow is because there's not much negative space right because you've made the picture so bright with so much going on that there's nothing that really ends up standing out um you know and I understand the goal was to make it clear there's dust everywhere in the Milky Way but I think that maybe you went just a little bit too bright um and then also uh the compositionally I'm not sure if this was the best way to lay it out so I hope you don't mind but you shared an astro bin link to your uh profile so I just want to bring up this as a sort of counter example to your image here so this is also a big mosaic but you've found and framed a scene so that it has this really elegant simplicity of a strong vertical composition where the eye is led up through the scene to the most important thing and then you also used bright stars in a way with this one where they anchor the scene better so hopefully you know in contrast to this one uh you can sort of see what I mean by composition this one has two strong sort of pillars of information and then this bridge between them but something about that doesn't work as well as the simplicity of a composition like this so I think that's sort of the biggest thing I think you're looking at your profile your portfolio on astro bin you've gotten way better at this kind of thing from image to image so uh hopefully that helps and and is some feedback that you can actually use okay Hassan captured the rosette nebula with an asi 533 mc optalong l ultimate filter and the red cat 71 telescope so Hassan you have some very nice uh details here if we zoom in you can see the the dark nebulae in the rosette quite good um Hassan mentioned wanting to get more blue to come out in the center of the rosette that was his goal in processing so one thing I would try with a filter like the ultimate if you haven't is separate out the red green and blue channels before stretching them and that way you can stretch them separately and uh when you stretch the o3 signal uh you can stretch it a lot more aggressively than the ha to sort of match their brightness levels and then that will help the blue come out and you know there's different schools of thought when it comes to uh how to create the o3 signal some people combine the green and blue channels uh or you can sometimes just use the green channel throw out the blue if the blue is very noisy uh I'll leave that part up to you but the the main thing I think with this kind of filter is to stretch the color channels separately and then combine uh like it's an ho image okay Haydn's heavens sent in a photo of the Pleiades from portal eight this was taken with a tp0 180 astrograph canon t7i and sp b bony cls filter on a sky watcher star adventurer this looks very nice um pretty natural color rendering especially with the cls filter you may want to try shooting this without any filter uh and just using very short exposures personally I found even from portal eight or portal nine that on reflection nebulae the result can be better without any kind of light pollution filter the downside to that is if it's a really light polluted place you may be taking 10 or 15 second exposures and so it's sort of a chore to process that many pictures uh but I think that it might be worth it for recovering a little bit more of that blue nebulosity uh the other thing I noticed is there's a small uh common type of uh light pollution gradient here from bottom up uh so you could probably take care of that you know right in photoshop or a gimp but the best results you're going to get for light pollution is to use a background extraction tool when the data is still linear and you can do that with the free program zero okay henry sent in an image of the m 31 andromeda galaxy take an untracked with a sony nex 3 n camera and zoom lens henry took 1197 photos uh at four fifth of a second and shooting at f 6.3 so f 6.3 so f 6.3 is definitely a bit slow for untracked astrophotography um but I applaud you henry for you know trying this with what you have available and uh so you definitely got you know some of the shape here of andromeda a little bit of the outer arms beyond the the core I think I can see in your data here um something you might try it might be difficult uh with how faint and drama it is is to reduce some of this blue noise in the sky background uh other than that I think the stars look round and you you did get some nice star color as well h t sent in a photo of the dragons of aura n gc 6188 this was taken with a asi 294 mc camera and sky watcher 72 ed refractor and h t captured this with nina and processed with deep sky stacker and camp so my biggest advice is to add zero to your workflow um it's also free software I can see that you're using other free software and what I think it would add to your workflow and to your data processing is um background extraction color calibration would be really useful here because the the picture looks a little bit uh brighter in the middle but I'm also seeing some sort of color casts in here and so I think if you did a little more color calibration and background extraction when the data was still linear it's going to help you get more contrast and more uh vibrant colors because the data here looks quite good um so I think but I think there's more potential in the processing okay next up we have hubert and hubert sent in a photo of sygnus taken with a canon 70d dsl r canon 50 millimeter lens and astronomic cls filter on a sky watcher star adventurer tracker this was processed with dss starnet and photoshop and so I really like this uh composition it features a lot of the best known nebulae in sygnus the veil nebulae down here satyr and the north america and pelican um the one thing that I would work on here is the star field I know the cls filter isn't going to give you the most natural stars which is why stars are mostly either just white or uh sort of uh reddish orange in this picture um but I would try to desaturate the red stars a little bit uh another thing you can uh try is uh let me just turn off the star spikes for a second here is the camera raw filter the defringe option in optics and so since you have a lot of sort of orangish stars I'm going to expand the purple hue to that and then do something like this so here's before and it's just you have all these um reddish orange fringes on the stars and then there's after using that defringe filter and I think um you know it changes the color balance of the photo a little bit but hopefully it helps focus the eye on the the nebulae a little bit more so that's just a quick example uh but that's my my main advice is to play around with the star field and I don't mind the addition of the star spikes I think I would personally make them a little bit less pronounced and maybe add fainter ones on a few more stars just so it's not just like those three uh only okay Ian sent in a photo of the heart nebula this was taken from a portal six sky with a stock canon dslr and a small reflector and this is two hours integration Ian processed this with dss serial star net and photoshop and you know you know I think you did all the right things in processing looking through your steps I did try this one as well and went with a little bit more of a subdued look and part of the reason that I went darker than you did is because I'm very hesitant to use any noise reduction because I think that it creates usually more problems than it solves um so just to give you an idea of like a more subtle uh dark version of the of an edit of the same data that's what it might look like um Ian asked about noise and snr signal to noise ratio and uh how to improve it and then gave some options like would it be better to get an astronomy camera a light pollution filter or just more total integration uh it's hard to say you know given your result here I think if you added a light pollution filter and got a little bit more integration uh that combination will improve the photo a lot um and then if you add the modified camera into the mix you know that's going to improve it even more so that's sort of a cop out I'm just saying do all three but that's the truth of astrophotography at all just all these little things add up to the result so there's not really one thing that I can say is going to work the best because I'm not sure there's just too many factors uh but keep at it uh keep trying to improve upgrade your gear when you think it makes sense and you uh have the money to do so um and but last thing I'd say is keep in mind the heart nebula is a very difficult target for broadband imaging so I think you did a really nice job here um but it's more of a narrowband kind of target so uh it's always going to be a difficult one when shot in broadband okay Ian sent in a photo of the Andromeda galaxy so it's taken with an sv bony telescope a sky watcher star adventurer and a canon 80 d and this is two hours of integration from a mortal five sky Ian asked about how to get more colors out of the galaxy and he's processing this with pics insight um as far as a processing technique to get different colors to come out there is a script in pics insight called color mask uh that's in the scripts that allows you to do saturation boost to different parts so you could for instance make a color mask script for the blues and then just boost the blues saturation um however I I'm gonna warn you that it's only gonna work well if you actually have a good blue signal uh in your photo it's it's easy to maybe just end up selecting the noise and boosting noise um and so with light pollution and broadband objects uh it might be really difficult if you are uh fairly mobile and you can travel to a darker sky it's definitely worth it for something like this uh even in an hour uh integration from like a mortal three sky is going to be much easier to process than several hours let's say four hours from portal five uh so that's my main advice is it's maybe not a processing thing it's more of a sky uh thing in terms of boosting blues okay Ilya sent in a nice image of the bubble nebula and the m52 star cluster up here and uh Ilya took this with a sky watcher spree 80 with no flattener and a fuji x80 a5 on a sky watcher az gti mount um so the stars are really nice and around here and you have some nice detail in the bubble um my only uh quick suggestions are I think the the bubble the ha emissions sort of around the bubble here should be more of a red overall the scene uh has sort of like a yellow color balance to it that I think could be uh fixed I actually just went ahead and did a quick uh selective color here uh just taking cyan out of red and taking yellow out of yellow and here's before and after just to show you a more neutral kind of color balance I also cropped in a little bit just because I think the center was the important part of the picture so those are my two suggestions a little crop and a little bit more color balancing okay Isaac sent in this photo of the north america and pelican nebulae and this was shot with a nikon d810 that's been modified and a red cat 51 on a sky watcher star adventurer and uh Isaac definitely did a lot of processing on this I'll just show you what the original looks like with just uh background extraction so I think Isaac's processing uh is is good here um I would have guessed this is this was done with a dual neuroband filter based on uh how much this you know the stars were shrunk um but they you know it was a well done uh star shrinkage because I don't really see any artifacts left over um Isaac asked about this being so red and how people are getting more blue in the body of the north america nebulae so as you suspected Isaac there are various reasons um some people are shooting this with a stock camera and in that case the the bright o3 emission is going to be better balanced with the ha emission because a stock camera is cutting off a lot of that ha once you modify your camera like you have then you let in more ha and it dominates the the blue the o3 um and then people also of course use narrowband filters and dual narrowband filters and that gives you more control over how you present it if you do extractions and things like that but even with just a modified camera you can have a lot of control through processing uh what you want to do is with the data still linear like this you can click this button split rgb channels and then maybe go starless on the rgb channels and uh stretch them separately uh from one another so that you can really bring out that o3 uh signal um you know there there is plenty of uh o3 data here in both your green and blue channels and there's your red channel so um it's all about how you stretch how you recombine them basically you're doing narrowband processing even though you're doing it with a color camera so the first step is to separate out the channels and treat it or like you're doing narrowband okay isaac sent in this photo of the lagoon nebula taken with a qhy 183c a sky watcher eq m35 mount and a sky watcher evo star 72 telescope and isaac's process this with serial and starnet to go starless with the presentation here and i think uh while i don't do a lot of starless image you know starless is my final presentation i think the lagoon is actually an excellent object to do it on because it there's a lot that are to be revealed by removing the stars out of the lagoon uh my one suggestion is the framing it feels a little bit uh weird to me uh there's this bright thing down here um i like that the lagoon has this nice sort of base of darkness to to sit on but i i think the core of the lagoon should be centered so i would just recommend cutting off most of this uh left side and just centering the core area like this maybe even getting rid of that top little bright patch because it sort of pulls the eye away from the lagoon so i think i like that even better because you're then a little bit closer in uh without looking around and it really highlights uh the main attraction here while still giving you a little breathing room on the bottom okay i even sent in a photo of andromeda this was taken without a star tracker using a canon m50 and a 32 millimeter lens at f 1.4 and ivan mentioned that he had just received a gift of an ioptron skyguider pro star tracker and was looking forward to using that so congrats ivan that's really cool i think you're gonna really enjoy using the star tracker ivan said for completeness he sent in this cropped final version but also the uncropped version which includes more of perseus for me i enjoyed the uncropped version more because i get a lot of photos of andromeda in these critiques but it's always nice to see something a little different so this one you know shows the context of andromeda and the double cluster which is the famous star double star cluster in perseus so i think this perspective is a lot of fun so thanks for including that ivan okay and another ivan this ivan sent in the crescent nebula taken with an asi 533 mc opt along elix stream and skywatcher 150 pds newtonian on an ioptron gem 28 mount this was taken from a portal for sky and processed with syril starnet and gimp and ivan asked two questions one what is the best way to add the stars back into the image with free software and two is there an alternative to auto stretch in syril so you likely already know this as a syril user ivan but the syril 1.2 beta answers both of those questions perfectly they added a very comprehensive implementation of generalized hyperbolic stretch and they also added a process called star recomposition with starnet implemented right into syril so you can watch my video on that if you haven't already but those are definitely my favorites for how to now stretch images and add stars back to starless and you can now do everything with a nebula shot like this right in syril you might not find that you even have to leave syril to go from beginning to end so speaking of the the photo this is of course really well done um you got amazing details here on the shell and uh within the crescent nebula and you know the crescent nebula is obviously the star of of this image i like how you handle the background keeping it sort of dim so that the crescent nebula really pops out um but also feels uh right it doesn't feel like pasted on or anything it feels like it's it's right there as part of the nebulosity so congrats on on the image and i think you're gonna like syril 1.2 even better ivar uh captured the sygnus wall with a sky a sky watcher 150 pds on an h e q5 mount with an asi 1600 mm camera and astronomic six nanometer sh o filters from a portal nine sky so i think this looks excellent it makes a great impression uh zoomed out like this i found two small nitpicks on zooming in uh one is at the bottom of the picture there's a small line of green so always just check your your edges because it's easy just to to quickly crop out little registration artifacts and the second issue is if you zoom way in on certain parts of the image i think the stars look off um you mentioned that you brought the stars back in at 70 opacity but if you zoom in on certain areas that makes the stars look odd like too dim um you know a star core shouldn't be that gray like it has to have a little bit more of a vibrant punch to it so i if i'm gonna lower the opacity of the stars when i'm bringing that back in i never go below 85 percent uh 70 percent feels like too dim uh for me just about reverse vignetting on your o3 filter and flats that won't fix it so it's normal with narrowband filters to actually be darker in the center and brighter in the corners uh normally flats should correct that so my guess is your flats are under correcting and you could try brighter longer flats but another thing that it could be is the asi 1600 doesn't work very well with bias frames so if you're using bias frames to correct your flats uh instead use dark flats and dark flats are just darks that match the exposure time of your flat frames if you use the wpp script it's very easy you just load in your regular darks to correct your lights your flat darks to correct your flats and it will know what to do uh so that'd be my other suggestion okay this is j astro who sent in an image of a ryan taken at 55 millimeter focal length on a star adventurer tracker and this is one hour of integration taken from portal six and j astro asked of this level of noise is normal for one hour of integration from portal six uh yeah i think it does look normal let's zoom in on the noise yes definitely normal for one hour integration um you know the thing you know you you might compare your images to other people's images and then think oh well why are my noisier well there's a lot of things that can be going on even just saying portal six can mean different things uh because it's a range of sky brightnesses and they might be shooting at higher in the sky all kinds of things um and signal the noise ratio is a little bit complex uh but the main things that are going to influences are how dark your sky are and your total integration and your focal ratio and uh you know the the harder you stretch the image the the more you're going to see the noise that's in the image uh so the the longer you increase that total integration the more you can bring out without the noise sort of taking over so you stretch this fairly hard for one hour you know you're starting to see some of the dust in Orion but if you just processed it differently to make the sky black then you wouldn't see as much noise so to make this particular photo you know noise free or at least uh bring out the dust without the noise I think you might have to go to eight hours 10 hours I'm not exactly sure but the alternative is you could just darken the sky to hide the noise or not even darken the sky just don't stretch it as much okay jack sent in an image of Cygnus of course one of my favorite constellations for the reason you're seeing here it's chalk full of nebulosity and I think this is the first black and white photo sent in this is cool this was taken with a modified Canon T7i 100 millimeter lens and Astronomic 12 nanometer HA clip-in filter and jack processed with Cyril and Photoshop and jack mentioned he wants to make this an HA RGB image but wants to know how to introduce the RGB without overwhelming the image so uh check out two videos I did earlier this year one was about my secret weapon which is how to blend stars into a starless image made with star net and then the other is about Cyril 1.2 beta which is out now because both of these ideas will give you some ideas for what to try think about how to use star net stretching the stars and the starless data and combining it all back together and with your HA RGB plan another thing that I will sometimes do is make both the HA and the RGB starless combine those two just with opacity adjustments as a starless base because the RGB will give you sort of a a nice you know reflection nebulae and a better base color to the sky and then you can just blend only the RGB stars on top of that so hopefully that makes sense if you have any questions you can always contact me okay jack sent in an image of the horse head and flame nebulae taken with an SV bony 80 ED telescope and a self-modified Nikon D 3400 on a sky watcher star adventurer and that's that's a big telescope for a star adventurer an 80 millimeter refractor jack mentioned he is colorblind and so he tries to use photometric color calibration to get the colors right asked you know and asked about the colors in the image I think yes something did go a little bit amiss with your colors the the color of the dust and the flame and the horse head are all right on but then the blues somehow got shifted to magenta here and the reds might be a little bit too orange but but it's mainly the blues went to magenta I did open up your data and just ran an automatic background extractor no color calibration and these colors are perfect so you might not really have to do any kind of complicated color workflow if you can just find processes that don't change the color too much your data actually has all the right colors already in it so if you if your goal is to keep it natural that's what to do but as you said in your message if you're happy with how it looks that's all that really matters so I think you've you've done a good job of bringing out a lot of a lot of detail here it's it's really only if you're concerned with natural color that I would try to after a background extraction maybe a color calibration just try not to do anything that's going to change the color balance I'm not sure exactly what did but but that's that's the way to go about it now that I'm looking at these back to back yellow the reds are also very shifted to orange and the blues got shifted to magenta all right jack for life 101 took this image of andromeda with an olympus pen e-pil 5 camera at 210 millimeter focal length without tracking from bordle 8 jack for life 101 forgot to switch from jpeg to raw so this is 81 second jpegs stacked and he asked about calibration frames and whether they're necessary when it's cold out so I still recommend uh them if shooting raw it doesn't the temperature isn't going to matter uh too much I mean you could say the dark serge is necessary when it's cold out but I would still just do them now with jpeg uh you don't want to use calibration frames typically because these are stretched frames that are they're stretched in camera and then all calibration is sort of out the window but I think this looks quite good considering it is jpegs stacked and considering the age of the camera you definitely got some of the a couple of the prominent dust lanes here and andromeda and and the overall shape okay jacob sent in an image of the north america and pelican and sygnus this was taken with a canon dslr and kit 75 to 300 lens on a star tracker from bordle 4 and jacob was happy to capture an emission nebula with a stock camera but was wondering if the colors looked right or if they were oversaturated um so I do think your colors look pretty right for a stock camera uh you'll find that with the stock camera you actually have this better balance between o3 and ha uh just naturally because for for nebulae there are more that are rich in o3 uh uh so I think this looks quite good you know to improve it you can just get more integration time this is uh just under an hour but if you get three to four hours it's going to be even easier to process and uh then you can you know stretch the data more without uh the noise the color noise being such an issue because you can see that there's a lot of a lot of promise in here um but when I stretch it aggressively we are getting a lot of uh color noise okay jacob sent in a picture of andromeda this was taken with a sony mirrorless camera and zoom lens on a star adventurer mount from bordle 4 uh jacob was unsure if his flat frames worked correctly I did take a look at your flat and it looked perfectly normal but then looking at your resulting stacked photo you can see there's a lot of blotchiness my guess is this is clouds so thin passing clouds you might not have noticed from bordle 4 those are what's I think causing this blotchiness in your result you can always when you are reviewing your photos on the back of the camera try to see if there's any clouds passing through that's my guess is what's going on I can't be absolutely sure um other than that I think this looks very nice and natural uh getting more color out of the data like you asked will require more processing um and I think the the blotchiness here might be what's holding you back from from getting more color with this particular data but generally you can use masks you can use uh masks combined with like saturation boosts and and it can help get more color okay jacob captured the horse head and flame nebulae in Orion this is with an sv bony 80 millimeter scope and a canon t7 on an ioptron skyguider pro uh so this is uh an impressive capture I mean an 80 millimeter scope again on a star tracker a lot of people are are putting these big scopes on star trackers which impresses me um my only advice is this picture looks very bright and and almost washed out uh and then it has a pretty extreme gradient from left to right where there's it's much darker over here to the left of the flame so uh you know bringing it into zero before stretching doing a background extraction and then messing with uh the black level uh after you've done that gradient extraction these things are going to uh help a lot with uh getting the right contrast and things like that okay jake sent in an image of the north america nebula this was taken with an explorer scientific 127 refractor and this is a four panel mosaic uh so congrats on the mosaic jake it's uh definitely a seamless mosaic I didn't notice uh the you know the only thing after I read this is a mosaic that maybe gives it away is over here on the right edge there's a little uh red and blue uh artifact there uh I think uh overall my advice for this is the color balance feels a little bit off to me I think it's it's sort of like a a magenta cast is what I'm seeing like if you look down at the sky where it should be just sort of a neutral black it's it's uh a little too reddish so if I just do a color balance here go to shadows and add about I added 22 to the green in the shadows here's before and after and that's just it's a little bit more neutral uh to my eye now there's some things that I like about the added magenta in the in the mids um so you might want to apply that more selectively than I did but just to give you an idea of what I was seeing with the color balance okay jake sent in a picture of andromeda this was taken with a cannon rp and a cannon 600 millimeter f 11 lens uh that's uh one of these new r lenses that are pretty neat and this was 100 lights at one minute each uh and used dss in photoshop uh jake didn't spend a lot of time on processing but would probably have made the stars smaller if they had spent more time I actually uh don't think the stars need to be any smaller here I think the star size is fine it's more just the balance between the star brightness and the galaxy brightness that needs a little adjustment so uh if you could just you know either make a mask to just the galaxy or separate the stars in the galaxy and boost the brightness of the galaxy compared to the stars I think you'd find the star size is actually fine okay james sent an image of the iran nebula this was captured untracked with a cannon dslr and a samyang 135 lens uh I like the the star colors you know you have a lot of variety there they're nice and colorful I took a look at your raw data and uh you did capture uh the extended shape of the iran nebula and a bit more of the running man but uh looking at that raw data I can see why you went with this sort of darker edit because in the raw data there's a lot of walking noise uh where it's like the noise turns into these sort of lines um so one way to break up that walking noise uh would be if you this is just a better look at it if you take data over multiple nights and you have a slightly different rotation uh each night uh that will help break it up uh that pattern uh the other thing that that helps are dark good dark frames but that's sometimes hard with uh with a dslr so nice job with uh with processing uh some difficult uh untracked data okay jared sent in a photo of the elephant trunk nebula uh which is one of the more uh beautiful nebulae in the sky in the constellation cpheus and uh this is very well done uh the composition I think is perfect looking at it the what what I saw was there's sort of this repeated pattern of here's the elephant trunk and then here's this dark nebula streamer which sort of has the same shape it's almost like it's casting a shadow uh and that gives it a really nice 3d effect with this composition uh my one suggestion uh since I see that you do use photoshop is to try the defringe tool it's under camera raw filter and it's uh right here under optics and I think uh uh just applying a little bit of this purple amount uh slider here's before and after and right near the uh elephant trunk here's uh before again I just noticed there was a lot of sort of uh purple fringing on these bright stars and I think that helps improve the look if you were if you're finding that it's messing with uh the overall color balance of what you're trying to do with the nebula you could always mask it so you can always just mask to just the stars on a separate layer and apply it just uh to that masked layer but I actually think that it looks pretty good just uh applied globally in this case okay jason took this photo of the Cygnus wall region of the north america nebula and jason wanted tips for getting a neater background using seral uh so let's just go over to seral and take a look at jason's raw data here here it is with just an auto stretch applied so there's linear and then I'm just going to turn on auto stretch and the first thing that I notice here is that there's a blue color cast to it so I'm going to go to image processing color calibration color calibration I'm going to make a selection over a dark part of the picture and click use current selection and then click background neutralization and apply close okay so that gets rid of the blue color cast now the overall image looks a little bit red so I want to do a background extraction but just to make sure we get the best background extraction I'm first just going to crop out the edges of the photo just make a selection right click crop go down to background extraction we can try this rbf uh method um but I'm going to turn up and do high smoothing because this doesn't look like there's much gradient here but we just want a little bit of background extraction so I'm going to turn the smoothing way up and just use a few uh points okay I just put in about six points I'm going to click compute background okay so overall uh that actually is better I know that now we have this green color cast on the right side but we got a lot more contrast everywhere except the right side so I'm going to go ahead and apply that and then just run remove green noise okay and I think that is a great starting place so hopefully that helps uh Jason get you to a good starting place with serial we just did three processes background neutralization background extraction and then remove green noise and we got that okay Jason sent in a very nice image of the witch head nebula here uh this was processed in pics insight which is why I opened it here in pics insight uh Jason asked about sharpening in post and how much and when and and uh whether it's a good idea I think it's perfectly fine to use sharpening in post production I'm guessing you did here um it looks plenty sharp I'm if you're saying that you don't think this is sharp enough that it's too soft I disagree I mean the witch head nebula is this sort of cloudy cloud cloudy cloud a you know it's a dust cloud basically out in space so it's not going to have like super sharpness uh just due to the nature of the object but to me this looks plenty uh sharp enough um the only thing I'm seeing here is there's a little bit of color noise in the uh shadow areas it looks like green color noise so let me just try a little bit of scnr green on it just to see what happens I'm just doing this at 50 on the jpeg so I don't know if you can see that in the video but I think it did help a little bit here's before and after um a lot of times the the dark green noise is very subtle um but uh I did see a little bit in your image but other than that I think this is uh perfect I like sort of the lower saturation of the star field and really drawing attention to the witch head nebula okay j shot the row of yuki cloud complex when it was low on the horizon with a sony camera and lens and the first thing I noticed here is there's a bit of a blue color class cast to the whole thing but then there's a very prominent green uh hot spot in the middle here uh so taking out the blue color cast is easy enough we can just uh run a color balance uh thing here and so here's before and after uh it did the image is a little bit dark when I do that but uh that's because I'm just working on the jpeg uh here um the green spot is going to be a lot harder to take out I attempted to take it out a little bit here that doesn't look perfect obviously um but I just wanted to show you with the blue color cast gone the green hot spot gone um I think there's more that you can do with with processing uh if if you've found that uh that green hot spot was from dew forming on your lens you might be able to find the subs where that's happening and remove them before stacking but I'm not sure if that was actually the issue here okay j sent in a single exposure milky way shot I really like this I've always been a big fan actually of single exposure milky way uh images and using silhouette here uh really works quite well uh to show the the graveyard uh and and the milky way uh the the one thing I noticed is uh there's a little bit of uh green bluish green in the mids and shadows so uh we could try just a slight color balance shift now I probably went a little bit overboard here and now the image has a bit of a magenta bias personally I sort of prefer a magenta bias and a green bias for the milky way but that's uh really um you know personal preference okay j cash money sent in an image of the arine constellation rising over some hills and this was shot with a canon t7i a kit lens and a tiffin double fog filter so I'm not sure why in the images you sent uh there's these little squares artifacts it looks just like something weird happened with maybe the data transfer of the images or something so I'll just ignore that um I uh you were you were asking me to address the light pollution in the image for me it's perfect that you left it just as is uh I know that you know in a lot of other critiques I've been talking about removing gradients but in a wide shot like this where you're also seeing the horizon you need to leave it in that's my opinion at least because otherwise it will look very unnatural to try to remove that and then add the horizon back it never looks good there's always going to be some glow uh as we reach the horizon in a wide field shot like this and so this is is a perfectly nice uh amount of glow from light pollution and then I also like how you used the uh the double fog filter here to bring out the stars in the constellation I think this is uh a perfect uh use of the kit lens and uh to to shoot constellations and then using that filter really makes the constellations pop okay Jeff sent in an image of the cave nebula taken with a sky watcher spree 120 and the zwo asi 2600 mc camera and this is 12 hours of integration and processed with pics insight uh I think this looks really great jeff uh we have really nice uh details here if we zoom in a little bit you can see all kinds of nice details in the dark nebulae and in this little herbig harrow object over here and in the reflection nebulae um my only uh issue is the flow of the image definitely leaves me to this reflection nebula right here but to my eye that reflection nebulae is the wrong color it looks a little bit too purple uh I'm not sure how this was color calibrated maybe that is correct but just to my eye a reflection blue reflection nebulae should look a little bit more pure blue um so if again I don't know how it was color calibrated maybe you did do all the right things but uh just check that out and see if see if that's the right uh color for the nebula okay jeff sent in an image of the Pleiades and the surrounding dust this was taken with a stock cannon dslr and a red cat 51 on a star adventurer from a portal to sky and this is four hours of integration so I have two suggestions one is I think you could use a little bit more saturation especially in the blues I'm just doing this on the jpeg but just to give you an idea here we go and um my other suggestion is to add more contrast so especially uh in the making it darker uh so something like this just bringing down the sky background level um you might still also have a little bit of a gradient left here where this top half uh is a little too bright um so maybe also work on background extraction to get more contrast up in here okay jeremy sent in a very nice image of m 33 this is the triangulum galaxy and this was captured with a sony mirrorless camera attached to an sv bony 70 millimeter refractor on a star adventurer gti the galaxy looks very nice here we can zoom in my one suggestion is to ease off on the contrast uh so the sky is very dark here well the black level is not too bad but then the it's stretched very aggressively where all the stars are basically white and quite uh bloated so i would just ease off on stretching um and with a little bit lower contrast and with a more subtle star field our eye will be drawn even more to the galaxy okay jim not carry sent in an image of the andromeda galaxy this was taken with a modded canon t three i are looking on 135 f2 lens and on a sky watcher star adventurer and i love seeing andromeda with such uh detail but then i also a massive star field uh this looks really good shows that that uh lens is is good for even the large uh galaxies my only critique is and it's just a minor tweak is to the colors of the galaxy um the outer halo looks a little too green so here's just a neutralized halo it's just a very subtle change to the green curve and then the inner part of the galaxy i think looks a little bit too uh magenta so here i just added a little bit of green to the inner part so here's before those changes and there's after so very subtle tweaks to the color okay joe akim had captured the iran running man harse head and flame or also called the ryan belt and sword and this was done with a nikon d 5000 a nikon 135 lens at f2.8 and this is an astounding 5 730 lights at 1.3 seconds each taken over four nights and stacked in 11 batches using seral which i have open here and the 11 stacks were stacked again to get the final result so joe akim asked if this is the best way to go about this because they'd heard that it might be better to actually use serillek so that you could stack all 5700 lights in one big batch so technically yes you've heard correctly that that is technically better but practically most computers may not be happy about stacking that many subs at once so you might be better off doing exactly how you did it because stacking them all at once you might just go through the whole process and in the end get a memory error after like 24 hours so i think the way you did it makes a lot of sense and the result is very nice you brought out a lot more detail than is typical with untracked astrophotography we can zoom in here so you can clearly see the horse head and flame and there's a lot of detail here in the aryan and running man my one suggestion is there's a little the blues are tended towards green not everywhere but just like in the nebulae so anyways if you just try remove green noise that should fix that pretty well i mean i think that did a really nice job uh just getting rid of that green noise here was before adapter here's before and after okay juao sent a photo of andromeda this was taken with a without tracking using a canon 850d and a canon 75 to 300 kit lens under a portal seven sky this was processed using dss serial and photoshop and i think this looks very impressive for portal seven and using that lens i'm uh surprised by how much detail you were able to get untracked in these outer arms uh my critique is that you mentioned using camera raw filter for noise reduction and uh on the galaxy before adding back the stars to my eye you went too far with the smoothing with the with the noise reduction slider just to open that up and show you what i mean here under detail i find you can use this color noise reduction as much as you want but you have to be very careful with this middle slider the noise reduction slider um because it's it very quickly can blur out detail okay john sent in an image of the rosette nebula this was taken with a sky watcher is spree 120 a zwo camera and an l extreme filter from a portal for sky john processed this in pics insight and used the four axe palette uh so some very nice details here we can zoom in on them you can see uh and i think you framed the rosette uh pretty well um i wonder if a 90 degree rotation if you could have no because then you wouldn't have gotten this outer part so i think this is a good uh rotation for your system um this is sort of like an orange and purple uh palette uh it's not always my favorite but i think for this object it works pretty well um i'm not sure how others feel but for me it's like i don't have a favorite palette necessarily i feel like every object uh something can work well or something can work not so well for it and and i've seen this kind of uh look with other things and i think it doesn't work but for the rosette it does it really does give a nice feeling of like i think the rosette is sort of a tube shape and you can sort of feel yourself going into it this way okay john captured the monkey head nebula with a sky watcher quattro 200p uh q h y 183 c from a portal three sky uh so this looks like excellent data the stars look perfect uh you must have really dialed in that newtonian uh john used syril and gimp for processing and was looking for recommendations about balancing the colors and bringing out the dark uh nebulae along the edges so i think uh part of that is the balance of the star field and the nebula and i think in processing you've uh have perfect stars but they are stretched pretty aggressively so they're mostly white um and just stretched very hard uh like almost clipping um so i think in this new version of syril 1.2 definitely try out the star uh recomposition process in here in uh the star processing menu you do have to remove the stars uh and make a starless image and then have a star's only image but then you can do a lot of balancing and i think that will really help make uh the nebula pop if the if the stars are a little bit less prominent okay john captured the pleiades with a canon 7d and apertura six inch newtonian and no calibration frames this was 90 minutes stacked with a step and processed in pics insight so the details are really nice here especially in the pleiades um this is stretched fairly aggressively for 90 minutes of data which of course is great for seeing all of that detail that you've captured but there is a fair amount of noise and unevenness in the background uh you said no calibration frames so i'm guessing some of this unevenness in the background could be tamed with flats uh but then another thing to try is a combination maybe of automatic and dynamic background extraction followed by photometric color calibration all of these processes while the data is still linear will really hopefully even out your sky background and so that you can uh add a little bit more contrast make the background a bit darker but also make it flatter okay jonathan uh also shot the pleiades this one is a wider shot obviously and this was shot with a rokinon 135 stop down to f 2.8 and with an asi 294 mc camera and on a star adventure gti processed with deep sky stacker pics insight and photoshop and issues that jonathan would like me to address are the dust detail and the stars having hollow cores uh so you've definitely brought out a lot of dust detail but then i think at some point you added too much contrast to the sky so the sky looks almost clipped like jet black uh and so the colors are good the dust detail is good but just by adding that much contrast it doesn't quite work uh with the dust so make make the sky a little bit more gray and the dust shall should fit in better with the whole picture uh and then let's see about this star core issue okay so what jonathan's talking about is look at these bright stars here and see how there's no core anymore it's somehow missing on a few of these so here's the issue i am not actually sure though what happened because i haven't seen this particular thing before where the star cores are missing of course one solution is if you noticed it a certain step in processing uh you could then not do that step or if you if you had to do that step if it was something critical um at least save a copy of where your image is right before that step so you could add the star cores back in uh something like that i i think is is the solution here um looking at this uh closer i'd say there's too much contrast in the sky background and also in your stars are stretched very aggressively um so um yeah i would i would i would stretch less uh overall um and then just use the starless technique to bring out the the dust and keep the stars as natural as possible okay yuha sent in an image of the orion and running man nebulae taken with an olympus camera ascar 180 astrolens and an omegan minitrack lx3 wind-up tracker and this is a mix of many 15 and 20 second lights uh that's a great little setup that you have there uh it's the kind of setup i'd like to feature on the youtube channel uh sometime for anyone that hasn't seen the minitrack it's fairly inexpensive you wind it up doesn't use any batteries no power to run it because it's just mechanical uh yuha mentioned struggling with blue and brown noise around this area so the brown probably both but the brown especially is actually dust out there around the orion nebulae if you look at a very deep picture deep integration of the orion nebulae you'll see that it's filled with this brown dust um so knowing that you could try to bring it out but probably with this short in integration it's not gonna come out that well so i think what you did of just uh taming it is the right call i would darken the background even more probably um that's really the choice you have with orion is try to bring it out or darken the sky and if you try to bring it out you you need enough integration so that doesn't just become super noisy okay joules sent in an image of the lagoon and triffid nebulae in the core of the milky way this was taken with a red cat 51 telescope a stock cannon 600d and a sky watcher star adventurer tracker and this was bordle six 106 lights at one minute each and was processed with star net and photoshop uh joules you have some really nice details here in the lagoon and triffid if we zoom in you can see there's a lot of cool details in the cores of each and uh personally for this scene this feels a little bit dark since this is in the core of the milky way we know that there's tons and tons of stars here in the background um but this edit of the data almost feels like there isn't so um i prefer a brighter edit of this uh scene so just to show you what i mean here's letting the star fields uh be sort of a presence a little bit more um of course of course in yours you could say the the lagoon and triffid pop out more because the rest of it is a lot darker but i think that they sort of speak for themselves uh and you could always sort of zoom in a little bit just to make it them even more present in the shot i also think by making it this dark you're losing out on some of the things that you captured in the background so the lagoon actually has this sort of bridge and then connects to this other nebula up here that's sort of interesting so uh yeah i would just play around try try maybe a brighter a brighter edit julian sent in an older image of his this is of the invirometer galaxy which was one of his first successful astrophotos and this was taken with a stock cannon 550d a cannon 75 to 300 millimeter zoom lens and was taken on a sky tracker pro this is 124 75 second photos and stacked with deep sky stacker and edited in photoshop so the colors are very good uh you have the warm core and the the bluish outer arms uh it looks like you used a fair amount of noise reduction and sharpening um and i think you have to be careful with that because when you zoom in it it looks uh a little bit over sharpened to my eye uh you know these things always look nice zoomed out so it is sort of a trade-off maybe you just want to go for the more nice zoomed out appearance but for a sharp eye when you zoom in it uh you start getting a little bit of weirdness where noise turns into something that looks like a signal sometimes but it it actually isn't um or you know there there is signal there but then it also is like over smoothed noise sometimes uh julian had a couple questions he hoped that i could answer one is about do heaters and he said that even with two do heater bands he was still getting due on his lens i'm not sure what's going on there uh usually if you have just one do heater uh in the right place you shouldn't even with very high humidity you shouldn't get due so what i would suggest is however these do heaters uh work just turn them on inside your house and hold them and make sure that they're actually getting warm uh you know a do heater band doesn't need to get super hot in order to work but it you should be able to feel that warmth after a few minutes um so it sounds like something isn't working right the second question is about filters like the l enhance the l pro and whether those can somehow block uh high humidity or uh thin clouds or things like that and no those filters will still be affected by those things just as much as unfiltered what those do is they block light pollution mostly uh until you get higher contrast on emission nebulae by blocking a lot of the uh light pollution sources okay uh urug sent an image of the ro of yuki cloud complex taken with a canon zoom lens a zwo asi 2600 mc and an original sky watcher star adventurer tracker this was from a portal to sky at high elevation so the data quality and the colors uh and the rendering uh here all look very good my one issue is with the star field it just feels very uh aggressive uh for for this scene if i zoom in it's like all the little stars have been clipped almost and then just super bright in how you uh stretched um almost like a maximum filter was applied to them it might just be the stretch or it might be something that went would happen with topaz denoise uh applying a lot of sharpening to the image and then thinking all these little stars needed to be extra sharp uh and it just makes it feel a little bit busier uh than than it should be i think um so my preference is to use a starless technique so you use something like star net uh and remove the stars then you can stretch the nebula however you want add them back in uh and it helps sort of control a busy star field like this okay justin sent in this photo of uh the ryan belt and sword with the ryan nebula and running man quite prominent this was taken with a nikon dslr and zoom lens on a star adventure and processed with astro pixel processor and photoshop and justin mentioned uh star halos and uh what to do about them i did look at uh your stars they're a little bit trailed left to right um and then up here all the talk looks quite good i think that star halo is pretty unobtrusive with these stars it looks like some kind of processing was done and it definitely i think uh doesn't look good uh because you've sort of taken a hole out of the halo but then left the ring um so if these looked like this i would have just left them alone um i think that would look good because it's the natural color of the star and so i don't really see the the point in uh getting rid of it and at this point i don't know how i would really fix this because there's just too much going on but typically if you have a really obtrusive star halo in photoshop what you can do is basically make a selection around it so i'm just holding down shift and alt or shift an option with uh with mac and then uh feather that selection so we've got to select modify feather and then we can just adjust that part of the picture so see if i wanted to sort of desaturate that halo i could or i could saturate it or i could change its color that kind of thing so it's possible to work with halos in photoshop um you can darken them somewhat but it it's a very subtle thing um and for the most part i would just avoid doing it uh at all costs and in this case i would probably have just left in their natural halos okay kareem sent in an image taken with the stelina telescope from vayonis and this was processed in pics insight and this is 145 lights at 20 seconds each uh with a new moon and from a portal five sky so i'm only seeing the jpeg here but i think the the background is is a bit dark i would i would have uh maybe gone with a slightly brighter background if i look at uh the info panel here in photoshop uh the green channel seems to be clipped to zero over most of the background and the blue channel is clipped to zero for most of it too um it also just crop a little bit there's a little bit of an artifact here at the top you can crop away and then we can center the lagoon a bit more um and other than that i think this looks quite good i think you got a lot of nice details here in the in the lagoon a lot of times this area gets blown out but it looks really nice in your image okay carnax sent in an image of the milky way this was captured with a canon 90d and a 10 millimeter efs lens on a star adventurer tracker from a portal two site and carnax stacked with sequader and processed in photoshop so i think this looks good there's a bit of haze and light pollution maybe down here maybe some air glow um my only suggestion is the sky looks a little bit blue uh biased um but some people um do that for effect uh so you know you you might be doing that intentionally uh just because it looks nice but if you wanted to correct that uh it would be pretty easy you could just color balance in the shadows and add a little bit of uh yellow but of course that's affecting the air glow down here so then maybe i'd want to uh draw an gradient for that something like that is a corrected sky uh whether that looks better or worse i think it probably looks worse but just to give you an idea of a more neutral sky and what that would look like but other than that i can't really think of anything that uh i would change here i like the little element of the vignetted branch uh on the bright sky uh reflecting the milky way okay ken took an image of thur's helmet from a portal nine sky with an asi 533 mc camera it was wondering why the image came out looking red and how to fix it in uh pics insight so i think the red is just the natural noise uh from you know a light polluted sky and only taking an hour's worth of photo uh because if we look at thur's helmet here that's a fairly natural color but there is just a lot of red noise um so an easy simple way to reduce any color in pics insight is just open up your curves transformation tool this default curve is all the colors but we can just pick the red curve here uh so we can see what we're doing we can click the circle which is going to give us a real-time preview and then i can just make a very uh subtle change to the red curve so basically what you want to do is the the red noise is down here i'm going to minimize that but i don't want the color in thur's helmet to change so i'm going to put another point right here and i'm just looking at what it looks like here compared to the original image and i think that looks good so i'll apply it and here's before and after so just taking out some of that red noise you can zoom in here's before and after um i'd probably also darken the background a little bit on this one so i'm just going to go back to this rgb k mode and let's do a darker background just like that so curves is always uh probably the last tool that i'm using uh to finish a a photo you're gonna want to do any kind of final sort of color adjustment sometimes and also setting your black level where you want it okay kary sent in this image of the rosette nebula this was kary's first image in nine years uh for you know a nine-year hiatus from astrophotography and as may be expected after a long break uh there were some issues in capturing it uh there was an unexpected windows update that cut the session short and some other problems i did want to show uh if we look at this the stars look fairly round but if we look at kary's original data zoom in the stars are pretty trailed so i just wanted to congratulate kary on on being able to fix star trailing in the image quite successfully and also bring out the the Hubble palette look here um i wouldn't have known just looking at this how trailed those stars were to begin with i think the processing on the nebulae um a little bit too much noise reduction for my taste because i think your details are a bit sharper here in the original data than where we ended up but other than that a nice very nice job and and congrats on coming back to the hobby after a long after a long break okay here is uh kevin who shared an image of the jellyfish nebula this was taken from a portal nine sky using an l okay kevin shared an image of the jelly fish nebula this was taken from a portal nine site using an l ultimate filter an asi 533 mc and a red cat 51 and kevin mentioned wanting to work on reducing the halos from uh the l ultimate filter and adding autofocus to his red cat telescope uh so i'm not sure how to go about reducing them in pics insight uh i'll just show how i do it in photoshop just in case this is helpful so you first make a uh big selection on the halo make it a bit bigger than the actual halo itself because then you're going to feather it by quite a bit i mean to feather it by 20 pixels and then i'm going to go to adjustments hues less saturation and i'm going to darken that halo desaturate a little bit you might find also that playing around with the uh hue uh helps okay and then i can bring back the star by just taking a brush and painting with a soft brush in black on the star and anywhere else that uh okay so uh here's the before and there's after so the halo isn't actually gone uh it's very hard to make it look natural if you really actually completely remove the halo but when you're zoomed out uh i think that does look better than before uh so something you can try if you have photoshop i'm not again i'm not exactly sure how to repeat those steps in uh pics insight creed sent this photo of the north america and pelican nebulae in cygnus uh this was made with a stock canon dslr canon 200 millimeter prime lens on a star adventurer and this is 71 lights at three minutes each over two nights from a portal for sky so i really like this crop and how it's vertical but you fit in the whole north america and pelican by having them slightly tilted like this it looks really nice my one note is i think this would look even better with a slightly more robust star field it looks like you have really nice star colors and the stars look nice and round so i would just like to see them a little bit more uh in the uh in the field now part of the reason you might have avoided making them more prominent is because you have a little bit of uh fringing a little bit of chromatic aberration but i've shown this a few times now uh there's a fix for that in photoshop with this uh camera raw filter under optics and so we can extend this into the orange a little bit more and uh get rid of some of that chromatic aberration and then you can see uh here's before and after and after you do that i think making the stars a lot more prominent would look really good uh well not a lot more prominent a bit more prominent i should say okay uh chris sent an image of andromeda taken with a sky watcher az gti a red cat 51 and an astro gear dot net modded canon t5i and this is 200 lights at two minutes each under a portal for sky and processed with zero and i think this looks very good very nice natural uh kind of processing chris mentioned uh maybe pushing the colors too hard and overcropping the image uh to me these colors look very nice i don't i don't see any issue with pushing them too hard i i think that it's the right amount of saturation for what you have and i don't think it's crossing any kind of line uh in terms of tastefulness uh in terms of the crop i i agree i think i'd probably prefer a little bit um wider the with a lens like this you know i think it'll look sharper if you actually have a wider field of view uh the last thing i'll note is uh this is sort of how andromeda actually appears to us in the sky most of the time is in this orientation it is uh common to rotate uh andromeda 180 degrees so it looks like that um for me i do sort of i don't know why but i i sort of prefer it that way uh too so uh just something to to toy with i'm not sure if it really matters to you uh chris but uh to me it just feels a little bit better that way for some reason okay kyle sent in an image of the whole veil supernova remnant which is also called the sigmus loop and this was taken with a stock cannon r5 a red cat 71 and an opt along l ultimate on a star adventurer tracker uh that's a very interesting combo of gear i haven't seen many people using the cannon r5 for astrophotography so uh it's good to see being used well looks like it's a fairly uh good sensor in terms of uh noise performance and also ha response i assume it's not uh modified kyle said that his processing was in pix insight and this was basically just color calibration curves and scnr and green i would suggest trying star net or star exterminator because it allows you to stretch the nebulosity further without worrying about the star field um and then you can combine the star field back on so like this would be perfect if you just took this image with the stars as they are but then took out the starless image and pushed it further to bring out more of this uh nebulosity and then just put them back together i think there is there's more in there uh to be brought out okay kairon uh shot the lagoon and trifid with a red cat 51 and asi 533 mc and processed with seral and something i've never heard of called real dash es r g an uh which apparently upscaled the image um so my only critiqued with this image is the star field it just feels a little bit uh too high contrast uh and the smallest uh stars are all sort of blown out and very sharp uh when the smallest stars in a big star field like this should appear a little bit dimmer um and a little bit fuzzier um but they've been brought up so much to be so sharp and i mean it's definitely a look it looks sort of cool but to for my taste i'd prefer a slightly more natural star rendering okay larkin captured the elephant trunk nebula with a stock cannon dslr from a portal seven sky uh and this is a very challenging object from uh with a stock dslr and then because it's a it's a large dim emission nebula uh and then extra hard because from a light polluted sky with no filter so the issues um are probably just because you were really fighting against the data here with with a stock camera on that much light pollution uh so the stars look a little bit soft there's a lot of noise reduction um in general what i would suggest is it's always better i think to just accept where your data is and don't try to push it too hard into something that it's not and and maybe collect more data when you have a challenging object like this but congrats for for going after it and and and pulling some some detail out i mean i think this right side where you have the more color is is more successful than the the trunk itself this this looks pretty interesting over here so uh good job keep at it i i think uh collect uh more data on this object and you and it'll be easier to process uh after that okay large astronomy sent in ngc 7822 this was captured with narrowband filters and an asi 294 mm pro and large astronomy asked about binning on that camera um i've never used that camera so but i sort of know about how it works um i think if i were to use it i would be using it in the native uh mode sort of how the sensors was designed to be used which is a bin too and then i would just dither and drizzle rather than the high resolution mode uh with the very small pixels because to me that you know there wouldn't be that much benefit and then the file sizes are four times as large at least the way i'm thinking about it i might be wrong uh because i i've never used the camera and i haven't done any tests but anyways when it comes to processing this looks really cool i like the this teal blue that you've brought out it looks really really nice i i've rarely seen quite that uh intensity of teal it looks it looks really good um the star treatment i'm not a huge fan of it just it looks over sharpened uh to my taste um and then a lot of the smaller medium sized stars got shrunk i think a little bit too much so um i prefer a slightly fuzzier profile on the stars uh than than this uh but the the nebula is is really really nice looking um so if you could improve your star treatment i think uh that would push this image over the top okay leon is a 14 year old astrophotographer from germany who uses a stock canon 600d canon 55 to 250 zoom lens and an iopter on skyguider pro this is leon's image of andromeda that is six hours of exposure from a portal for sky and leon mentioned this lens is known as not being good for astrophotography but he thinks the result is good for this gear i totally agree leon this is very very good for that gear um you've brought out the colors and the details and andromeda very nicely i can zoom in on it and it still looks great and your stars look nice and sharp and colorful uh and the only thing i found a little bit odd is you got such rich colors and andromeda that i'd expect a little bit of blue in m 110 here but it's just sort of pure white it almost looks like you uh didn't saturate that or maybe that's how it came out but uh that was the only thing i thought looked a little strange is how much color is in the stars and andromeda but just nothing in m 110 okay leon sent in this wide field shot of the elephant trunk and flying bat and leon said he struggled to control the star field uh you know it's not it's yeah it's a little bit bright and messy but i i'd prefer that actually to over controlled an over controlled star field at least you have some very nice star colors and it feels somewhat natural here uh and it's it's it is quite beautiful and how diverse it is to like to see how the star field looks uh down here in this corner versus where the dark nebulae streams are it's very interesting but to control a star field like this what i would suggest is star net and seral and specifically how they work together in the new seral 1.2 beta uh there i have videos on this and it will really help you uh balance your star field and your nebulosity okay linus is a 15 year old astrophotographer from germany who sent in a photo of the north america nebula taken with a nikon d 300 nikon 70 to 300 zoom lens and a sky watcher star adventurer and linus mentioned he'll be getting a better lens for christmas uh which is a 180 millimeter prime lens so that's already happened that'll be nice i hope it's linus is putting it to good use uh linus noticed his zoom slides during capture and wondered if there's a way to prevent that uh yes uh just gets an electrical tape and tape it down uh tape the put the electrical tape right on the barrel and the lens won't be able to move after you do that but the electrical tape is also really easy to take off when you're done linus said all of his images have come out sort of blurry and is wondering if i can pinpoint the reason okay let's take a look we'll zoom in uh so i think your focus is fine but you have star trailing um and let's look at it and it is in the same direction across the whole frame here it's left to right so what that usually indicates is polar alignment error uh so there's two ways you could go about sort of fixing that one is work on polar alignment and make it better uh you know that takes some practice another thing you can try is just using shorter exposures so here you're using 60 seconds try 30 seconds uh if you go down to 30 seconds you might want to bump up the iso uh and that's it hopefully with shorter pictures your stars won't be trailed and then you won't have that sort of blur uh from the polar alignment error okay l-shep astrophotography sent in this photo of the trifid nebula taken with a 10 inch newtonian qhy 268m and ad leah lRGB filters and let's zoom in on these details here because this is pretty amazing so you rarely you very rarely see this kind of detail in the trifid uh and not just detail but also color variety in the dark nebula here and you know i think the way that l-shep astrophotography did it is by just you know uh really long uh kind of integration and exposures that that really were able to break up uh this this level quite a bit uh so you could see all this interesting variation in the dark nebulae uh very nice um let's look at the whole thing again there might be still just a little bit of a gradient uh where the left side is a little brighter than the right very minor though uh overall i think this is this is a really excellent shot and and uh definitely a keeper the the trifid i'm just amazed at this this dark dust in the trifid that looks so cool i've never seen it quite like that and it's uh to treat to see it like that okay lucas sent in a photo of the heart nebula created with a canon 550d canon 75 to 300 zoom and a star adventurer this was taken from a portal for sky and it's 247 lights at f 7.1 focal ratio it was processed with serial and photoshop and lucas asked if the background being read like this indicates actual ha admission ha admission or just noise um so it's probably a mix of both but mostly ha admission i know that this area uh from doing deep integrations with a mono camera is just full of ha emission it just keeps going everywhere uh so you know it's it's hard to process this area because you're right that like it's it's dimly red but then that doesn't look that great because it doesn't then the heart nebula doesn't stand out as much and it sort of just looks wrong um so aesthetically aesthetically i'd probably still neutralize the background a bit more than you did here uh even if it isn't right in terms of what's actually there i just think it looks better to to darken the sky okay maxum captured the andromeda galaxy with a modified canon 40d a sigma lens and a homemade mount and maxum mentioned having an issue with the edge of m 31 where it looks torn off so let's take a look so i'm not sure exactly what you mean maxum by that but uh maybe it has to do with how dark you made the sky um because the sky is almost clipped to black uh so maybe that's what you're talking about not sure um other than that dark background my only other sort of critique is the starfield is so saturated that it's distracting from the the galaxy uh and just looks a little bit uh artificial so i would leave the stars not a little bit more natural not not this colorful okay malte sent in this photo of the constellation cassiopeia uh created with a canon m 100 camera and a canon 70 to 200 f 4 lens shot at 70 millimeter f 4.5 and tracked with a sky watcher eq 3-2 mount and this was two and a quarter hours from a portal for sky and malta uh processed with zero graxpert star net and gimp and described a few workarounds with uh layers to get the star halos and backgrounds to look right but described those workarounds as cheap tricks so uh i mean it looks perfect i really can't uh fault your processing and all sometimes these workarounds that we do yes they don't feel they feel like we're maybe being a little bit too heavy-handed in processing but if you're fixing artifacts that are mainly sort of you know are the gears issue and not the trying to add anything that's not there in the sky you're really just fixing an artifact from from your gear i think it's perfectly fine um so the only way to not do these sort of cheap tricks is to just buy very expensive gear like a top tier refractor uh to get better results but you know that's not always practical and with a camera lens what you did to fix these problems seems smart to me um and where you ended up with the stars and the halos i think looks very good i don't really see anything that stands out as unnatural looking or uh overly processed so very well done you know this is the kind of image that i i really love a large rich star field but one where you can still really make out the cancellation and even some deep sky objects in there as well okay marcel captured the crescent and the soap bubble very successfully i'd say and this is with the asi 294 mc the opt along ellen hance and a sky watcher 200p newtonian i really like the framing here with like the crescent uh sort of looking like it's trying to escape off that side um and the soap bubble is right down here uh the colors look really good and natural uh my critique uh is i think the background extraction could have been done just a little bit better maybe uh this area looks like a little bit too bright but that might be o3 emission i'm not i'm not sure uh i know that the o3 emission is sort of everywhere in this uh scene so maybe never mind maybe that maybe that's right um you have some really excellent details here and the crescent i'll just zoom in on them for people to see and your your star shapes look quite good too so very well done marcel okay maryan maryan captured the heart and soul nebula with a stock cannon xsi dslr a samyang 135 f2 lens and a sky watcher star adventurer from a portal for sky so the heart and soul are definitely going to be difficult with a stock camera and no filters you know even from a dark sky with a fast lens like you used when you use an an older dslr that hasn't been modified it's going to be really hard to to bring those out let's just take a quick look at the data you shared in pic's insight okay so here is the stack with just a automatic background extraction applied and uh it looks like the flats didn't quite work correctly because you still have a lot of vignetting and sort of a bright ring here i think you know that can be fairly common with uh camera lenses but it does make the data more difficult to process i'm sure so uh you might try uh shooting sky flats instead of uh however you did shoot the flats and that might help and then you you do have a fair amount of banding from uh the age of the dslr uh one thing that can help with this is there's an action set uh no sorry you're a pic's insight user so there's a script under utilities called canon banding reduction i think it only works on horizontal banding so you might have to turn your picture 90 degrees and then use it but you can you can try that out the last thing to try uh it's worth a shot is maybe bumping the iso up uh to 1600 and see if that helps with uh banding and noise on the camera mark took a photo of the pleiades star cluster with a nikon dslr and zoom lens on a sky watcher star adventurer tracker and this is 111 lights at 45 seconds each from a portal three sky mark said that he struggled to fix this magenta cast in processing using deep sky stacker and photoshop so i'll show you a relatively easy way to fix it in photoshop which is the color balance adjustment uh so you just go to adjustments pick this color balance and then you're just going to add green to the color balance to fix the color cast i'll turn this on now and so i added plus 12 green in the mid tones and plus 25 green in the shadows um now if i disable the layer mask one issue is when i did that globally you can see it added some uh it overdid the green up here uh so what i did was i messed around a little bit with the layer mask just sort of painting with a light touch until it looked right and it's still maybe not perfect but uh hopefully you get the idea of removing some of that magenta cast with just a color balance layer and a layer mask an even better way to remove that color cast from the beginning would be to uh use seral uh s i r i l before bringing the photo into photoshop and you can watch some of my start to finish videos for how to use seral and background extraction and things like that next we have marcus marcus sent this image of andromeda taken with l r gb and h a filters and an asi 1600 mm camera uh so i first read marcus's email sort of out of order and saw this was done in one night and then i was like how is that possible then i got to the back to the telescope and realized okay it's a celestron eight inch rossa at f2 so that makes a lot of sense the rossa is an amazing telescope for getting lots of signal in a short amount of time because of its very fast f2 focal ratio the only downside is uh the stars on the rossa can be a little bit funky uh so you can see the the halo is a little bit uneven um but the overall impression is very good uh and you know one of the the better m31s i've seen i really like the addition of the ha uh it really makes it uh quite nice uh my only could treat my only critique is the background uh doesn't look perfectly uh flat you can see there's some color shifts and some brightening of the corners especially in these upper corners so you have a little bit of uh a red uh so you could try to correct that you probably best to just get very good background extraction early in the process before stretching okay martin captured the cocoon nebula in sickness this was at 900 millimeters focal length at f11 on an eq1 mount with a clock drive and martin notes that the image is in focus but uh the blur is from a small uh resonance of frequency from the clock drive that is basically vibrating the camera a little bit causing it to be blurry so uh you're definitely uh doing astrophotography on a difficult mode here by marrying a f11 high focal length scope to to an older clock drive mount like that but i'm sure uh that's what you want to be doing and it's a great photo for that setup you've you've gotten some very nice details on a on a small object here and uh my only critique is in the processing uh i'm not sure why all the stars have this uh dark ring around them i'll try to zoom in and show where it's most obvious it's not actually all the stars it's all the larger stars have this dark ring like this it looks maybe like you uh made some kind of selection on the stars to dim them and then uh it also dimmed the sky background around them so if you could avoid that artifact somehow it would make the picture a little bit better okay here is marty marty sent in an image of the veil nebula taken with a red cat 51 and opt along el enhance filter and an asi 533 mc camera and this was taken from a major city sky marty said his struggle is making it really pop in processing and marty uses seral star net and gimp for processing so i'm not sure if i have a video where i've shown this exactly but what i recommend doing is using the extract ha and o3 script and seral make both the ha and o3 starless with star net and then stretch them separately uh and just a light stretch then combine them back together in pixel math and seral and then uh you're going to put the ha image into the red the o3 image into both the green and blue then you'll have your ho starless version you continue to stretch that you saturate that image until it really pops then go back to your data do a regular stack like a star's only image from your regular stacked image and then finally combine the two with star recomposition just the regular stars and the ho uh extracted starless version um and i know that was probably just talking through it like that was not did it make a whole lot of sense but i do plan to do a video on that process soon and i think it would it would help with an image like this one to make the nebula pop a little bit okay marvin uh sent in an image of the elephant trunk uh taken with a sky watcher 150 pds newtonian and a modified cannon 600d marvin said that he had a number of issues the night he took this so he was limited to fairly short exposures um and also wonders if he was out of focus and wondering if i could tell i mean just on first glance i don't think that's out of focus uh but let's zoom in hard to say still i mean maybe slightly but if so very minor not uh definitely not something i would have noticed unless you really asked me to to look um so in terms of processing i like a vertical composition for this better uh so we can just turn it 90 degrees clockwise and then i would probably crop the top a little bit and i would make it brighter um now of course when i make it brighter it's also going to brighten the star field which i think for this image looks okay but uh you might want to play around with star net so you can brighten the nebula and keep the star field a little bit more subdued but i think a little bit more uh contrast and brightness will will help with this image okay madel golf sent an image of the heart nebula sort of the heart of the heart and captured this with a sky watcher 150 newtonian an asi 294 mc in an opt along elix stream filter and for issues madel golf wonders if his stars should have more color and wondered how about how to properly process the stars so in my opinion for this scene no uh i don't think your stars need any more color uh because the focus of this scene is is your your nebula and so the stars need to be there but i don't think they really need any kind of particular saturation um let's let's look at how they look now so right now you basically just have almost white stars a few of them have a little bit of color tinting to them but i think they look quite good i wouldn't i wouldn't mess with uh the star treatment too much so my actual critique of this image has nothing to do with the stars uh my critique is that i think you added too much contrast so uh in different places so for instance over here this is clipped to black when it shouldn't be i don't think uh you know you want some of the dark nebula to appear almost black and it's fine i mean this looks fine over here but this looks odd to me over there i'm not sure you know it just feels like a big pack patch of black um and then there's other areas where the stretching just feels like it's been done too hard like in here you're just losing much contrast at all because uh the color just seems sort of to be a block uh and i mean it helps for us to really focus i guess on these dark nebula regions but it just looks a little bit odd and i would prefer a little bit more of a natural transition with some of these colors okay matt took a photo of the heart nebula with a canon dslr a canon 200 millimeter f2.8l prime lens and a clip-in uhc filter and matt used star net and photoshopped for processing and wonders how to get rid of the chromatic aberration that were left over from star net i actually don't think that the chromatic aberration was left over from star net i have this lens and it just has chromatic aberration so it would be there whether you use star net or not but the way to get rid of it is open up camera raw filter extend the purple hue into the orange apply it and here's before and there's after before after and typically you'd want to do that just on the stars and not on the nebula that works especially well if you just separate out the stars apply the chromatic aberration reduction the de-fringing and then add the stars back in okay Matthew took a 10 hour integration of a dark nebula called barnard 3 from a portal 6 sky and knows the best thing would be to get to a darker sky but that's not an option so is wondering how to bring out the dark nebula without also bringing out the noise and this is currently processed with pics insight star net and photoshop so i looked through your processing steps Matthew and you're doing everything that i would do so i'm not sure if i have a satisfying answer here i guess my only suggestion is if you're really into dark nebulae and you have a good view to the south it might be easier to capture some of the ones in the milky way core area because then the sky background will be milky way so the dark nebula is going to really stand out against all those stars it's sort of a different kind of dark nebula than this if you really want to do this style of dark nebula i guess the other suggestion i have is just wait until it gets as high in the sky as possible and then put in as many hours as possible so you did 10 hours but it might take 30 hours to get to an snr that's acceptable from portal 6 so i know that sounds sort of crazy but i know people have done it with with pretty good results so this this is actually a really good start already let's just see if we if we stretch this a little bit more what happens yeah i mean i can see what you mean with the noise this looks like a difficult object so keep it up i don't i'm sorry if that wasn't fully satisfied but i guess it's just what you'd expect just put in more time and and and hopefully that will work out in the end okay mathew took a photo of the central sygnus region with a modified cannon 600d a cannon nifty 50 lens 50 millimeter f1.8 and a sky watcher star adventurer tracker and mathew mixed a stack of normal exposures with the stack of exposures taken with an astronomic 12 nanometer ha filter and i would say this is very well done i'm impressed by how well the nifty 50 rendered the star field i see you stopped down to f3.2 for the rgb and f2.8 for the ha i'd say that's i'm surprised actually how well it did at those focal ratios i would have thought this was f4 or f5 uh based on this star field uh but it it worked quite well maybe you have a nice copy of that lens um let's zoom in so if i were to nitpick uh very close up the some of the small stars have a strange color sort of like a teal green when i think they should be either white or yellow uh that might just be the lens uh but maybe there's something you can do in color balancing the the star field on its own because the the rest of the uh scene looks very well color balanced so i wonder if it's just something to do with the stars and it might it might be the lens itself that might be some kind of green chromatic aberration or i don't know uh but it zoomed out i didn't notice that it's really only zoomed in that you can see that kind of thing okay mathias sent an image of andromeda this was taken with an ioptron skyguider tracker so any mirrorless camera and a zoom lens and mathias mentioned having trouble with the stars looking nice after star net and struggling with noise so i have a few suggestions one is to check out ciril s i r i l um even if you want to still use dss for stacking if you then bring your stack into ciril you can do a color calibration and background extraction that kind of thing it should make your data easier to work with and hopefully the colors will will work very well after that too as far as the noise goes um it's hard to say because it looks like you did a lot of noise reduction but i probably would have done less noise reduction than you did it looks very sort of smooth um the my last suggestion is i would leave it a little bit more zoomed out this is a fairly aggressive crop and when you crop way in the noise is going to be more apparent because you're sort of zooming in on the noise so if you leave it a little bit more zoomed out the noise won't be as noticeable mathias sent in an image of the milky way taken with a nikon d610 and a samyang of 24 millimeter lens without tracking processing was done with photoshop and this is definitely a unique look at the milky way it took me a second to sort of understand what i was seeing this is uh signess at the bottom here uh so we're we're seeing up through signess and vulpecula and then a little bit of uh akila the top um so that's a it's a fun view of of the milky way uh and uh because usually shots are set or either on signess and seafious or or sagittarius so this is something a little bit different in how it was framed uh i would suggest checking out the camera raw filter in photoshop uh just for managing some of that magenta fringing on the stars uh it'll just clean it up a little bit uh other than that i think this is is well done okay max sent in an image of the pleides taken with a stock canon 6d a william optics zenith star 61 and a star adventurer tracker done from a dark sky so this is well processed max uh very elegant i like the portrait orientation uh of course you know saturation is definitely a subjective thing but i would have preferred a little bit more saturation both in the star field and in the nebula so just to show you what that might look like there's a bit more saturation uh the way i did this is i just added a saturation adjustment so you can see it's pretty high plus 68 and then i copied the image you had there into the layer mask and darkened the sky background in this mask so that the saturation would only be hitting the nebula and the stars and not the sky and this is before and after so even though this seems like a big adjustment plus 68 i feel like the effect of it is actually fairly minor it doesn't it doesn't actually uh you can raise the saturation quite a bit in astrophotos and uh it only affects it to the eye just a little bit i think okay max seam captured the Cygnus wall with a vioness vespera telescope using the cova lens mode which makes a small mosaic image to help reduce walking noise and the issues of uh it being an alt as telescope and things like that so that's a very neat mode they've added to that smart telescope and max seam says he wanted to send this just to show how easy it is to get a good telescope with i mean a good picture with that telescope in a short amount of time this is just about 10 minutes without any post processing done to it so very nice max seam i like the bright yellow star right there is an anchor point it looks very good and i agree that this technology is really amazing these electronically assisted telescopes are really opening the hobby up to a lot more people by by making it easier to jump in okay max a million is a 16 year old astrophotographer who captured this portrait of the ryan constellation with a canon add a canon 50 millimeter f 1.4 lens and an astronomic cls ccd filter and a sky watcher star adventurer tracker this is about three and a half hours from a portal to sky and it was processed with serial star net photoshop and lightroom and max a million astrophotographers are too saturated so overall i would say no uh but it's a very busy field and there's a lot going on and then there's a few places where i think the saturation level plus how you stretched it is hurting you barnards loop feels very like filled in and like not quite how it should um it should be more varied in brightness and color contrasts while it just feels like it's all the same red here uh but there's you know i think that that's actually you can sort of see it in the horse head area too and in the angel fish nebula it's really the reds that you're having trouble with the the variations in colors in some of the other colors looks perfectly fine so something went wrong with the reds but you did a great job of bringing out all of the dust and interesting stuff in this region and i'm sure this looks nice zoomed in yes it very much does the star field is really nice and colorful and you can see all these interesting little details for managing the star field with the background uh check out the new version of seral which i've been recommending and the star recomposition process uh i guess the last thing is uh i like the framing uh but i i wish uh there's we just got a little bit of the chin of the witch head it's sort of uh it's sort of just makes me want more there so i don't know if it'd be better to crop that out but i think then if you cropped it you'd be too close in on rigel so it's probably uh good as is there okay mika sent in an image of the heart nebula which is uh this image is in narrow band plus rgb and the image processing was done in pix insight and mika was going for a natural look uh with using all the filters and i think you did a good job of a pretty natural look here uh if you think of the heart nebula as being in natural color it should be fairly red mostly dominated by the hydrogen but then you have a little bit here in the center where the hydrogen mixes with the o3 signal and you get a slightly you know different uh kind of red um i have a few aesthetic kind of suggestions here and i'm just doing these in photoshop just for convenience but these are just more visual suggestions so you can accomplish this same kind of thing using the tools in pix insight so my first suggestion is just to back off the red vibrancy just a little bit so here's before and after and to me that just looks a little bit more finished um and then the the second thing uh after the red um is just to make the image overall a little bit less bright uh both the sky background and the bit tones uh so here's before and after um and it just feels a little bit more balanced that way to me so these are just pretty minor things uh but to me then it feels a little bit more finished many sent in an image of the elephant trunk nebula taken with a samyang 135 lens and a modded cannon add with an l enhanced filter and tracked with the star adventurer gti i think this looks very nice uh many i like the framing here the sort of wide uh screen look with the elephant trunk in the middle and the samyang 135 is definitely uh a powerhouse in terms of a big star field like this many asked about star color and said it was very difficult to get any blue stars to actually appear blue and yes the reason for that is the l enhanced filter is an emission nebula filter so it blocks most of the blue star light instead of just you know passing it it's it's purposefully trying to block that out it the only blue it really passes a sort of a teal blue it's our or a teal green actually that's the o3 emission um so blue stars will mostly turn white yellow stars will turn either white or red and the only thing to do if you really want natural star color is take the filter out and take another set of unfiltered data just for the stars uh that data set doesn't have to be as long as your l enhanced stack so if you you know did three hours with the l enhance maybe you could just do one hour for the rgb stars and then you blend them the two together um and i think for this shot that would look really nice it would enhance it uh quite a bit my only suggestion uh with what you have here is just that the sky background is a bit uh noisy um i'm not sure best way to completely fix that but an easy way to at least fix the green noise would be using scnr uh green on this image and it at least takes out some of the green noise there's still a little bit of unevenness um that maybe um could be fixed a bit with uh gradient uh background extraction you know there there is also a lot of ha in this region that i'm seeing so some of that unevenness is accurate but then there's like a big blue spot down here there's a few other little things that uh maybe you just need more integration to to fix those two okay michael's taken a photo of the veil nebula with a stock canon dslr mounted on a ryan 120 millimeter f5 refractor i think that's the short tube 120 uh an eight times reducer fladdener and tracked with an ioptron skyguider pro that was auto guided and controlled with an asi air uh so that's a very big telescope for the skyguider pro i do wonder how you manage that how you got it all balanced and everything uh michael shot this from a portal seven sky and this is a very long integration it's 42 hours and 40 minutes and michael was wondering why he didn't see more of the diffuse nebulosity with such a long integration uh so i was wondering the same myself i did take a look at your uh stacked data and try editing it just to see if i could bring out any more nebulosity this is what i was able to do uh using uh seral i just did a background extraction and color calibration i took out the stars with star net i stretched the starless version with generalized hyperbolic stretch and seral which lets you get very specific about how you stretch an image and then i stretched the stars with an arc sine stretch and then brought those two together here in photoshop where i did a little bit of work so i'll just show you that quickly so there's the result of the starless image i darkened it a little bit i then brightened the nebula with a curves adjustment i added saturation to just the nebula with a layer mask here and then i screen blended the stars back on top so uh hopefully that gives you some idea of some processing techniques to try michael uh i think that the 42 hours did work for pulling out a lot of nebulosity even with a stock camera and it's just uh try trying out some different processing techniques will help you really bring all of that data out okay michael took this shot of the crescent to the tulip in sickness with a modded 60d cannon a cannon 200 millimeter lens and a sky watcher star adventurer tracker no filters were used uh and michael commented that he was hoping for more o3 emission but it came out very red so yeah that's going to be very common when you use a modified camera but no filter there's just some steps in processing you have to take to bring out the o3 emission because normally if you just process the data it's going to be dominated by the ha um so uh just because i was curious about how much i could bring out i i tried this here so there's your starless red channel i colored that red i then screen blended the green channel on top so that's your o3 i colored that blue and you can see it's still fairly weak compared to the red but with a little bit of selective color and curves you can make the blues stand out a bit more i then noticed there was like a little bit of a gradient down at the bottom so i darkened that i saturated it and now we're seeing the better balance of uh red and blue added the stars back on um there's some reason your data is a little bit soft a little bit uh blurred i'm not sure uh why exactly but it's still i think makes a pretty cool impression uh this is a little bit more of a fantasy look i guess that's often what i do with ho is get me get a little bit uh uh crazy looking like this um but i just wanted to show that it's definitely possible to really push that o3 emission that you have captured by going starless and then just really enhancing the green channel and coloring it however you want so i colored it fairly blue okay michael took this image of the iris nebula with an asi 174 mc cooled camera attached to an orion 200 millimeter newtonian on a sky watcher eq six mount processed with deep sky stacker and photoshop cs4 and i think this looks great you obviously uh have this mountain system uh you know newtonian telescope dialed in the stars look really nice and do the details uh my only suggestion is you may want to add one more plugin to your photoshop cs4 which is pasta levista green because i just see a little bit of green noise left around the shadows in around the iris nebula but that's really the only uh small fix i would make to this okay michael i'm not sure if i'm saying that right it could also be michael but i'll go with michael uh michael sent an image of orion's belt and sword and uh this was taken with a canon ad d s car fma 180 telescope and sky watcher star adventurer gti it was captured from a portal for sky and it was a total of one hour 40 minutes a few issues were mentioned one of them was that the stars in the upper right look stretched so let's take a look stars in the center look perfectly round uh i mean that doesn't look too bad to be uh i guess i can see a little bit of issue uh but it could be tilt it could just be that's the quality of the lens uh the ascar 180 lens um you know for a wide field shot like this you can't expect perfection in the corners so that might just be the best it can do one thing you could try i guess is you could attach someone else's camera and see if the same tilt is there uh in that same corner that kind of thing but you may just have to live with it uh michael also mentioned the bright blue halos on the belt stars those look again fairly normal to me uh i wouldn't uh worry too much about that um those are some of the brighter blue stars in the sky and they always sort of have that glowy halo look to them uh one thing i did notice which i thought was a little weird was the the sky around aryan and running man is like a lot darker than the rest of the picture um i'm not sure what happened there but i just put in a little fix just to show you what i meant so this is before and then after i just brightened up that part of the sky um it's still maybe a little bit darker right in close to the aryan nebula uh but this is just a quick curves fix on the jpeg okay mihalo sent in an image of the aryan and running man nebulae taken with a nikon dslr and a kit 70 to 300 zoom lens on a sky watcher star adventurer tracker and this was from a portal seven sky this is 245 lights at f 7.1 30 seconds each and it was processed with serial star net photoshop and topaz and mihalo asks how to avoid over processing data that is not very good uh good question probably the my first answer there is don't use topaz denoise on data that's not very good it's only going to exacerbate the problems uh any issue with noise or bad data quality it's is going to make worse um if we zoom in i'm sure i can see some yeah some weird topaz artifacts like this line right here in the aryan nebulae is really artificially sharp the stars look way too uh sharp and not uh natural looking uh but then other parts are are blurred so yeah i would just avoid using topaz denoise it's gonna always at first make your you know your image look much better especially zoomed out like this but then when you really look at it you're like oh that's not that's not right uh so it's it's it's putting a band-aid on some of the issues but then uh also causing its own issues so other than that uh great job congrats on the new gear that you mentioned which i'm sure you have by now and are enjoying okay mike sent in this wide image of the sickness loop this was with a nikon z5 a stock nikon z5 a red cat 51 and a sky watcher star adventurer and this was shot from portal three with about two hours of integration and mike described his process in pics insight then said that one of his issues when he combines the stars back with the starless image is it leaves gaps uh so let's take a look okay so yeah i can see how it looks like uh there's sort of these weird holes and it just looks sort of splotchy so what i would suggest is simplify what you're doing uh what you're doing now is you're making a starless and stars version and then you're processing both what i suggest is just stretch your data so that it looks good for the stars separate them at that point with star net two and then don't touch the stars version until you recombine them and when you recombine them just screen blend the stars back on and that's it uh and that's all you have to do you can mess around with the starless version however you want but don't process that stars only version ever just just add it back on at the end and hopefully with that kind of uh workflow you're not going to see any of these artifacts okay mickey sent in a photo of mars this was taken at 55 millimeter focal length with a camera lens and a canon dslr it looks great mickey the stars are in focus let's just zoom in a little bit and they look uh fairly sharp just a little bit trailed but not noticeable when you zoom back out they have nice color as does mars and um the next thing i guess to try with a photo like this one is to follow mars night by night using stellarium and find a night when it's going to be close to something interesting like a star cluster or the moon or deep sky object and see if you can get a sort of interesting conjunction between mars and and something else in your photo okay mickey sent in an image of the andromeda galaxy this was taken with a six inch newtonian and the nikon d 5300 no coma corrector and no calibration frames it was taken from a portal three sky and mickey got three hours of integration um so it looks good uh but you know there's some issues maybe that could be corrected with flats i also think that with uh this kind of framing where you can't really fit the whole galaxy into frame because of the focal length uh that what might look better is just to do a uh crop where you're really just focusing in on the details something like that uh just then it really feels like sort of like a spacewalk into the center of the galaxy uh and i think makes for a slightly more interesting photo and then uh because you don't have to deal with the the background sky you can do some fun things with processing too like you could really up the saturation if you wanted to or up the sharpening all kinds of interesting things when you're when you're filling the frame with the deep sky object so that's what i would play around with with this image micolage uh captured the andromeda galaxy with a canon 60 d and a zoom lens and micolage mentioned having issues with banding uh i can see that now that you've pointed it out uh and it's both vertical and horizontal banding uh so uh to avoid this in the first place one thing to do is make sure your flats and your bias frames and your darks and everything is the same iso as your light frames i've seen some people use like iso 100 for the flats you really don't want to do that uh especially with canon cameras so if if you shot every all your light frames at iso 800 let's say then shoot all your calibration frames that same iso i don't know if that was the issue here but it could be it could just also be that your canon 60 d is developing uh problems with the sensor um there is a action set called astronomy tools for photoshop that's about 30 bucks and it has both horizontal and vertical banding noise reduction so so you just click on them and run them and it's supposed to remove a lot of that uh banding from the photo so looking at it i think it did a great job with the vertical i still see one at least one big horizontal band here uh so maybe let's try running it again it got maybe a little better a little better so yeah you can try running those if you want to spend the money uh but it might be better just to upgrade the camera at some point uh oh one other thing you can try is different iso so sometimes banding shows up more at lower isos less at higher isos so you might try going up to iso 1600 and see if the banding is still there okay mind agaas is a 12 year old astrophotographer who captured this image of the andromeda galaxy untracked with a canon dslr and canon nifty 50 lens from portal three sky and mind agaas asked why the stars have purple rings around them that's called chromatic aberration and it's very common with many many camera lenses uh you can minimize it by either stopping down the lens so uh that it lets in less light but also sharpens up things like this but of course that's a trade-off because you're uh letting in less light with untracked that sort of is uh will make the galaxy dimmer of course uh with track test photography we can stop down the lens and just use a longer exposure time there's also a way to minimize this in photoshop so we go to filter camera raw filter and uh we use this defringe tool here's before and after i can also zoom in so look at that star right there there's before after and that defringe tool works uh pretty well i i have to say okay momo skitos took this photo untracked with a canon 60 omegan 72 millimeter refractor at 432 millimeter focal length so yeah let's say that again untracked at 432 millimeter focal length that's pretty uh aggressive and momo skitos took 1,860 light frames at one second each iso 12,800 from a portal four sky uh stacked and processed in serial uh so let's zoom in i'm surprised at how little star trailing you got at that focal length untracked but i guess the canon 6d does have pretty big uh pixels so maybe that did it um it's very impressive i think i think i'm not sure if going to iso 12,800 was necessary maybe try 6400 um i'm just not sure if the 60 can really go to that super high iso without limiting dynamic range a little bit too much um you asked how to improve the color of the nebulae without messing up the color of the background to me these look these colors look great i don't i don't know uh about changing them too much um you could make you know if you if you had some particular reason you wanted to change them you could you could just make a selection to mask and then use selective color to you know change the color of the nebulae in some way but these look like very natural colors to me with a stock camera the lagoon and triphid should appear this sort of like bubblegum pink uh because there's a lot of h beta and o3 components that are mixing with the h alpha to make that color um i did look at your data and i really couldn't do any better than you have here in processing it uh to bring all of this out uh the only thing that i maybe would have done differently is just cropped away some of the edge artifacts uh just because i find them a little bit distracting and i think the you know the main focus uh of the lagoon and triphid uh is enough and we don't necessarily need all that stuff around the edge but very nice job and very impressive definitely one of the most impressive untracked astrophotos i've seen uh in terms of uh using an actual telescope untracked that's pretty cool okay this is monti montia 15-year-old astrophotographer from australia sent in a nicely detailed image of the large mandolinic cloud this was shot with a canon 200d a sky watch or star adventurer tracker and are working on 135 f2 lens and it was shot from a portal for uh location so this looks very good uh monti said the only thing that was difficult was the tarantula nebula which is right here is so bright that uh it could be hard to process the galaxy without blowing that out and monti actually sent in his uh photoshop file here so you can see all the different adjustments that were made and uh this this one's pretty interesting that's an adjustment where he uh brightened you know the the large mandolinic cloud but didn't want to like also brighten some of the nebula regions so he he masked those out which is smart uh i don't know this area of the sky very well so i'm not sure if this is accurate but it looks like you have a light pollution gradient up here in the upper left because the sky is really quite neutral and dark down here and then seems to be too bright up here so uh if you didn't use background extraction on this i'd recommend it you can do it in searl or craxpert both are free and they help you remove the gradient out of your image before you stretch it but overall i think this is very impressive i i love seeing images from the southern hemisphere and you know the the tarantula nebula is so fascinating being this giant nebula region in another galaxy but that we can uh make out like this even with just a camera lens that's fascinating nandakumar rajesh sent an image of the milky way this is 33 photos stacked with sequadre and shot with a nicon d 5300 and kit lens and processed in lightroom and pexels or no no sorry pexels i think it's a social media platform but nandakumar wanted me to say that he has contributed over 400 images to pexels anyways obviously uh the struggle with milky way and light pollution is there's no good way to remove gradients when the whole sky is taken up by the milky way and the color of the light pollution and the milky way is often the same color so then they become intermingled but this is a great job with those challenges and i hope you get uh maybe you'll also try some deep sky uh from your location because with deep sky you can you know shoot closer to zenith where there might be less light pollution and might have a lot of luck that way okay natan sent in an image of andromeda untracked with a stock canadia solar and nifty 50 lens nice job bringing out the dust lanes within andromeda that looks really nice um some impressive detail for a small lens and natan asked if you should add bad data to a stack uh so good question and of course the answer is it depends what it what it depends on is what you consider bad data like a satellite going through a photo is no problem usually because as long as you use something like sigma clipping in stacking those pixels where the satellite photo bombed your photo are just going to get rejected so then the satellite trail won't make it into your final stacked image um but if you're talking about bad data like it's out of focus or clouded over or something like that then it will be better not to add that to uh the stack or because the resulting stacked photo will probably be worse if you add those kinds of bad frames okay nelson sent an image of the andromeda galaxy taken with a canon 60 and a canon 70 to 200 f4 lens on a sky watch or star adventurer gti and this is one of nelson's first attempts to use the tracker uh so it looks like nelson you have a little bit of polar alignment error uh just based on the trailing of the stars uh it's all in the same direction uh so keep practicing with polar alignment the key thing for me to get it was uh using those apps on your phone where it shows you where polaris is on a little uh reticule like the the same one that you'll see in the polar alignment scope and knowing that you just have to get polaris onto the same point in that circle so i usually just ignore the markings in the reticule and just look at the app and say okay polaris should be at three o'clock on the clock and then that's where i put it uh but if it helps you can also just with a gti just rotate the r a axis until that clock face is all lined up and then uh just follow uh where polaris should go based on the app uh to get correctly polar aligned okay nick sent in this image of jupiter this was taken with a celestron eight s e telescope and an s v boney 105 camera this is 20 pictures stacked with astro pixel processor so i didn't know that astro pixel processor does planetary uh registration and stacking that's really good to know i think this looks good nick i'm not a planetary expert but i think you can do uh video with the s v boney 105 using some kind of software like fire capture and you might want to try that because with short video frames it can really help with sharpness because you're doing something called lucky imaging where you're finding just these fractions of a second where the atmosphere is uh more still and the faster you can record video the better that works okay nico from texas sent in an image of m 33 the triangulum galaxy this was taken with a modded nikon d 5300 a william optic zenith star 61 and an iop drawn skyguider pro it was from a portal to sky and this is 67 subs at five minutes each and nico used dss seral and gimp for processing and mentioned that this object has always been challenging and this is his fourth attempt uh so i've admittedly only shot at one time in my first year uh but i remember finding it difficult too it's deceptively dim and there isn't a huge amount of contrast uh in the galaxy to really tease out so you really have to use color contrast which i think you did a great job of here by uh emphasizing those uh nebulae the h2 pockets with their brighter pink uh color uh my only suggestion is that i think you could darken the sky a little bit without losing anything uh you know if i look at a histogram there's a big gap here between zero and where your sky starts so i could probably bring it over you know halfway and i think that looks really good okay uh nikolas nikolas captured the heart nebulae with a q h y 8 l ccd camera a gso 200 millimeter newtonian and a celestron avx mount and this was a total of 36 hours integration and nikolas wondered why he's not getting the depth that he would expect from so much integration and asked if it's his image scale his processing abilities or something else uh nikolas described his processes stacking in dss processing in photoshop along with using the astro flat pro plugin um but he didn't get it going to like a lot of detail with how exactly he processes this in photoshop so i'm not sure why you lost so much detail in processing um it looks like you tried to do a lot tried to like remove a lot of the stars and really add a lot of sharpening and things like that so i would advocate for just doing much simpler processing than probably what you did you know uh i'll show you what i was able to make out of your data so this is just uh background extraction in zero i made a starless version i stretched you know the starless version with uh generalized hyperbolic stretch i sharpened it a little bit uh and then added the stars back on uh and so definitely there's a lot more detail in your data but i think that the trick is just don't over process it just just keep things simple really concentrate on background extraction and then uh you can add a little sharpening i like the starless technique um but just keep experimenting keep learning you know you you may find uh serial helps you or you may want to move to pics insight there's a lot of tutorials on that uh as well okay this is another nikolas and nikolas sent in a photo of andromeda captured with a nikon d 3300 and a 55 to 300 millimeter lens on a star adventurer from portal three no calibration frames and about 40 minutes of data at 135 millimeter focal length and nikolas process this with gimp and said they couldn't get star net to work maybe because the stars weren't in focus enough so let's take a look yes they do look a little bit out of focus you have that sort of like donut shape and uh when a any kind of algorithm can't find the center of the star it will have trouble um knowing what is a star so that makes sense um what i'd suggest adding to your software stack is serial for things like color calibration and background extraction and for the focus issue since you have the samyang 135 which is oh sorry and for the focus issue at 135 millimeter focal length you should be able to use a badenov mask many people are 3d printing them i think you could find one that works for your lens for not very much money okay night sky observer sent in this image of andromeda this was taken with an 8 inch sc t and a modded can in 2000 d uh so this is a really cool image i like how close in it is uh your system seems dialed in pretty well based on the details and the stars and night sky observer mentioned he is having a problem with flats over correcting and is using a pixel math workaround to sort of fix it but would want to really solve it uh a good you know uh for real um so my sense is uh it's it's hard to give advice on flats because different things will work for different people in different systems but one thing that a lot of people suggest when you're struggling with flats is to try sky flats um because they seem like something that are sort of tricky to capture well but once you do understand how to capture them well they can fix a lot of problems so i think that's uh worth a shot but uh nice work with the uh photo it looks really good okay here is night time imaging who sent me an image of the sygnus wall this was taken with a canon dslr and a sky watcher 150 pbs newtonian on an eq m 35 mount this is nine hours and three minute nine hours of three minute subs and it was stacked in zero and processed in pic's insight so uh this is uh oh and night time imaging is wondering if there's something more they can do in processing or something where they can do artistically um so i think artistically this is uh really successful i like you know sometimes the the off center of the main object looks a little strange but because you have the the bright stars and especially this bright star offsetting the uh you know it it creates balance in the photo basically is what i'm trying to say because you have something big and bright over here and then the obviously the main area of interest is on this side um and i would say your processing style is very naturalistic i like how much of the blues you're able to bring out the it's a very bright style um just to show you what a little bit of a moodier style might look like uh here's my interpretation um it has a little bit more uh contrast than yours um and then i guess i also went more uh red uh but you still can see a fair amount of of blue as well so uh i i think i like yours uh better actually um but i am seeing maybe a little bit of horizontal banding and things in yours uh that is a little bit harder to see in mine just because i think i went uh darker with the interpretation okay this is Niklas and Niklas sent an image of the lobster claw and the bubble nebula in seafious uh and m52 is there too and this is captured with a ts optics 80 millimeter refractor an asi 294 mc and an opt along elix stream filter and processed with dss photoshop star net and topaz denoise and niklas said his problem is under sampling with his camera and scope combination so to me under sampling is only really a problem if you're trying to do something very specific like so to me under sampling is only a problem if you're trying to do something very specific like resolve very small details in the lunar surface or in another galaxy or in planetary or something like that for shots of nebulae you likely are not really under sampled uh because for instance if you look at your stars that's those don't look under sampled to me right they don't there's nothing that's pixelated about them they have a natural profile uh i wouldn't say they're under sampled and then in terms of nebulae detail you're picking up plenty of fine detail given the field of view of course you can go with a higher focal length and get a better sampling but then you're not going to pick up all of this in one shot so i really don't think under sampling is an issue for you and i agree that it's really fun to pick up lots of deep sky objects in in one shot my one suggestion in processing is to check out generalized hyperbolic stretch it's available in both seral in the 1.2 beta and it's also available as a plugin you can download for pics insight and the reason i suggest it is because it's very powerful in of your ability to bring out some of this faint nebulosity while controlling the highlights because it has a protect highlights slider and i think that's going to help you with a scene like this avoid um some of these really bright areas just getting so bright that it's hard to see some of the detail that you've captured when zoomed out okay njr 95 captured the large Magellanic cloud untracked with a sony a7 for a sony to 70 to 200 zoom lens and took 445 images at four seconds each which comes to about 30 minutes integration and this was done under a mortal five sky and i think this looks really great i mean i'm amazed this is untracked i don't i don't really know the southern sky that well but i just can't believe that you can get this much detail without even a tracker on the Magellanic cloud njr 95 asked how much difference will there be an image quality taken between a portal one to three and a portal five four to five assuming all other parameters are equal so a couple things one is that there's a big difference between a portal five and a portal four a portal four is a big category it can go from a fairly dark sky by the by the end of portal four you're reaching a pretty bright sky uh but if we're talking portal one to three uh it's going to get much better because the thing with signal to noise ratio is a light pollution carries its own signal but also its own noise and so even if you subtract a light pollution gradient from your data all the noise from the light pollution is already mixed in with all the other noise sources so i know that's a bit abstract but um just to give you another sort of example of how it could improve your image quality if you look at your image here there's a magenta uh part of the Magellanic cloud and a green part of the Magellanic cloud there's a ball there's all these color shifts that i think came from a light pollution gradient that then you tried to subtract and it it didn't quite work perfectly a lot of that kind of stuff is solved by a really dark sky because you don't you don't have all of these uh light pollution problems when you go to a dark site usually uh so i think it will be definitely noticeable 30 minutes of data from portal one to three will be even better than what you've captured here okay noa captured andromeda galaxy without a star tracker using a canon t7 dslr and a canon nifty 50 lens this was 200 lights at f2 and two seconds each from a portal six sky and noa was wondering if there was a way to get more of the natural color of andromeda from the city sky so uh maybe not too much more than that um untracked with a star tracker definitely yes uh you know i think with a star tracker and a slightly longer telephoto lens that people are definitely able to get plenty of color out of andromeda from portal six um but with your equipment i'm not sure if more exposures would really help with the color the darker sky would help but i think um what what more exposures is going to help with is the noise but i'm not sure if color is really gonna come out that much better with with the equipment you're using from a portal six sky another thing to point out here is there's a pretty extreme light pollution gradient from the upper left to the bottom right um you can take care of that for free with programs like ciril or grexpert okay noa captured the running man nebula and their ryan nebula with a stock cannon 60 d a william optics zenith star 73 and an optalong skyguider pro this is two hours of integration from a portal four sky processed with photoshop and topaz denoise and noa said his biggest issue was black dots in the star cores after processing with topaz uh so uh if you've watched more you know of this uh coverage you know that i'm not really a fan of topaz denoise uh it causes lots of issues like we're seeing here uh so what noa is saying is these uh hollowed out star cores was from uh after using topaz uh but then also i just think that this you know we have sort of a lumpy kind of blurred out effect too from topaz denoise if you do want to use a simple ai-based noise reduction uh tool i would recommend rust chromins noise exterminator which is available as a photoshop plugin over topaz because it's trained on astrophotography data and does a better job um what i usually just use is i try not to use any noise reduction that blurs the image like this what i use is uh in here in camera raw filter i use uh color noise reduction and color noise reduction seems to just desaturate top pixels and things like that in color model but it doesn't uh blur anything so that's what i i use in terms of noise reduction typically okay nolyn took an image of the north america and pelican nebulae with a stock nikon d7000 24 to 120 millimeter zoom lens and a star adventurer tracker from a portal five sky and with a nearly full moon and it was about two hours of data at f4 and nolyn asked about the noise and whether that was more from an old camera or from too little integration um so noise is always going to be a combination of things and in this case you shot on a full moon from a portal five um so probably that that moonlight is adding to a lot of your problems if you shot it on a night with no moonlight it's you're gonna have far fewer noise issues uh on something like this with the dim ha target the other thing is you're using a a stock uh camera not an ha modified one so ha target ha dominant targets like this are going to be a little harder to bring out and then the more you stretch the more you see the noise so uh it all compounds you know the sky brightness the moonlight all these things but i wouldn't really worry too much about your camera not being new enough uh if you are really into a mission nebulae you might consider getting a modified uh dslr or an astro camera okay noon sent in an image of the sickness loop made with a modded dslr a samyang 135 f2 lens and this is untracked uh 686 photos at 1.3 seconds each with the lens at f2.2 and from a portal for location and noon mentioned having trouble with the cloudy dust in the background uh and asked if there's a way to make it cleaner so my guess is that you have a mix here of actual uh dust in space but also probably a lot of dim little stars uh because this is a really busy star region that are not fully being resolved by your lens but you're are still creating some kind of light that's brighter than the sky so i think the best way to handle that would be to just darken the sky on your starless image while keeping the nebulae sort of preserved with a with a mask you can make sort of a luminance mask on your starless image and try that it's also very impressive that you went after such a difficult target without a tracker uh i mean it's sort of curious to me that you have an astro modified camera but no star tracker uh but you know everyone approaches this hobby differently so maybe you just like the simplicity of just the the tripod but that's really cool well done okay and here we have umar's astrophotography and umar's astrophotography sent in an image of a ryan nebula this was taken with a mead 80 millimeter refractor and a nikon d3100 uh stacked in dss and serol and uh my first thought when seeing this is that it was like i'm uh taken with an on an eyepiece but i guess not uh it looks it sounds like you're at prime focus so i guess it's just that the refractor is uh very vignetted maybe it's like an f10 refractor or something with a like an acromat since omer's astrophotography didn't mention amount and this was done with four second lights i'm guessing this is untracked so uh we're getting a lot of very interesting and cool untracked shots here this one was untracked and now omer's astrophotography is taking this super zoomed in view untracked so my only suggestion uh in processing is um to see if you can resolve more detail in the core here and i actually know that you can because i took your autosave tiff from dss and processed it myself and got this um and i think this is really neat because you actually resolved the four trapezium stars right here in the core of Orion this is called the trapezium cluster and it's very cool you know that you you captured this at such high resolution with untracked i think um i used the new generalized hyperbolic stretch in the new version of seral to do this uh and so that would be my challenge for you omer is to maybe just crop in on this part and and try uh processing it like i have here uh just focusing on the on that cluster okay orson sent in an image of the pleiades made with a diy modded fuji xt2 a tear 3s lens and tracked with a star adventurer and this was taken from a portal five sky the lens was stopped down to f8 and the iso was 3200 and orson has some questions about noise and iso so i'll try to explain this uh as briefly as i can for stacked astrophotography a higher iso does not create any noise on its own in fact higher iso values have slightly less read noise what happens and the reason that you think a high iso has higher noise is because it's revealing more of the noise so if i just take a picture a single picture and look on the camera and i use a higher iso it looks like there's well there's way more noise but it's just because the picture is brighter because of the higher iso value uh so um the thing that actually determines how much noise we see in the picture is our signal to noise ratio which is determined by how dark your sky is how fast your optics are and how much data you collect um so iso is not particularly important the fact that you are at iso 3200 doesn't really matter you uh you could be at iso 1600 3200 6400 it's going to come out basically the same once you actually stack and stretch and all that what did matter as you guessed was stopping down to f8 that's going to mean that it's going to take much longer to get adequate signal the tradeoff is you get sharper stars but i think probably with the tear 3s which i own too uh you could just stop it down from the native f 4.5 to f 5.6 and that's going to give you plenty of sharpness in the stars uh whilst giving you a whole stop brighter in terms of the light so that was a lot of theory and acquisition about you know so that was a lot of theory about acquisition and camera settings um in terms of your processing i think it looks great uh you know the the diffraction pattern is pretty crazy at f8 but other than that i i think this looks really nice and the noise uh since we've been speaking about that really doesn't bother me in your in your photo here okay oothman oothman sent a photo of the ryan belt and sword taken with a cannon esr and a sky watcher star adventurer tracker this is a 200 millimeter focal length at f 2.8 from a portal five sky and this is one of oothman's first images so he's looking for any kind of advice so my biggest advice is don't be afraid to stretch the data much more aggressively than you have here uh you know even on the jpeg here if we just raise up the levels i'm sure we'll see a lot more so it doesn't look great because a lot of stuff has been clipped to black already but you really can just go ahead and stretch your data much much more aggressively because i'm sure there is a lot more in there um this is one reason i like the program zero which is free it has an auto stretch feature the auto stretch is going to be fairly aggressive but it's going to show you what's actually in your data and so you could start with the auto stretch and then go from there and just sort of alter the auto stretch a little bit okay auto sent in an image of andromeda this is taken with a cannon t8 i red cat 51 sky watcher star adventurer and from a portal for sky this is 60 lights at two minutes each it was processed with sequader photoshop and star net and auto s if the background is clip so visually uh yes let's find out if numerically it's also clipped yes okay so the what i'm seeing here is if i hover my mouse and look at this info panel it says 000 in the rgb uh that means that the it's pure black and that's what clipped means so 255 is pure white that's an 8 bit scale uh 0 to 255 and what you want to see there in the black background the dark sky background is something more like 18 18 18 or 28 25 27 something like that as long as it's within the range of around 15 to 35 that's a really good black level for most monitors um in the you know other than that uh this looks pretty good auto uh you know even though your sky is so black uh you still have a fairly nice transition from galaxy to sky but the galaxy will look less pasted on if your sky isn't so dark the only other thing is i think there's a little bit too much magenta in your galaxy which is giving it a little bit of a purple tone when usually we want to go for a little bit more of a solid uh blue okay and then next we have pob morex and uh this is sort of a funny one back to back because uh you know we were just talking about black level and this one was clipped to pure black um this one to me looks much too gray like not dark enough and so if we look at this numerically we're at around 49 49 49 so around 50 and i said sort of the ideal is around 15 to 35 uh so if we apply you know just a a curve like this to uh darken your sky now we're at 16 or 22 21 17 so something like that is is generally what uh we're going for with the sky background now sometimes you can go a little bit brighter than this um so we could i could meet you halfway do something like that and then we're at around 30 but 50 is usually feels a little bit too uh gray and washed out so anyways on with your critique i just thought that was an interesting uh comparison uh pob morex says this is their first astrophoto ever wow that's it's amazing that uh my photo wasn't nearly this good uh my first this is 32 lights at 30 seconds each with a nicon d3200 a sigma 18 to 200 zoom lens and just on a tripod untracked and from portal nine okay so very impressive uh to get this much detail out of an untracked shot from portal nine uh and knowing all that really the only thing i would uh say is just what i said earlier of it just being too uh bright to begin with so i just darkened it and i think it looks a lot better a little bit darker okay patrick sent in an image of the orion nebula this was taken with a nicon d750 a tamron 70 to 300 zoom and an omegan mini track lx3 from a portal for location patrick used sequader for stacking and photoshop for editing so i think this looks very good patrick uh i really don't have any other notes on it other than it's cool to see another person using that mini track uh for a you know a close-up deep sky shot like this i'd thought of it mostly as a you know a wide field kind of tracker but uh it's nice to see that it can be used for this kind of thing and still get nice round stars okay patrick captured this of star trails obviously but also some satellites in there and this was done with patrick's panasonic lumix s5 which has something called live view composite mode so what that i assume means is you see the picture being made in real time right on your camera screen and that's really cool i actually have a android cell phone that can do that mode two and i found that it's really fun to capture star trails that way and see them getting longer and longer right on the camera screen this one is obviously very well planned with the cool foreground in the lit up monument there uh in front that looks really nice so congrats patrick i like this shot quite a lot okay next we have paulo and paulo sent in a nice image here of the iris nebula this is in the constellation seafious it's one of my favorites and this was taken with a sky watcher refractor with reducer an asi 294 mc camera and paulo uh would like me to address the background color of the sky and the stars not being round in the corners okay so let's first uh take a look at the corners okay so down here looked worse than the top corner but i don't know if the top was cropped okay and just looking at these bottom two corners all the stars are radiating in so that suggests that you need more space between the reducer and your zwo camera so i'm not sure exactly what your imaging train looks like but it probably should be 55 millimeters between the back of the reducer and your camera's sensor typically with zwo they're pretty good about giving you the right spacers so that you just put them all together and put it on the back and you're good to go but i don't know if you're using uh something in there like a filter drawer or something that's changing that um but then yeah your top is is actually pretty perfect so that would almost suggest tilt more than uh than a back focus problem but then the way that these are radiating in on both corners makes me think that it is back focus so you might have to you know play around with this uh there's a thing a plugin within nina called hocus focus that's supposed to sort of tell you what is tilt and what is back focus so maybe try that out uh paulo's other question was about the color of the background sky in this shot and it looks a little bit red but i i think it's possible that this red is emission nebula um just dim emission but the the key thing is just to do a very careful background extraction so a lot of times what i'll do is i'll run automatic background extractor that'll show me where the dust is and then i'll know where to put the points for the dynamic background extractor and just be very careful not to put those uh points anywhere on the dust okay then we have Pedro Pedro said and sent in an image of the lagoon and trifid nebulae captured with the canon dslr samyang 135 and opt along l pro clip-in filter this was processed with zero and this image uh you know it looks like a very nice field the nice sharp stars throughout uh the only thing that looks a little bit odd to my eye is uh the it looks like very natural color except for the lagoon and trifid are very uh orange right uh in this shot well they should be more of like a pink uh or or red uh but but in a natural color shot like what you have here uh i think with an l pro they should be sort of pink um so i just used this a quick selective color uh adjustment and mask uh to show you what they should look like if you're doing natural color which the rest of your image suggests you are so uh that's that's the only thing i would suggest is maybe figure out why they got so yellow if you can and then if you can't figure it out i would still just sort of maybe colorize them uh a little bit differently there okay papito centered the dumbbell nebula at 250 millimeter focal length untracked this is 158 subs at one second each from a portal seven sky papito mentioned they tried the night before with a brighter 50 millimeter lens but the dumbbell was too small here they found it too dim and noisy i wondered why there's so much noise so light pollution is this unwanted signal it also has its own noise even when we remove the light pollution from our image the noise is left over so that's why light pollution is so bad because the noise from the light pollution intermingles with your normal noise um and so uh getting to a darker place is the number one thing to sort of uh get better backgrounds get better contrast um the other thing you can do is use a faster lens uh so you know when i'm showing these videos untracked on youtube i'm usually using a f2.8 uh 200 millimeter lens and from a darker sky with a longer integration so all of these just little things add up uh to create a less noisy picture um but if you could just do one thing if you went from 150 sub exposures at one second each to 600 your image is going to be a lot less noisy okay peter peter sent in this image of the veil nebula it was captured with a q h y 163 m camera an explorer scientific ed 80 telescope with a hotek field flander and a sky watcher h e q 5 mount and botter ha and o3 filters and peter said that this is his best image so far but he doesn't want me to hold back because he wants the critique in order to improve um okay so let's take a look i mean zoom in and just take a look at the details very nice details in the veil okay looking at your corners uh the stars do seem to be radiating in at least along the bottom corners so you might need a little bit more uh additional spacer maybe one or two millimeters um or it could be tilt one or the other um typically with an h o o image like this you would make the ha emission more of a pink and pink or red and you made it very orange it doesn't bother me i think it looks sort of cool but uh i don't know if that was your intention um probably was i would assume you have very nice detail and uh great you know sharpness here there's a little bit of graininess of noise when you really zoom in but that kind of thing doesn't bother me uh you know you could probably reduce it even more with a little bit more integration but i think this looks excellent um just because the stars are a little bit strange in the quarters i might uh crop in a little bit more than you have uh but on the other hand then you'd be missing out on some of this cool extended nebulosity you got so maybe not um in terms of the composition uh i think you probably could have done something a little bit more interesting with what you have uh it's just very much centered uh and straight across maybe putting it at a more of a diagonal and getting a little bit more of the flummering pickering triangle could have been interesting okay peter has captured the andromeda galaxy this is with a ts optic 70 millimeter refractor a sony a6400 mirrorless and an avx mount and peter says that this is his first light with this telescope he processed with deep sky stacker lightroom star net and photoshop and said he didn't have uh the knowledge for how to deal with halos on bright stars um i actually wouldn't have noticed that at all i don't think that your halos on your bright stars are obtrusive uh so i don't think it's really anything to worry about you know that this isn't a star that's a satellite galaxy um and the other stars look perfectly fine to me um my only suggestion is maybe color balance i'm not sure if you meant to go with this like really blue look it looks cool but uh it's a very like artistic kind of interpretation of the galaxy because usually uh the galaxy has a much warmer core than this well this is more of sort of like an icy icy blue look if you want a free tool for color calibration you can download zero okay peter captured m 42 untracked with a stock canon dslr and a kit lens this is 826 lights at two and a half seconds each from a portal three sky it was stacked in sequadre and edited with gimp and peter asked uh what this line was to the right of m 42 let's take a look okay so you see this sort of dashed red line my guess is that is an airplane trail and i can't remember if sequadre has a sigma clipping option but that's how you get rid of airplane and satellite trails is to use sigma clipping which rejects outliers i know most stacking programs have it i can't remember if sequadre does other than that i think this looks really good uh you know compositionally i think i would have left a little bit more space down below orion even if it meant not getting all three belt stars uh and then there's a little bit of great light pollution gradient left in here that you could uh fix uh and that's about it you have some nice colors and uh and the rine nebula came out very well so philip captured here central sickness uh with a nikon z6 mirrorless camera a nikon z 85 millimeter lens and uh he also composited in some details on some of the different bright nebulae with 180 millimeter lens and i'll say that the uh compositing was very well done because i didn't notice it at all uh before i read about it i the only place where now looking i can maybe tell is uh on the sickness wall looks like there's some extra crispy details in there um but overall i think uh you know this is all really well processed the colors look good uh for my taste i would maybe go just a tad darker overall uh just because it feels a little bit bright um but i think the the nebulae are at sort of the right level and maybe it's the star field that just feels a little bit bright but uh that's just i guess to my personal taste i think this is uh a very nice composition with with all kinds of great details another way you might control the star field uh since you're tracking is uh to use to stop down the lens a little bit i know that it seems sacrilege to have this really nice fast lens and then stop it down but uh i have an 85 millimeter f1.2 and was using it at f1.2 for a year before i ever stopped it down but then when i did and actually did a very similar shot to this i was actually very happy with the star performance stopped down to f2.8 okay so philippe captured the triangular galaxy here with a red cat a canon t7 and a star adventurer this is 104 lights at one minute each and it was processed with deep sky stacker and photoshop and my suggestion here is just to be careful with your stretching do it very incrementally the sky looks basically clipped and the stars are almost clipped in the opposite direction you know to white uh so i think if you do put in less contrast through stretching you're going to actually get a better result uh and then as for the color i think you could add a lot more uh even just with the jpeg here let me just try adding saturation okay so that's plus 67 to the saturation and of course i'm bringing out all the noise in the jpeg but look at all that beautiful color in the galaxy so with careful stretches and careful applications of saturation i think you could get a lot more color in the stars and in the galaxy okay peter so peter sent in this very nicely framed a vertical composition of the horse head and flame nebulae and this was done with a ts optics 80 millimeter apo a qh y 294 mono and an eyopron 725 with border filters this is 42 hours of integration from border six and it was processed with zero photoshop lightroom and topaz and the composition and the colors are all really cool i love this vertical composition showing off the extended ha response off the horse head there my one critique is i'm not sure if it was topaz or which part of the process but some parts of the shotgun just a little bit over sharpened and sort of are looking artificial the actually the entire horse head i think looks quite good it's really here in the flame where i feel some of this color and blockiness in the sharpness doesn't look very good and i know i'm way zoomed in here but i could sort of see it even zoomed out it's i'm just zooming in so we can see on the video what i'm talking about so that's my only thing for 42 hours i really would want very nice transitions and i think in some areas it just you just went a little bit overboard okay pietro pietro took this with the nikon d7500 a samyang 135 and an omegan mechanical tracker it's 320 lights taken on three different days so this looks very nice it shows again that with a stock camera you can really bring out a lot of detail in the north america and pelican and pietro mentioned that he did some special boosts in processing to get it to look like this well i think you did well the star field was very busy and was wondering if there was any techniques to manage that so yeah you shot wide open at f2 with the samyang i believe if you stop that lens down to f2.8 or f3.2 the star field is going to tighten up quite a bit and the other thing you didn't mention is if you use startet but that's another way to sort of control the balance between the nebulae and the star field okay pranshu pranshu captured the north america and pelican as well this was with a stock nikon d5600 a 73 to 300 millimeter kit lens and tracked on an eye optron skyguider pro and this is one hour 48 minutes integration from a portal three sky and pranshu stacked with deep sky stacker and edited with serial start at gimp and lightroom mobile so this is definitely a really nice shot especially for that lens pranshu used it at 150 millimeter focal length at f4.9 there's a very nice balance here between the the sky the nebulae and the star field and it also has good natural color throughout the only suggestion i have is uh for me it's just a thing where it distracting things along the edge or in the corners just sort of bug me so this is the neb over here i believe and you just sort of have the glare of it i would just crop that out i think this would look cool as a widescreen 16 by 9 or maybe just like a little bit taller than 16 by 9 something like that and then you don't have any distractions at the top or the bottom and i think that has a really nice flow as well okay ps mcd ps mcd captured the elephant trunk nebulae with a mid 70 millimeter quad a qhy 183c a celestron avx internopped along alex stream filter this is about three hours integration and processed with deep sky stacker star tools photoshop and anise actions and i think the data looks good here the i love the framing that looks looks really nice um you know centering the elephant trunk and having everything else sort of frame it up um with the alex stream filter you should be able to get a little bit more color variety than this uh that was a question you had uh was to get more color out of the nebula um so one way to do it is if we look at your channels here here's the red channel you can see it's very extreme it's uh very bright here's the green channel right so the response is a little bit different um than the red and so i took the green channel and i put it here and screen blended it on top now that of course doesn't look very good but if we turn it sort of a teal blue okay now we're getting a little bit more color variety uh the picture is brighter of course but then what we can do is we can increase the saturation which i've done here now you're seeing a little bit more of that blue color and then we've stopped you know we've given the little more blue but now the reds are getting a little washed out so i just increased the intensity of the reds a little bit then now and then now i see you know the whole image is quite a bit brighter than where you had it so i'm going to darken it back down oh and that's it okay so hopefully that helped a little bit i just basically took your jpeg here took your green channel brought it back in and colorized it just to boost that o3 response and here is the before and after oops before and after okay so this is all just working with the jpeg i'm sure you can do much better working with your original data but hopefully that gives you a place to start in processing q swat 72 made a three panel mosaic image here with a samyang 135 f2 lens this uh was done with an ellen hands filter and an asi 533 mc it was processed with pics in sight microsoft ice and lightroom and that's it okay so really nice idea for the framing here with the 533 square sensor i really like how this is framed from the you know with the boogie man horse head and orion all straight across in the middle looks pretty neat my main suggestion in processing is to try to not go so heavy with the contrast because you're losing a lot of potential details that you've captured um you know high contrast high saturation is of course going to make your photo pop but bringing in too much and then you start losing a lot of details in the smaller little uh micro details basically so with a mosaic image i like to zoom in um but it feels like you really edited this for the overall look rather than the zoomed in look where we're starting to lose a lot of uh of little details that's what i'm trying to say especially in color uh having done a lot of mosaic work myself i'd say that you really have to sort of reset your normal expectations for how much contrast and things to add because as a general rule of thumb the more zoomed in you are in a deep sky object the more you can add saturation and contrast and all of these things and it keeps taking more and more like if you're at a if you're just shooting a core of the orion nebula or a galaxy core or something you can add tons of saturation and contrast to that and it's going to look great but the more zoomed out you are the harder uh you have to sort of control how much contrast you're going to add uh for it to to look balanced and and natural in the end okay quasar ap sent an image of andromeda taken with a canon t7 an sv bony cls and an astro tech at 72 all on a star adventurer tracker and this was about 511 lights at nine seconds each 75 minutes total integration from a portal six and my guess is quasar ap was using such short exposures on a star tracker because it wasn't sure about polar alignment or balance the 72 millimeter scope is a little bit long for the star adventurer without guiding with nine second exposures from a portal six personally i probably would skip using the cls filter because that's uh blocking a lot of light that you could be getting out of the star field and and andromeda here so i'd probably only use the cls filter for for more emission nebulae and things like that but in the end you did get a very nice result pretty nice colors and the galaxy is showing a lot of really great details the sky background is a little bit uneven um but probably um you went fairly dark like this to hide any walking noise uh one thing you can do to uh try to fix walking noise before it you know forms is to dither a little bit so even if you don't have an auto guide or what you can do is use the slow motion controls on the star adventurer to slightly change the position uh every you know 20 shots or something like that or maybe every nine seconds each probably every 100 shots would be fine uh and just just moving at a few pixels uh every so often is is a way to manually dither okay quinn captured the andromeda galaxy with a william optic z61 refractor a sky watcher eq m35 pro and an asi 183 mc camera this was taken from a mortal three sky and is five and a half hours integration processing was done in pics insight and quinn asked about getting more detail in the core area of the galaxy um so the best way to do that in pics insight is with a tool called hdr multi-scale transform um and you typically want a mask to just this area so you might use range selection to make that mask but honestly quinn i don't know how much more detail there really is to extract from this image you already have really nice little uh bits of the dust lanes going right into the core so uh i i wouldn't uh worry about getting any more detail uh in this image okay rajat took took this photo of the north america nebula this was of the stock cannon 40d a samyang 135 lens and an ioptron gem 28 mount with a sv bony cls filter from a mortal nine sky it was processed with astro pixel processor seral star net and affinity photo um so this looks good it's very tastefully processed and nice job bringing out some of this fainter nebulosity below the north america and pelican um rajat asked about how to get good star color from a very light polluted location um so the cls filter used is great for getting good contrast on these emission nebulae but it's not good for star color so what you could do is take one stack with the cls filter for the nebulae and then take another stack for the the stars using much shorter exposures because you're under portal nine so maybe 10 20 second exposures and get about an hour of that uh and then you'll make two stacks one for the cls you'll probably go starless with that uh you'll register to the same frame and then with the rgb image the one without the cls filter you can extract the stars and put them back on now don't expect it to be you know really really good because you're under heavy light pollution but i think it'll you'll at least get better star color than you have here using that technique okay ruck sheet uh ruck sheet sent in an image of andromeda galaxy this was taken with a samyang 135 lens a canon 1200 d d slr a star adventurer and a heida clear night filter and this is one of ruck sheet's first images this is a 50 uh 52 minute exposures from portal six and processed with deep sky stacker and photoshop and ruck sheet is hoping to bring more detail out in the image so let me think um you took 50 exposures next time i would take at least 100 or even more that's going to help you bring out more detail you know stretch it further without too much noise i would try next time also not using the heida light pollution filter it probably will work better for emission nebulae but i wouldn't use it on broadband targets like this from portal six sky even if that means your exposures are shorter like you know one minute instead of two minutes that's fine the result i think will still be better without if you use no filter and then my last tip is try seral because you have a fairly extreme light pollution gradient here and seral is very nice for removing those kinds of gradients and doing some other nice processing of your astrophotos okay ralph captured the sader region of sygnus with a panasonic g9 camera and an olympus 75 millimeter lens the tracker was a self-made modified syrup genie mini which is typically used for timelapse kind of shots and this was 250 lights at 20 seconds each from a portal for sky processed with seral and gimp and ralph asks about color how to manage colors in astrophotography for a calibrated monitor and how is there any way to do that so yeah sort of i mean seral has a command called photometric color calibration that you can use on the stacked data before you stretch it while the data is still linear and what that does is it looks at the stars in your image and then goes on to an online database and figures out what color those stars should be and then it applies a white balance function to your image now that color calibration is only as good as uh you know that you preserve it and it's hard to preserve good color once you do start stretching your data and doing all kinds of other stuff but i still recommend it because i think it's it's better to start with a good well calibrated uh you know color calibrated image as a starting place and then you can still use your artistic license but you'll you'll have something of accurate colors that way um so i went ahead and went through the process with seral of photometric color calibration and stretched the image and this is what i got so just to give you an idea of uh what it might look like with color calibration and i think this is fairly accurate um you know the neb up here is a blue star i'm seeing it is blue here uh the pelican nebula i know what it looks like a natural color and this looks very natural to me um so this least gives you an idea of what uh what it might look like uh with very natural colors okay uh relph sent in this image of andromeda galaxy taken with a cannon r6 and a cannon rf 100 to 500 millimeter zoom lens at 500 millimeter zoom this was on a sky watcher star adventurer 2 i and this was from a portal 3 location uh for some reason the jpeg relph sent was super tiny so i'm just using the uh stack here um and relph asked how to get more color into the image for dramatic effect so good question there are a few things you can do um one is in seral here there are different ways of stretching the image and some stretches preserve color better like this arc sign stretch is considered a very good stretch for preserving uh color um one thing i'll have to do is stretch the data fairly minimally take out the stars and just open a starless version to saturate that some more so i've already done that so just to save a little time here let's just open up the starless version there it is and um let's go linear there we go so this is just very minimally stretched right this is sort of a good starting place for a starless version is this level of stretch um because there's still plenty of space in there to add color while when it's really stretched uh you've probably blown out a lot of the the color so we just need to add saturation now um and in seral that's under color saturation with your image i found that uh you know doing it once all the way to one didn't make a huge change but then let's do it again i'm taking them out to bring it all the way to one okay now you can see there is quite a bit of color uh i'm just going to do it a third time just to this might be too much but just to show you there is plenty of color in your image it's just it really needed to be brought out and sometimes i can't exactly explain why with one camera and system you might just have to bring up the color saturation a little bit and with yours i had to do it three times but there you go just don't be afraid to add saturation um and these are very nice natural colors because i already uh you know color calibrated this in in seral and everything and it's it's ready to go so hopefully that helps you would now just add the stars back on and you're ready and having a very nice image i think okay randall captured the pleaties with an ascar fra 400 uh with reducer asi 294 mc and an eye up drawn gem 28 mount this is 560 one minute subs from a portal seven sky and this was processed with pics insight and photoshop so there's a lot going on with this uh data set i think one of the big challenges uh in processing this is differentiating between uh noise real dust and light pollution gradients and things like that um i think uh you know the reflection nebula component here the pleiades uh reflection nebula looks really good in your data i'm not quite as pleased with the the surrounding dust just because there's a lot of like color shifts and uh i think over smoothed uh modeled uh noise kind of stuff um so if you're gonna what i would suggest is uh really spent a lot of time on background extraction i just wanted to see sort of what you had so i did a very quick process i didn't spend a lot of time on background extraction so i didn't stretch this nearly as hard as you did um but i just wanted to see okay how crazy is the background and that yeah it's it's it's pretty confusing so um i would try out different methods you know try graxpert try automatic uh background extraction maybe followed by dynamic and see sort of what uh you can do in terms of separating out that light pollution from uh from the noise and from the signal it's it's pretty difficult um so i uh i salute you for trying such a difficult target from portal seven uh the data is definitely not easy to process uh okay respora captured the aryan constellation uh untracked with a sony a seven three and a sony 24 to 70 millimeter lens from a portal four this looks pretty good the you know the witch head nebula is present right there which is always impressive to get from you know with an untracked technique for me uh and to my taste you've eliminated too many stars uh there's it feels like a little bit like the stars left are just sort of noise in a starless image um so i would i wouldn't kill this many stars from your image uh you asked how to get round stars while maxing out dim detail and there's not really any easy way to do that i think you'll probably have to get a star tracker to do that because with a star tracker of course you can take much longer exposures which is how you get the dim detail while still having round stars i mean the other way with untracked is just to pile on more and more integration um but there's sort of a limit to that because at a certain point it just becomes impractical okay rinehard captured the leo triplet with a ts optics 115 millimeter refractor and leo allergy b filters asi 183 mm camera and a sky watcher he q5 mount and this was captured from portal four and processed in pics insight and rinehard says his main issue is teasing out structures in the galaxies while also retaining sufficient depth in the background to show all the background galaxies and fainter things like electric trails so i looked through your whole processing description rinehard and i think you're doing all the things that i would have suggested like careful masking uh using generalized hyperbolic stretch and all these kinds of things so i'll i don't know if i can really give much help in terms of your question of how to balance these things um just for anyone who doesn't know about it one really nice thing with generalized hyperbolic stretch is you basically um tell this where you want to add the most contrast so let's say i wanted to add more contrast to this stellar stream coming off here off this galaxy i can click on that it creates this yellow line and then i wanted to set my symmetry point to that yellow line then uh i'm going to open up a preview here so then uh we want to increase the intensity and the stretch factor and over here we can see what it's doing and one of the problems of course is you know i just told that i want to work on this area of the sky we're bringing out a lot of dust and stellar streams by working with that area of the sky but then the galaxies can very easily get blown out so what you can do is you can take this protect highlights slider and bring that back over and we should be able to get more contrast in the parts that we want while still protecting the parts that we don't want to be changed and let's see how i did so this is before and after maybe not perfect so sometimes you know you might also want to combine that with masking out the details you really don't want to change and so i think it sounds like Reinhardt was doing all these things but it is challenging i don't really have an easy answer for for what to do differently okay richard used a stock cannon 5d mark 2 an smc super takuma 200 millimeter vintage film lens untracked to capture the lagoon and triphid nebulae from a portal six sky and richard asks if i think it's over processed um no not really what i think there is an issue which is you have the saturation level very high but the picture is fairly dark uh and so it's like high high saturation high contrast but dark and i think for this level of saturation to work the picture has to be much brighter uh so i like the jpeg here but let's just see what happens if i just raise the curve okay so this is bringing up a bunch of you know issues because it's just a jpeg but something like that like much brighter image and then the saturation level will work but this dark it looks a little odd uh richard also asks if um this is the best you can do untracked and whether it's time to invest in a star tracker uh you know as you probably know untracked is great for bright objects like the lagoon and triphid and messier objects things like m 31 m 45 m 42 once you've sort of hit all of those uh really bright big highlights it's probably time for a star tracker so uh if if based on your result here i assume you've done other untracked targets and i think once you've captured maybe about five or six of the the main ones then probably a star tracker is the next step okay richard used a modded canon 1000 d a canon nifty 50 lens and shot the heart and soul and uh double cluster and richard is the second person in this critique who is using an astro modified camera but no star tracker which i think is really interesting uh it shows you that you can go pretty far into challenging targets untracked uh with the right camera and the right sky and the right sort of attitude about it i guess richard processed this with siril starnet and gimp and i think this looks very good um i my two suggestions for just sort of finishing touches would be uh to darken the sky background maybe just a little bit more i know there's interesting um dark nebulae structures in there so we don't want to lose those but i think you could just get away with just a little bit darker like that um and then i guess i see if you could make a selection on just the stars and maybe the yeah maybe just the stars and increase their saturation a little bit i think that you know in the double cluster here even from this zoom level i should be able to see some of those bright orange stars that really adds a little bit of a dynamic element to this so i would just try increasing saturation just a little bit let me just see what i can do just very quickly okay so that's not great because i'm i'm also increasing it on the the background sky but you get the idea i think there is a lot more color in the star field that could uh make it a little bit more uh interesting even zoomed out okay richard captured the horse head and flame nebulae with a sky watcher gti mount william optics red cat 51 and a opt along elix stream filter using an asi 294 mc camera and then processed with pics insight uh so it looks like you have some really nice data here richard uh i would just suggest we're doing background extraction first thing you know right after wpp just take the stack stretch it i mean no not stretch it do the auto stretch so you can see what you're doing and then just immediately do a background extraction to get rid of this gradient a good thing to do if you're if you're having trouble with dynamic background extractor is try just the automatic background extractor but turn the function degree down to two and maybe make the sample size bigger like 30 pixels and i think that'll work pretty well uh and then i often also set the correction to division rather than subtraction because i think it just is a little bit more of a gentle version of background extraction okay rick captured the heart and soul nebula uh and the double cluster from a portal for sky with a nikon d7500 a rokinon 135 f2 lens and a skyguider pro tracker and rick wondered why uh there was this color gradient in the background going from left to right um so to my eye this looks like just sort of the natural color of the milky way but just to and then the milky way band sort of fades out and the double cluster is basically right on the edge of the main band of the milky way where there's so much more dust but to confirm this i did pull up an image i found online and they had you know there was also 135 uh with the cannon stock cannon and uh or stock dslr i should say um and it looked very similar to yours right with the same kind of gradient so i think that's just a natural uh thing that you're finding there in the sky if it really does uh bother you you could probably darken it more um but it is the reason that it's there and you have trouble uh getting rid of it is because it's it's meant to be there it's not an artificial gradient it's it's actually out there in the sky robert captured the heart nebula with an ascar fra 300 pro telescope an asi 2600 m m and and lia four and a half nanometer scho filters so uh this is i think perfect uh framing great processing i don't always go for the starless images but i think it works very well here for this object just because there's plenty to plenty to look at uh with the heart and the and the fish head um my one suggestion is i find this sort of right side uh sort of distracting this sort of like magenta color over here i'm not sure it's probably is uh real signal or something but uh i just don't find it that appealing um so you could if you don't care about uh accuracy of the background sky color you could just darken it like that or i think even uh more interesting what you can do is uh crop uh right so i would probably if this was my image just crop way in here to some of the most interesting parts of it something like that or uh and then maybe even rotated to me that you know that works a little bit better just because then i can without zooming in really see all of this beautiful detail that you've captured in the starless image okay romaine captured the veil nebula this is with a collapsible dobsonian telescope called the heritage 130p and it was mounted on an ioptron 25p with a modded canon 100 d and an ellen hands clip in filter and romaine says that everyone was telling him not to use this uh collapsible dobsonian telescope for astrophotography but that made him want to do it even more uh and despite all the challenges it sounds like romaine is having a lot of fun uh with adapting uh non astrophotography non astrophotography telescope to more of an astrophotography type setup so good for you romaine i think uh everyone should just be doing this hobby how they find it enjoyable and the end result is really great uh you know if one were to pixel peep you could probably find a little coma on the stars and things like that since you're not using a coma corrector but i zoomed out i really it looks perfect to me um it makes a great impression uh and i i like the framing with the diagonal of the veil instead of uh you know just in the middle uh i think that looks really nice okay roan captured the milky way with a smartphone and processed a stack of 130 photos at 20 seconds each with deep sky stacker and gimp so i really like this framing with uh looking through the tree canopy one of my very first milky way shots was a lot like this where i uh i was with it it was a dslr but i was just looking up and seeing the milky way through the trees like this and took a picture uh i i do wonder if you left the satellite trails or whatever these are in uh deliberately or if uh brought them back in because usually with deep sky stacker with the default settings i think it should reject those um this is i the dark horse nebula here in the milky way looks great it's very well placed here and really it really came across well so keep it up i i think this is a a really great start for for your astrophotography journey here okay ruben captured the horse head nebula with an omegan rc-8 sky watch or eq 6 r mount and a night sky camera modified canon s l 1 this is 13 hours from a portal 5 sky and processed in pics insight and affinity photo and so uh my biggest suggestion ruben is to try to get rid of these magenta and green shifts at the top and bottom of the photo uh just since we know they're not naturally part of the scene but they you included them and then they got very saturated so it looks a little odd to my eye um maybe if you can't get rid of them with background extraction you could try making some manual gradient masks in uh affinity and just applying the opposite color so right so apply more green to the magenta to neutralize it and apply more magenta to the green to neutralize that and try to just sort of get them at least a little bit uh diminished um it's not going to work perfectly but i think you can at least uh minimize the effect of those added colors uh otherwise i think this looks really nice i really like uh the centered horse head and the the vibrancy of this uh red and and yellow stars right around it really draws the eye okay ruxan took a single eight second exposure of the milky way with a huawei phone and said the issue is no proper equipment for astrophotography so yes uh it would be better to have the dslr and star tracker and all these other things but on the other hand keep in mind it's pretty amazing that the your cell phone can do this and the cell phones are getting better all the time so hopefully you know things will just keep improving and get less and less expensive um you might also want to try stacking it looks like you have a pretty nice result there so i i feel like stacking might work for you if you have a laptop that you could uh install some free software on like deep sky stacker or zero okay ryan captured the crab nebula with a 10 inch star finder telescope with no coma corrector a celestron cgem mount and an asi 224 mc which is normally thought of as a planetary camera this was taken from portal six and this is 16800 images at one second each captured using sharp cap with the ser format and processed with serial astro surface t3 star net and gimp so this is a very impressive ryan and i want to look more into your uh methods here as uh this would be a very exciting way to image small deep sky objects using bigger telescopes uh using a small sensor but uh as i understand it ser is like a video format um so i i'd be really interested uh to find out more about how you do this because the the results look really impressive the amount of detail uh that you captured in the crab nebula here with such short exposures okay sam captured the lagoon and triffin nebulae with an ascar fra 300 sky washer star adventurer and canon 1300 d this was captured from a portal three sky and was processed with deep sky stacker and gimp sam is wondering how to bring the milky way out more in processing um it looks good in terms of bringing the milky way out more i think the first thing is um it has a little bit of a red or pink color cast to the whole image uh if we look at the histograms you can see the red channel is like a little bit pushed um when to get it more neutral you need the red uh the left edge of the red to sort of line up with the green and blue so the first thing i did is i just sort of neutralized that um you can see i did do a quick mask here so i wasn't um changing the color of the uh lagoon or triffin when i did that so because we're just sort of working on the milky way and bringing that up right so i first changed the red color cast and then to make it brighter i just used that same mask and i just applied an s curve and this is what that looks like so pretty simple really um just uh getting the color sort of neutral and then making it brighter is this is my tips there oh and i was doing this in photoshop just because it's more convenient for me just to have everything lined up in photoshop but it's the same thing in uh gimp the the only difference is instead of using adjustment layers like i do here you just duplicate the layer then apply the adjustment to that duplicated layer and if you want to mask out the nebulae uh with a layer mask just like i'm doing here okay sam took a photo of the ryan nebula with his samsung smartphone at the eyepiece of an astromaster 102 and its 701 second exposure stacked and sam notes that he took each photo manually pressing the shutter each time on the phone uh so that's some dedication i wonder though if uh some of these star streaks are from you uh manually touching the the phone uh there is a app for android i've used called intervalometer that will press the shutter button in your camera app for you uh so it might work well for you so then instead of having to touch the phone you can just focus on recentering uh ryan and then maybe all the ones that it's taking while you're recentering you can just throw those out before stacking but congrats on the dedication here you definitely got some really nice details uh in the ryan nebulae core through stacking um i'd probably suggest a little bit more uh saturation maybe making the image a bit darker so that you can reveal uh more in that trapezium region which i think is the most interesting at this kind of focal length sasha took this uh picture of the a ryan uh nebulae and horse head and flame with an eyeopter on skyguider pro a stock canon 750d and a samyang 135 lens this is with an sv bony cls clip-in filter as well and processed with seral and affinity photo and sasha says they couldn't bring out more of the dimmer things without blowing out the a ryan uh nebulae more than they have here um so i think that is a hard balance with this scene um but i think that it is possible to bring out a little bit more of the background without blowing out the nebulae more uh the trick is really just you know with a curve protect those highlights by putting some points over here if you're not seeing where my mouse is it's right below right over here um and i'll apply this curve now just to show you what i mean so between what you had and this you can see a ryan nebulae is not changing in appearance but i'm bringing up the sky background level and this is just on the jpeg so uh there's probably some color noise and things in there that wouldn't exist in the raw but i would keep trying with balancing things you can also try generalized hyperbolic stretch i think that might work very well for you it's available in seral which you did use they added it in the new version of seral okay satya satya took this image of the triangular galaxy untracked wow with a canon 80d and a samyang 135 f2 from a portal 3 sky and this is 2357 lights at 1.3 seconds each stacked uh in sequader with no calibration frames then processed in seral and photoshop all right so satya i gotta give it to you this is a master piece of untracked astrophotography uh i can't believe the results people are getting this is i would be so happy to get this result for untracked uh you have even have like the uh the nebulae within the galaxy the spiral arms are so clear the stars are round and the noise is quite you know uh manageable here um but 2357 lights that's that's more than i've even ever done that's a lot of dedication um satya asked if they stretched it too far because they can see some blotches of different colors in the background uh so yeah i think you could darken the background without losing anything here's just a dark background and you know what i think that looks pretty nice um maybe that's even too a little bit too dark let's see let's do halfway so here's where you had it there's where i put it and there's halfway right so i think um making the background darker is definitely a good idea with this image i think halfway i can still see some of the color variation in the background nearly let's not let's see what the value is here okay so this is about 14 okay so somewhere this is somewhere around 14 to 15 out of 255 in terms of a black level i think that looks pretty good with this and i don't think let's just take a look at the galaxy i don't think you're losing that much in the galaxy by making the sky darker like that so i probably i probably would okay sarab sarab sent an image of sygnus uh taken with a stock cannon 200d a cannon nifty 50 lens and a move shoot move tracker this was processed with deep sky stacker and photoshop and it looks great sarab my only suggestion is to maybe try seril as well which is also free software you can use it in between deep sky stacker and photoshop and it has some really nice background extraction and color calibration tools that i think will help you know remove any last bit of light pollution gradient in your picture and also help you you know bring out the nebulae but i think this already looks very nice and you've very well framed as well with the northern colsack down here in the dark nebulae going across diagonally okay scott's astrophotos sent in this image of the double cluster in perseus taken with an Orion eight inch astrograph celestial avx mount and modified t7i i think this looks great scott you you have the newtonian really dialed in so your your stars are are nice and uh sharp and no uh major issues with like their halos or anything it looks really good well collimated um and i think you know the six inch newtonian uh this is eight inch newtonian um which one is it and you know the framing uh here with your eight inch newtonian is uh perfect you get close enough to the star cluster that we can see a lot of detail and color but uh you can also fit in the whole thing comfortably my one critique is there is a little bit of a green gradient down here in this corner and then you also these stacking artifacts along the edge so we might just want to you crop those out because i think it's going to be difficult to get rid of them any other way so i think just cropping in a little bit like that you don't really lose uh much of the impact of the shot um but you get rid of some of that distracting stuff along the edge okay shon used a nikon z 50 a it's a stock nikon z 50 an opt-along ellen hands filter and a william optics zenith star 61 telescope on a sky watcher star adventurer to capture the north america nebula and uh was processed with deep sky stacker serial starnet and gimp uh this looks great shon i my only suggestion is maybe just to do uh one last uh little you know adjustment to the black level um so in gimp you could just do new from new from visible and uh apply a curves adjustment or a levels adjustment and just make it a little bit darker okay shon captured the andromeda galaxy with an heq 5 mount the william optics 71 millimeter refractor asi 1600 mm camera and astrodon lrgb plus ha filters 18 hours total and processed in pics insight uh this looks great shon i maybe would uh saturate the blues a little bit more just to balance that out with the red hydrogen uh but other than that i think this looks uh excellent the black level the details are all uh really well done okay sabos f l captured the north america and pelican nebulae with a stock canon 250 d a canon 75 to 300 millimeter lens and a sky watcher star adventurer tracker it was processed in deep sky stacker pics insight luminar three and photoshop so your data is very good uh sabos f l i think uh you're trying to do a little bit too much in processing you say your lens had a a big chromatic aberration problem but i think um part of the issue is your through the way that you're processing the data you're accentuating that problem rather than diminishing it uh so uh the easiest thing to do to get that kind of thing under control is just to stretch the data lightly with pics insight uh until the stars look good separate them out so you now have a starless nebula shot and the stars on their own um and then you can bring them into photoshop enhance the nebula however you want and then put the stars back on top so i did that uh so this is just to my personal taste with your data and that's what i got so you can see the stars are reasonably fine um uh just to walk you through the process of what i did here there's the starless image and this is what the starless image looked like with uh just stretching it for the stars to look good i then did some selective color a little saturation um some curves to brighten it then added the stars on top and then finally uh just tried to uh darken the the bottom half a little bit because there was still just a little bit of a gradient left in so hopefully that gives you an idea of simple processing that also helps control uh any any issue with the stars and your lens okay Sebastian captured the eagle and omega nebula nebulae with red cat okay Sebastian captured the eagle and omega nebulae with a red cat 51 eq 6 r pro asi 2600 mm and and lea h8 and o3 4.5 nanometer filters and it's only one hour per filter so just two hours total integration the data was processed in pics insight uh and this looks like you know a fair amount of detail for two hours let's uh zoom in on some of the detail in the nebulae here there's the omega looks good and there's the pillars of creation and the eagle so you can see some really nice detail in here okay um my one critique is with the overall impression and the star reduction um it's sort of a weird thing because it's like when we zoomed in then this level of star reduction looks fine and actually looks good um so if i were just to crop the image like that that is the level of star reduction that i think looks great um same thing with the eagle up here that level of star reduction is is nice but when we zoom all the way out uh to me this star reduction looks wrong um i it almost feels like you might as well just go starless because the stars just feel like sort of hot pixels or something at this level so it's it's sort of a hard thing uh with with wide photos like this uh you know how to how to handle the stars um i think part of it is that there is a lot of nebulosity in this scene and if the whole thing was filled with nebulosity this level of star reduction might not bother me but because so much of the picture is dark then i focus on how weird the stars look i guess but if if the whole thing was sort of brought out um i'll just do a quick adjustment just to show you what i mean if the whole thing looked like that then the stars being that small wouldn't bother me so just to give you an idea of what's going on in my mind okay shane captured the north america and pelican nebulae with a stock canon 6d uh canon 300 millimeter f4 lens and a sky watcher star adventurer shane notes that he likes how this region looks better with a stock diesel r because it's easier to bring out the natural pink and magenta colors uh created by the mix of the o3 and ha emission uh while with a modified camera it turns the nebulae more solid red so i agree shane that's a great point uh you know you can also do that with a modified camera but it's a little bit more work because you have to separate out the uh the o3 signal from the ha and then probably stretch them differently and recombine them while with a stock camera you can just stretch and get these kinds of of colors um so very nice job i think my personal preference would be for just a tad less uh saturation uh in those pinks and maybe a little bit more blue but i think this is very well well done okay shane captured the andromeda galaxy here with a stock nikon d610 and apertura 60 millimeter refractor on an ioptron skyguider pro and this is three hours from portal five uh so nice work shot this is very tastefully processed not overdone the one thing i noticed uh is there's a little bit of a color shift in the galaxy from this side to this side and i feel like this side looks a little bit more uh purple while this side looks more how i'd expect with the natural colors uh so i'm not sure if it was something left over from a gradient or something um but maybe a little bit less red in the in the mix on that right side of the galaxy would be good okay shree charon ms captured the Pleiades and the california nebulae untracked uh with a canon 200 d canon nifty 50 from a portal to sky this is 496 lights and processed with deep sky stacker photoshop and picks insight shree charon ms noted that they didn't think the california nebulae came out well and wondered if it was a capturing error or a processing error error uh i'm not sure exactly what you mean but didn't come out well i mean i guess there's like a little bit of a blur to it but a that might just be the distortion from the lens in general you know the the california nebulae is just a large red nebulae like this so that's about what it looks like through a 50 millimeter lens yeah i think that came out pretty well for 50 millimeter untracked uh and in general this came out really well for untracked astrophotography you've captured a huge portion of the torus molecular cloud here which is very dim i mean very difficult uh object um so this is this is really well done another sort of masterpiece of of untracked astrophotography uh you know this one in that that triangulum galaxy earlier i think are are two of my favorites uh i've ever seen untracked okay sigurd sigurd took this photo of the iris nebulae and with a sky watcher any q six mount and a sky watcher 200 p f5 newtonian and a canon d 60 mark two camera stock and this is 19 hours of integration from a portal for sky sigurd processed it with deep sky stacker serial star net and gimp and mentioned that this was his fourth time processing the data and the struggle was always to bring up the dust without making the image too noisy i mean i think you've done a nice job in bringing out the details it might be my preference to keep the image a little bit darker overall than you have both in the highlights and the mids the shadows are fine so just to show you what i mean there's just a slight edit um you know this this is different from monitor to monitor of course but uh i i like with a dark nebulae to feel like they're a little they're dark right they're they're just above the sky level so keeping them a little darker i think is good and it also i think helps hide the noise a little bit more one thing i thought about with your setup uh in terms of investing in something it might be worth investing in two pieces of fairly expensive software picks insight and blur exterminator i i think that your uh you would get you would get some benefit out of those two especially the blur exterminator for just sharpening up uh your stars a little bit which i think you know are are well-colomated and focused and everything but just uh you're probably at the limit of your of your seeing simon used a canon 90d and 300 millimeter lens he took this from portal seven sky untracked and this is about 350 lights at f 5.6 1p 0.3 seconds each simon used serial for processing this uh very nice uh i think i would just suggest a more contrast um maybe make the stars a little less colorful uh so that the dumbbell stands out so by more contrast i mean just we can just do an s curve here something like that if you go too far with the contrast it also brings out the noise but i think something like that helps bring it out a little bit more you could also do some selective masking uh to to bring out the dumbbell even more than that okay this is ski 220 who captured the heart and soul nebula with a night sky camera modified canon t3i an opt along illen hands clip and filter a canon 200 millimeter lens and an eye optron sky grinder pro this is taken from a portal four sky and was 50 lights at two minutes each processed with deep sky stacker photoshop and lightroom and this is ski 220's first attempt at using both the modified camera and the filter so for your first attempt this is great the framing is perfect uh i love the the you know the vertical look with uh the soul nebula sort of floating up here out of frame uh they sort of look like balloons to me um my suggestion for improvement is to try serial for stacking and try a script in serial called extract ha and o3 it's designed to give you basically two black and white images that you can then use to process it more like narrowband processing um and i think that's the best way to get the most out of the ellen hands filter because right now your image is very red and we're not getting a lot of that o3 signal out of this because the o3 is a lot dimmer especially in the heart and soul so i think serial is the way to go with that but of course there are other ways to do it too you could there's pics in sight there's even photoshop you can extract the color channels here and and work that way as well space side photography captured the sickness loop here with a stock canon 60d a sam yang 135 millimeter lens and a sky watch or star adventurer this was taken from portal four and is a bit over of two hours of integration and processed with deep sky stacker star netting gimp and space side photography asks i had trouble bringing out the fainter parts of the veil do i think it's more to do with their editing skills or how much data they collected probably mostly how much data you collected you know the thing is uh these the witches broom and the eastern veil those are much brighter than the middle part the flooding triangle so i think uh yeah it would just require more data maybe three times more data to bring out all of the stuff in the middle compared to the outer parts of the supernova remnant but this this looks good to me for for just what you have captured and also impressive with a stock camera speedy electron sent in this image of the heart and soul nebulae taken with a canon 550d a canon 55 to 250 zoom lens and on a sky watcher star adventurer this is about 90 minutes of integration from portal three and processed with deep sky stacker and gimp and speedy electron mentioned that their plan was to capture the heart and soul but then they couldn't see it even in a test shot so they used the double cluster as a reference for the frame but then cropped back in in processing to the heart and soul for the final shot but noted to me that they may be cropped too much so that got me curious and i brought up the data and and processed it myself and so here is your full field of view and personally i really love this full field of view we've seen this a few times from other people in the critique as well but this one's a little bit different actually it's even wider and it really shows these dark streamers of the milky way band and i also like the composition even if it was on an unintentional what i'm seeing here is a strong triangle here between the double cluster the soul nebulae the heart nebulae and this bright star over here and then it's mimicked by that dark nebula streamer right there so i really like it i think uh this you know the colorful stars of the double cluster and the star field i think add a lot uh to the heart and soul speedy's astro took this shot of the horse head and flame nebulae from a border for sky with an asi 533 mc and a sky watcher 80 ed telescope on an ecu 6r mount this is three and a half hours of integration no filters very nice framing speedies this 533 really fits the with the 80 millimeter refractor really fits in the horse head and flame quite well if you know what i see is speaking of triangles from the last critique this one has a really nice triangle right there uh sort of forming an arrow up into looking into on the talk um i'm not positive but uh i think there's an issue in processing because if you look at some of the details here when you zoom in they have sort of like a weird effect on them it's almost like a oh it's yeah very evident in the flame it's like a oil painting effect or something so i'm guessing that's some kind of noise reduction you used um i maybe back off on whatever that did that um because it looks fine zoomed out but then when you zoom in there's it has a weird it gives that a weird look and i feel like it's sort of changing the morphology the shape of some of the details in the picture okay spinach the wise uh took this photo of the pleaty star cluster with a panasonic lumix g81 and an olympus 75 millimeter lens and this was done untracked okay another really cool one untracked on a gorilla pod from a border four sky and spinach the wise took 2357 lights at one point second one point six seconds each so another uh herculean effort here and a great result for contract astrophotography the colors the stretch the star reduction all these things look pretty nice to me i especially like some of these details you've caught in the dust clouds my only suggestion is to just be careful with how you're applying noise reduction um it looks like you use camera raw filter on the starless i think if i were to do that i'd be very selective about it maybe even mask where you want it applied it feels like the pleaties got really hit with a lot of noise reduction but that's actually where you probably have the best signal to noise ratio so i would actually not use really any noise reduction there um but it gives it a little bit of an odd effect where that looks a little blurry right there i mean i am sort of speculating about you know what i'm seeing um but yeah that that's just what it feels like happened um but other than that i think this looks really nice the you know it's it's very well done overall and uh very impressive you know the dedication that people are showing with with untracked test of photography okay stefan astro captured the iris nebula this is with a celestron nine and a quarter inch sct and a qs i 583 ccd camera lrgb filters from a portal for sky so it's definitely neat to see uh all these details in the iris nebula close up like this um stefan mentioned having some issues with the stars uh i did take a look at your stacked luminance data here and it looks like in the center you have excellent detail really sharp stars and then away from center uh not so good um so it looks like it's probably a back focus issue i'm not exactly sure though which version of the sct you have i tried to look it up a little bit online and it seemed to indicate that uh that the edge hd version at least had a particular back focus of 139 millimeters so i'm just speculating but maybe that's why uh you're having this sort of weird focus issue uh where the stars away from center seem to be not in focus so i don't think it's i feel like you sort of phrase the the star's question as if it was a processing question but i actually think it's more of a gear uh issue so i think there's something going on with your equipment where i think it's probably back focus uh needs to be addressed to get the most out of the the full field here that the the celestron c nine and a quarter should be able to deliver um because if it if it could only do this center part that'd be a very small field i think it should be able to do more than that okay stefan nebula stefan nebula captured the veil no not the veil the vella super bubble with a sharp star hnt f2.8 telescope the asi 183 mm camera and a sky watcher any q6 mount and then a mix of chroma lrgb and astronomic high speed max fr narrowband filters ha and o3 and this was captured from a portal to sky processed with pics insight um so some very interesting nebula structures here uh i love the you know the in here you have these o3 uh streamers and then it feels like this stuff is behind them so it has a very nice feeling of depth to it and uh while i don't go quite this saturated with my stuff i do respect the the look here it's uh when done well it works it works really well and i think this is done well um stefan says he thinks it feels a little bit flat and is looking for any constructive criticism including composition and creative angles so i started thinking about composition and thought you know it maybe it doesn't quite work for me for some reason and so the first thing that i always try compositionally uh is just see well maybe it will work at a different rotation angle so i rotated this uh 90 degrees clockwise and for me this somehow works much better and i think i know why which is i read left to right and that's the same way i read images i think a lot of people that's probably true um and so when you read this image left to right if you start up here in the you know in the upper left and you follow the brightest part it's this this o3 streamer down here and if you keep following it it sort of leads you around the image in this very nice way and and things repeat in this very pleasing way where it goes down and then up and then you go down to the next loop and down and up and then you see this one is is also repeating that pattern somehow on the other orientation i wasn't getting all of that so my eye wasn't being led through the image uh quite as well as as this way uh so i i think this is how i would uh frame it um yeah okay steve also known as the mad lawyer and uh now a winner of a couple of apods at this point uh he's you know getting he's been very dedicated to astrophotography and advancing in the hobby very quickly and i know all that because he's a member of my patreon and discord uh community anyways steve sent in this photo of the elephant trunk nebula taken from a portal for sky with a couple different telescopes and cameras the cameras were a canon ra and ansi 2600 mc and this was steve's first experiment with trying to combine data from different systems um so uh my suggestions are i have a few uh one is personally i like the elephant trunk in the in the orientation that's a little bit more common which is 180 degrees rotated from here so the elephant trunk is going up and down like that but from the bottom and up uh i think it just looks a little bit better that way and then my second is i think there's a lot of color noise that you've uh raised the level of and then smoothed out and so it sort of looks like it's nebulosity but i don't think it really is a lot of this uh unevenness in the background out here is what i'm talking about mostly so uh background extraction is going to be very important before you you get far with any kind of stretching or or coloring of of these kinds of shots oh and steve asked that i do a shout out so since we're pretty far along in the video i'll indulge him so hello fort worth texas astronomical society stu captured gum 12 with an asi 2600 mm camera red cat 51 telescope and narrowband filters this is a two-pane mosaic stitched in astro pixel processor processing was also done in pics insight and photoshop and stu said that he had some gradients in the ha that he had trouble getting rid of so i think i see what you mean like for instance down here this area is really dark while here it's much brighter so i think that's maybe what it is i don't if you hadn't pointed it out i'm not sure if i would really noticed um but yeah an easy fix might be just to sort of manually uh brighten up this part of the sky and it would look uh more finished after you do that uh sometimes what i'll do to help with gradients with a mosaic is i'll run background extraction on each panel on each filter and then also on the mosaic uh images so i think it's running background extraction like nine times you know six times for a two-panel mosaic with three filters it'd be running at six times before mosaic construction and maybe three times after uh just to really try to flatten out any kind of gradients in there and i really like the colors here stu the it's really interesting to have this very rich blue over here and then this much more pastel blue on this side it really adds a lot of interest and then there's there's also a lot of interesting variation in what you've gotten with the oranges and yellows as well super zoki super zoki captured an image of the milky way from a portal three sky this is with a samyang 16 millimeter lens nikon d5300 camera and this is 100 lights at f2 stacked with deep sky stacker and processed with photoshop this is super zoki's first major capture and they are also new to using photoshop uh so for your first one it's it's really great my only processing suggestion is the color balance is just a little bit yellow overall to my eye so here's a shift to the color balance and you can look at what i did here the shadows i just took out a little bit of magenta added a little blue in the mid tones i added again a little bit of blue just to make it a little less yellow overall um you might already know this but just in case you don't uh you've captured some nebulae in here you can see the north america nebulae right there uh right below that is the satyr butterfly and up here this is the elephant trunk nebulae just you can just barely make it out but that that's it right there but the north america is always the one that i think uh comes across pretty clearly even in these very wide angle shots okay swastik swastik sent in a photo of the iran constellation taken with a smartphone from a portal five sky and swastik wanted tips about removing the background but then finding uh after you remove the background that there's too much noise yeah that can be a big problem basically the light pollution itself is this very nice uh signal it might actually be the brightest signal in your image but then when you take it out you leave all of the noise from that signal because it's intermingled with the rest of the noise in the picture so when you find that you can't really remove the light pollution in that way i'd recommend not doing it in that way so instead what i would do in this case is i probably just crop down to the nebula itself i mean not the nebula the constellation and i would just darken the background from here okay and then there is now a gradient there um so what you could do is make a gradient mask something like that there we go okay and then i'm just going to keep darkening the background and you'll have to play around with this you can see there's we're still getting sort of gradients so you can play around with layer masks and um curves transformation so you don't you're not subtracting the background but you can still sort of process in a way uh so that you can see more stars and get a darker background just through curves sillard sillard captured the eagle nebula with a sky watcher evil guide 50 ed telescope an asi 178 mm cooled camera an opt along ha 7 nanometer filter and a sky watcher ecu 3-2 modded with on step to have go to ability imaging from a portal nine sky sillard took a hundred lights at 60 seconds each and sillard used deep sky stacker and gimp to edit sillard asked what i think is possible with this setup and whether he should consider any new gear so in terms of what i think is possible i think you just showed what's possible you've captured the pillars of creation very well here from a light polluted sky um in terms of what gear to add to this kind of setup next i would highly recommend an o3 filter uh that would be high on my list if you can find one at the right price because then you can do h o o imaging uh and get a lot more color into your nebulae and sulfur filter isn't particularly important if you have ha and o3 you can do so much uh in terms of neuro band imaging uh so keep it up i think that's a very nice setup and and adding an o3 filter would make it even better taha captured the andromeda galaxy untracked with a canon 50d a tamron 70 to 300 zoom lens on a basic tripod this was 956 lights at two seconds each for a total of 32 minutes under a portal five sky and processed using pix insight and taha says they definitely have the you know as photography bug they're in the process of buying a star adventurer tracker uh but this looks great taha very nice color and details uh in this for untracked you can even see some of that those clusters of blue stars out in the outer arms of the galaxy here good luck with the new tracker and i'm sure you're going to put it to good use tomin captured the heart and soul nebulae with a nikon d 5600 a 70 to 300 millimeter zoom lens and on an iop drawn skyguider pro this is with an opt along one and a quarter inch u hc filter under portal three skies and this was 62 lights at 120 seconds each processed with deep sky stacker pix insight photoshop star net and topaz de noise so it's nice to see the double cluster up here in the corner uh the framing is pretty good uh i'm not sure if that one and a quarter inch filter is really working out for your camera sensor because i feel like this blue ring might be a reflection from it uh usually we don't think that one and a quarter inch filters work that well for a psc sensors now i know you might have the kind of adapter that gets it very close to the camera sensor so maybe that is working but it feels like there might be a reflection from the filter cell causing this problem here um but from portal three i would probably try without the u hc filter anyways and just try uh with no filter uh in your modified camera and i think that you might like the results better that way you'd get much better star color uh at least and while the nebulae might not pop quite as much uh i think it might make up for it in just a flatter field with better star color okay terry sent in a photo of the heart nebula this was taken with a red cat 51 an asi 294 mc an opt along ellen hans filter and and an iop drawn gem 28 this was under portal three skies and was processed with deep sky stacker star net and photoshop and uh i think the crop you picked and the uh the colors overall are very nice you know it's it's hard to get this transition from uh the sky to the nebulae the heart nebula especially right and i think you did a very nice job with that um i thought that it looked a little bit soft uh so i'm not sure if maybe um some of the data was a little out of focus uh because it doesn't look like you applied that much noise reduction it just looks sort of the details just look a little soft for a red cat 51 so i'm not positive about that that's just sort of a hunch just to look through your data maybe and see if if you've lost focus at some point and had better focus at another point the astro guy sent in an image of a ryan's belt and sword this was taken with a canon 1500 d with 75 to 300 millimeter zoom lens and this is more than 1200 lights uh at f 3.2 at three seconds each untracked and the astro guy said no issues with processing and i agree this is another amazing untracked capture here uh it has a very good flow from m 78 down you know up through the horse head and the ryan and then you're going to have a nice bright star up in the upper right hand corner uh you've brought out some of the dark nebulae in the constellation successfully so very impressive uh congrats the astro guy on on something uh that looks really good especially with that lens too i i think you're probably we're at 75 millimeters with this and uh looks really nice okay the stellar remnant took this image of a ryan nebula with a canon r a a radiant raptor 61 and a sky watcher star adventurer it was processed with a basic workflow in pics insight and the stellar remnant asked about uh this star right here in the center and there was like an artifact uh that they tried to heal in photoshop but it didn't uh really work um but then they found that that artifact was actually in their individual light frames so uh i looked at your stack and yeah i see what you mean um i wonder if you looked through all your individual light frames and if it was in every single one or if it was something that was in just in some of them um but that that's sort of what i what i would look into i wasn't sure if it was just sort of a stacking artifact or if it was uh you know something that was there in the data uh in every frame otherwise i think this looks nice maybe a little bit over uh smoothed for my taste but uh the colors and the star field are both really beautiful the ghost captured the milky way with a samsung s22 ultra this is from a portal three sky it's a single 30 second exposure and the ghost asked if it's possible to stack a bunch of short exposures from a cell phone like i've shown you can do with the s l r s yes definitely it's definitely possible to stack cell phone pictures i've seen people do it i've done it myself uh i haven't had a huge amount of luck with like doing calibration frames and raw and all that but i have stacked jpegs and uh that's worked pretty well okay theo captured m31 with a canon 5d canon 24 to 105 zoom lens at f4 and theo took 1738 lights from from two seconds each from a portal four sky theo processed this image with zero star net and gimp and asked why are the stars not round is it the lens okay and this again was the 24 to 105 let's take a look okay that does look like a lens distortion of some kind sort of like a flaring it almost looks also like uh flaring mixed with like a tilted lens element um so yes i think that is the lens uh unfortunately i'm not sure if it's a bad copy or if that's just sort of the nature of that lens and unfortunately there's not much you can do about it um but i think your editing taste is very good uh these look like very natural colors and an impressive amount of detail and color especially for untracked okay thomas captured m 33 with a sky watcher 150p newtonian on an ecu 3-2 mount and with a stock canon 600d uh this is a portal four sky and is 350 lights at one minute each so about six hours and uh it looks good i think that maybe the saturation in the galaxy could go a little bit higher with six hours of data um you know i just tried uh playing around with saturation just to see uh could the saturation of the you know these stars and the nebulae go higher and it looked like you know there there was color there just by raising the saturation this is of course a very uh dramatic example just to see the color in the jpeg but i think if you sort of incorporated a little bit of a higher saturation while editing i think that could look good okay thomas took this image of sygnus with a stock canon 80d a rokinon 16 millimeter lens and a sky watcher star adventurer and thomas asked if the lighter part at the bottom um is likely light pollution or sensor leakage uh i'd always guess light pollution i mean this is pretty minor but um light pollution gradients are very common even if you're at a dark site uh you still can get light pollution gradients my suggestion with this image is uh pretty much just to fix the the blue cast um pretty easy to do i can just use color balance here i can go to the shadows and uh play around with the sliders until you know you get a more neutral look basically the the milky way should have a sort of neutralish brownish sometimes goldish look to it and the dark the sky should be mostly dark so that was definitely a blue cast i didn't completely fix it but you sort of get the idea of what it was going for there okay thomas took this photo of andromeda this is with a sony a 6000 mirrorless camera sky watcher star adventurer tracker and a sky watcher evo lux 62 refractor and this was from a portal apes guy stacked with deep sky stacker processed in photoshop so this looks good thomas i have two quick suggestions and they're both in camera raw filter so let's take a look so we'll open up the filter and my first suggestion is i see a little bit of color noise in the sky so you can see it probably most clearly in here see all these like little red pixels and so you can just take this color noise reduction slider and slide that over to the left i mean to the right until a lot of those red pixels are desaturated so something like 50 looks about right and then the other thing i noticed is on some of these bright stars in the galaxy you have a little bit of magenta fringe it's very minor but you can clear that up with this defringe slider right here okay so two little minor things you might not even notice until you zoom in but both can be cleaned up with camera raw filter teego sent in an image of a ryan's sword here this is done with a canon t7 a canon 55 to 250 millimeter zoom lens and an iopter on sky guide or pro this is 16 by one minute at iso 200 f 5.6 and portal 8 looks nice teego i think in terms of processing you could add a little bit more saturation to the image and maybe a little bit brighter in the nebulae for capture i'd recommend using iso 800 or 1600 with the canon t7 even from portal 8 and i know if that means your photo gets very bright you know like the histogram peak is going up to 50 percent then instead of turning down the iso i would turn down the shutter speed or close down the aperture more uh probably i would start with shutter speed and and go for slightly shorter exposures i know it's a little bit counterintuitive but higher iso and canon cameras usually actually means lower noise for stacked astrophotography okay tim sent a photo of their ryan and running man nebulae captured with a canon 700 d canon 75 to 300 millimeter zoom lens and sky watcher star adventurer this is 91 minutes integration from portal 5 and processed with photoshop tim said that he had no specific issues with the image and i agree this looks really good i don't see really anything to improve in particular either tim did ask how to know when to upgrade equipment and mentioned one issue he had with the canon dslr is horizontal banding that's a common issue with canon there is an action set you can buy for photoshop called astronomy tools and they have a horizontal banding noise reduction script this is about 30 so that might be an option while you're saving for something else but as to the other question of like when to upgrade different to different things you know all gear has pros and cons what you have now a star adventurer with a what was it a canon to 70 you know canon zoom lens canon dslr that's a very small compact setup you could probably keep it that small but upgrade to a small telescope like a william optics red cat 51 and there are definite advantages to doing so you get much better star quality but then there are other upgrades that you really would have to consider if they work for you because they add complexity you know bigger mounts computers auto guiding all of these things so it's up to you whether that works for your sort of style of imaging okay tim captured the heart nebula from a portal for sky with an astrotech at 65 edq and ioptron 740 mountain an asi 294 mc camera with the zwo duo narrowband filter and tim said this is his first attempt with a duo narrowband and was wondering how to bring out more blue so with most emission nebulae if you just process them in a straightforward way with that narrowband filter dual narrowband filter it's going to come out just like this mostly red and i mean this is a very nice natural result this is sort of what the nebulae looks like in terms of the balance of things with a modified camera but if you want to sort of mess with that balance and really bring out the o3 make it more like a false color narrowband imaging then the thing you do is you separate the color channels when the data is still linear so you can stretch the o3 much more aggressively and then recombine as an ho image it's probably best to also use star net when you do this so that you don't blow out the stars and then another question you had was how to get the best star color the best is to not use the filter so basically you want to take one set of data with the filter one set without and then you combine the stars from the set without the filter into the starless version with the filter teemore an 18 year old astrophotographer captured the crescent nebulae with a sky watcher newtonian a sky watcher heq 5 mount and a modified canon 1100d with an elextreme filter this is two hours integration from a portal nine sky and processed with pics insight and photoshop so i think this is very tasteful uh processing teemore it looks good you have some nice details there um i like the crescent pointing down like this and the stars look well focused and uh well collimated as far as i can see i think for an ho look i prefer the more red pink look for h and uh this is more of like a brownish orange look um more sort of reminiscent of Hubble palette you know i think you've done it pretty well but it's just not my uh personal favorite um if you keep adding more data to this image one thing you can look forward to is the o3 forms a nice shell that goes out to about here uh with the crescent nebula topaz are captured andromeda this is with a next star 130 slt telescope and a self modified canon 1000d this is 148 lights at one minute each from a portal six sky and topaz are mentioned that the 148 lights used were chosen from a total of 260 lights actually taken that many was needed because many were rejected due to the inaccuracy of tracking with the next star telescope so that makes sense the next star telescope is pretty neat but it's an alt as mount it's really designed for beginners doing some you know visual or maybe planetary work so topaz are getting it working for deep sky is a very impressive feat you've done it very well here uh there's lots of nice details and uh it looks quite good my two small nitpicks with the processing are that the sky is uh clipped to black i think it looks better for the galaxy when the sky is not quite this black and then uh the smaller stars in the image they zoom in away from the galaxy have sort of a greenish color to them i think they should look a little bit more yellow i'm not sure exactly why that happened but just something to be aware of in processing tabias sent in this image of the Pleiades taken with a william optics gt 102 refractor an asi 2600 mc an iopteron 740 ec mount and this is tabias's longest integration ever 27 hours from a portal six sky so i think this looks really great uh tabias i think you've done well in processing to show sort of the maximum amount of maximum amount of detail possible while still looking uh natural and and and nice uh just sort of neutral uh color palette to it um nothing sort of uh too extreme with it um you know i the struggle sometimes is between detail and saturation because you know this maybe looks a little bit uh not saturated for the Pleiades but i think by not saturating it much you really see a lot more uh detail here in some of these fine wispy things going on so i think in this case uh it's it it is the right call now tabias said his stars were a little bit egg shaped in the corners you know when i zoomed in and looked around it's not something i noticed until you pointed it out and then once you pointed it out i can see what you mean but uh it's not really that big a deal i don't think it looks like your sensor might be too far away from the reducer based on what we're seeing um because the stars are perpendicular to the center not going in towards it uh so that usually means you need uh less space um between the sensor and the reducer and then the only thing that i thought with this image is i'm not sure about the uh framing to me it's a little bit imbalanced because uh you have this all the good stuff on this side of the image and then you know this side is basically is fairly empty you know there is some dust but it's just doesn't feel it just feels like a little bit sort of heavy on this side with not much going on over here so i did uh do a rotation and i like this uh vertical framing much better i think i said this maybe in another critique but this has or no that was for uh something different that was the horse head inflamed um it it forms this sort of nice arrow here with these bright stars and is inverted this negative space with the Pleiades and so it really leads your eye into what is important in this image and i think i like this better okay Todd captured the heart nebula from portal six as with a sharp star 61 a celestial on avx and an asi 183 mc camera with an l extreme filter and this is six hours integration Todd processes using pics insight so this looks very nice Todd uh my only critique is the background is a little bit bright and uneven this is a very common thing with the heart nebula it's a hard background what i'd recommend is do a background extraction with each color channel um you know each filter um before combining them uh together sorry well there's one filter so with each color channel so separate the red green and blue run a background extraction on each one stretch them separately then bring it all back together uh Todd asked if he wanted to get better star color by removing the l extreme filter how much data should he get and how would he combine that so from a portal from a dark site i would maybe get you know an hour from a portal six site i would get at least two hours probably of the rgb uh data for the stars um and then in terms of how to combine uh there's Russell Croman star exterminator and pics insight there's an option in there for stars only and on screen stars turn both those check boxes on and then you're going to have just perfectly extracted stars that you can screen blend back on to your narrowband data okay tofu and freed made this image of the rosette with a modified tasco four and a half inch newtonian and a cannon power shot s90 i'd like to sort of see that setup i'm not exactly sure how it works but uh it sounds cool this was mostly shot from portal four but also incorporates freed's data which was mono luminance data from a portal eight so i think this is quite beautiful to who i love the you know the feeling it gives and the how it fills the frame with uh nebulosity um the framing is is excellent uh and i like how you cropped uh in the you know the dimensions of this image are actually quite small 924 pixels square so i'm i'm guessing you had a much bigger field to work with but then for artistic reasons cropped to just this uh my only suggestion is you you also sent the starless i took a look at that and looking at that i felt like there should be a few little elements in here that should be sharper um basically this dark nebula structure down here and up here in the two corners so here's just a little um sharpness uh enhancement let me make it a little bigger okay so here's before and here's after and it basically just adds a little bit of micro contrast to those elements so i would just do that and then add the stars back in and i think that would look uh really nice it it gives it a little bit more of a feeling of depth because then the sharpest parts of the image feel like they're in front and then you're you're going back into the image where it's sort of you sort of lose focus tom captured the heart and soul nebula and the double cluster with a nicon d3200 a star tracker and a sigma 70 to 300 zoom lens this is one hour of data from portal 4 processed with serial and photoshop uh nicely done tom the double cluster especially pops in some really nice color here let me zoom in on that so yeah you have some really nice star color there for the double cluster uh the heart and soul of course are hard to bring out with a stock camera but you can sort of see their shape in there um tom asked how to bring out the nebulae more and how to reduce the number of stars without additional software and tom was using serial and photoshop okay perfect so it's not really additional software but if you update to 0 1.2 beta and also install star net which is also free and link the two together i have a video about this you can really bring out the nebulae very well and also manage the star field in the process it's called star recomposition and i think you'll you'll really enjoy that okay tomas shot the lagoon and triphid nebulae with a nikon d3300 a 55 to 300 millimeter zoom lens and an l enhanced filter on a star adventurer this is from portal 8 with processing in deep sky stacker serial and photoshop i really like the composition here tomas with the extended nebulosity off the lagoon going down into this corner and leading your eye up to the lagoon right in center uh looks really nice uh has a nice flow this is tomas's first time using the l enhanced filter i was looking for ways to improve sharpness noise color correction and so forth uh so my biggest suggestion is to work on the background sky uh color and uh evenness using background extraction there's a sort of a dark hole right here right around the um lagoon nebulae that i find a little bit distracting i don't think it should be quite that dark in that part of the sky um and then generally this the photo has a very sort of bluish greenish color cast let me just sort of show you if i take out so here's before and here's a slightly more neutral sky it's still not perfectly neutral but i just wanted to sort of give you an idea of what i was seeing uh i think uh it should be possible to sort of even get even more neutral if you use uh background extraction in serial and some of the other color calibration tools in there tomas captured a portion of the milky way with a nikon d 300 s a nikon 50 millimeter f 1.8 lens and untracked just on a tripod tomas shot 71 lights at eight seconds each from portal four sky and i think this looks quite good uh it's it's an unusual part of the milky way to feature uh but it's a very nice star field and there's lots of interesting you know dark nebulae structures to look at here um and tomas asked how to address banding along the edges so i'm not sure quite sure what he means by banding maybe he means that the stars are distorted that's just sort of a normal thing with lenses um there's also this over here this extra distortion um i looked at your raw frame and it's sort of interesting there's if you go over here to the left side it's like there's some good stars and then it's very distorted and then good stars again and so usually that happens when you have some data that um didn't quite get the right distortion model when stacking it's it's more common with wide field stuff like this so you can try stacking again but i don't i think you'll just get the same result there's not much you can do other than really crop that away i think you know with a 50 millimeter lens you're you're a 50 nifty 50 basically you're gonna have to crop in uh often to just get rid of some of that distortion along the edge uh if it bothers you tony sent in this photo he calls a ryan's shower it was taken with a samsung s21 ultra smartphone it's a single eight second exposure and it was lightly edited in apple photos i really like it tony i'm guessing that this is the moon glow from up here and uh in some of my other critiques i've sort of mentioned like you know having some kind of glow at the on the edge or in a corner is something i don't like but in this case it's really cool because it's like the glow from the moon um is illuminating the sky and and causing this sort of nice triangle shape and then a ryan constellation is centered right under it so it all seems very intentionally uh photographed and and composed um and then i even like uh down here you have a very nice sort of contrasting colors of blue into an orange of uh a little artificial glow with the cloud bank and some trees along the horizon so it all looks uh really nicely put together okay two zombie two zombie captured okay two zombie captured the ryan belt and sword with a canon 250d a 75 to 300 millimeter telephoto lens at 75 millimeters and this is 117 lights at two minutes each iso 400 uh my first suggestion would be to raise your iso to like 800 or maybe even 1600 and then you might have to lower your exposures uh time to compensate but uh i do see a little bit of um banding and noise stuff in this that i think is usually accentuated by low isos on canon cameras and and it's better to i think you have to use the higher isos unfortunately uh i only seem to get the uh stacked uh picture here not the processed picture but from what i can see it's really good you know your stars are nice and round uh looks like you have good star color i really like uh the framing you picked where you know you can get the whole witch head nebula over here uh but you also have the belt stars i think if i was doing this uh you know processing this image what i would do is i would crop it super wide to just the top half because there's not too much interesting going on down here and that just forms a really interesting wide composition i think Toto captured the heart and soul nebula with an a7r a sony a7r a canon 300 f4 lens and an astronomical cls filter from bordle 4 and this was processed with serial starna and gimp uh toto first sent me i hope you don't mind me showing this uh this version and then later sent me this version and i just thought the difference was interesting um in most ways the new version feels more finished because the first one has some obvious issues with uneven background and noise uh the main way that toto fix that in the new version was just to really darken the sky which is a you know a good way to go with that often um my only issue with the new version is this you darken the sky but also raised i think the saturation level and i don't i don't like that combination um if you want to darken the sky this much i would bring down the saturation i mean bring it down um by 30 percent or minus 30 um so here's before there's after to me that looks now much more balanced with the sky for some reason high saturation and dark don't work together you can either go low saturation and dark or high saturation and bright okay trevor captured the elephant trunk nebula with a red cat 51 a canon t6 and a zwo am5 this is trevor's first dso capture and processing attempt so for a first attempt this is very nice um it was stacked in a step and processed in pics insight and trevor wants to know about focus about removing the stars in post processing about star reduction um as far as focus this looks reasonably in focus to me uh stars look pretty sharp um so i'm not sure what else to say about it other than you want to check focus multiple times a night with a red cat 51 it holds focus pretty well but it can still easily lose focus if the temperature changes enough um in terms of processing you've stretched it pretty aggressively meaning the photo is bright the star field is very present one of the advantages of using star net or star exterminator to remove the stars is that you can then control the balance between the nebula and the star field um the most modern star reduction technique uh is bill blanchin's script uh that's the one that i prefer uh so you can look that up online on youtube it's it's available um since this critique is coming out months later maybe you already have uh but that's what i'd recommend okay tristan took this photo of this of sygnus uh north america and pelican with the sky watcher star adventurer mount a stock cannon 2000 d and a san yang 135 stop down to f4 tristan lives in a portal four area and this is a three hour integration um my first thought is the nebulae uh looked a little weird uh because this is a fairly natural color shot but then the nebulae looks sort of like washed out and um maybe a little bit too yellow uh so i just um process the jpeg here just a little bit uh just to sort of show you what i mean so um here's before i feel like they look a little too brightly washed out and yellow and then here's after um going for just a slightly more naturalistic look um and tristan asked about his stars being a bat away from center so if we look at the stars in the center they look like this and if we look at them over here they look like this that does look like uh some kind of lens problem lens defect unfortunately while the samyang 135 is a great lens uh there are quality control issues where you can get a bad copy and so it's quite possible you have a bad copy here and uh there's not much you can do to fix that yourself other than maybe sell the lens or something getting a new one or uh if you want to not sort of play that lottery um i think uh getting a small telescope might be a better investment uh a william optics red cat is is a pretty consistently good uh telescope i haven't heard too many complaints about bad copies there okay troi who also captured the north america and pelican this was with a con canon okay troi also captured the north america and pelican this is with a canon 2000d a 75 to 300 millimeter lens and a star adventurer and this is an hour and 12 minutes integration from portal four it was processed with deep sky stacker and pics insight uh and i think this looks very good troi lots of nice details here uh especially for your stock uh camera and kit lens i do have three quick tips uh one is it could use a bit more background extraction the bottom is brighter than the top there's a little gradient there i would use sc n r green to get rid of the green noise in the picture and i would bring down the brightness overall uh quite a bit something sort of hard with the gradient but something like that maybe um yeah and then kill the gradient too and i think uh that'll look a lot more finished okay troi's works shot the dumb bell nebula this is with an avx an eight inch newtonian and a canon 750d and a u hc filter this is under an hour of integration from portal eight and troi's works said he tried to bring out more red in the nebula uh so you beat me to the punch that was what i would have suggested is maybe just bring out the the red in the nebula here a little bit more um let's just try with uh just a simple mask here and photoshop okay so that's obviously very sort of a hack job but it's definitely there just wanted to show you that um i'm actually surprised the green came out so well if you were using a u hc filter because i thought a u hc filter cuts out most of the green spectrum um and this also looks really natural color so i wonder if you really were using the u hc filter a little suspicious uh but that's about it i think that with a little bit of work you could bring out more of that red because you do have it there it's just getting a lost a little bit in the green okay tuka uh captured the iris nebula this is with a nikon d600 a ts optics one oh two ed in an eq 6r mount this is a little over four hours from a portal for sky it was stacked in deep sky stacker and edited in photoshop so i do like the restraint of keeping it subtle uh i do and i like the framing here this is the ghost nebula down there uh tuka asked about uh star reduction so instead of star reduction what i would instead look into is star net uh which removes the stars you can then bring up uh the background about the nebulosity and then add the stars back in and the nice thing about about that is it lets you stretch the nebula without worrying about the stars and in my opinion that's going to look better than star reduction because your your stars look really nice right now but if i were to just um you know stretch this image more the star field becomes a little bit overwhelming but if you imagine uh you know bringing out the nebulosity but the stars are back like this it can it can look really nice so that's what you can do with star net okay omer omer captured the north america nebula this is with an explorer scientific refractor and a 294 mc camera and an ioptron 725 mount with an l enhance uh filter this is 45 minutes integration from a portal aid sky and it was processed with deep sky stacker and photoshop omer mentioned that the color of the nebula was hard it looks a little bit too yellow um well so what you can do in photoshop is selective color um and this allows you a lot of control over the color of uh different colors in your picture um and so i'm not going to get it quite right in the jpeg but you know you can see that i just changed the color of it quite a bit just with that quick few uh sliders so another thing omer mentioned being an issue was the stars so let's take a look so it looks like you added diffraction spikes then you also have pretty elongated stars in the corners and this is fairly normal because i think you're not using a field flattener uh with the telescope so i what i would suggest is get either a field flattener or a flattener reducer for the telescope and i think hotek h-o tech makes one that many people use successfully with the explore scientific telescope okay uri captured barnard three with an asi 533 mc a rokinon 135 at f2 and this was processed with pics insight and photoshop and uri mentioned the stars could be better but probably that was a consequence of shooting at f2 and the photo feels somewhat unnatural to him but he couldn't figure out why so i'm not sure either exactly uh i think somewhat earlier shared a barnard three picture and it was much closer in uh but it didn't look anything like this uh i think part of it is some of it's it's not about how many colors are in the image but it's about the particular colors that you ended up with um something about this pink of the hydrogen uh will look good in a shot where it's mostly emission nebulae uh but when it's mixed with this more natural stuff of the dark dust it looks a little bit funky um and then this i don't know what this feature is here this sort of periwinkle blue feature is that ref reflection nebulae or what but that that looks a little odd to my eye too i've never really seen quite that color naturally out in the sky um you know i've seen that kind of color when people are doing false color mappings with narrow band and stuff like that but i think this is all supposed to be sort of a natural color and so i think it's mostly the pink and periwinkle uh don't quite belong or don't look quite right uh so one thing you can try is a photometric color calibration and see sort of where that puts the colors okay v captured central sickness with a canon nifty 50 lens at f4 this is an asi 1600 mm camera zwo uh shho filters and all on an iopton ioptron skyguider pro tracker so that's a very interesting little setup uh you're you're very wide angle so you can use the the tracker just fine and get sharp stars and without trailing but then you're using a fairly expensive uh camera and filter setup so that you can do narrow band imaging uh this is 12 hours 15 minutes total from a portal six sky it was processed with pics in sight and v mentioned wishing they had more data but they've been working on this project over a couple of different years and so i'm very much the same way with projects i'm always wanting more data and always starting new projects and then i pick them back up years later uh but i'm bad about finishing projects anyways the framing is spot on here the i really like the neb in the center with this sort of dark void area down the middle and then you have a nice balance between the nebula over here and the nebulae over here um and that you know certain things pop really well like the crescent nebulae definitely pops right down there the color palette isn't going to be for everyone i know some people are really against this sort of fluorescent green kind of color palette but uh personally i think it works really well here uh and i think it also works really well for wide field sh o images i'm pretty sick at this point of the wide field red you know red dominated image uh that's of sickness that i just feel like is pretty boring and and red it actually doesn't show detail very well i feel like when you when you get a very red uh image it you can't see all this interesting structure wide field so i think that green is a very nice choice here for seeing the detail uh with a lot of clarity val captured andromeda this was of the stock nikon d5100 camera and samyang 135 f2 lens this was from a bordel nine balcony and it's 620 lights at two seconds each uh so very impressive that you got this much color and uh depth uh from a balcony at bordel nine i'm guessing andromeda must have been fairly high in the sky to get it like this uh val wanted me to address digital noise lines and wondered if they came down to not using darks okay so let's see so i brought up your uh just your stacked file and yeah this is called walking noise and shooting good quality darks does help because what happens is hot pixels um should be rejected somewhat by good quality darks and what this is is basically hot pixels and color model um spread across uh your stack once you once you stack the images it sort of forms these lines of noise so uh darks can help but also what can help is just actually many sessions at different rotation angles because then it will help break up the lines um so if if you have maybe five different rotation angles stacked together uh you won't get the the walking noise quite as much because the the noise will still be there but it'll be more random valentine captured m33 also known as the triangulum galaxy with a zenith star 61 telescope an opto long l pro filter and a sky watcher heq 5 mount and an asi 533 mc camera and this is about 90 minutes from bordel 6 uh and processed with deep sky stacker photoshop and topaz and i think this is looking pretty good uh valentine i think there's a little bit of green noise left in the galaxy and the background sky could be a little bit flatter uh you might check out seral for background extraction and color calibration okay vests sent in an image of the dragons of ara captured with a red cat 51 an asi 533 mc an opto long l extreme filter on an az eq 5 mount this was from bordel 6 it was processed in pics insight and in photoshop and the general impression here is really great vests the the square framing at this focal length really suits the subject quite well um it has nice flow uh in terms of framing uh with the this part right in the middle um but then also some interesting structures that lead you in uh into that my one uh critique of this image so if i zoom into the central part here you see how all these stars as well as even the dark parts of the nebula are all blue tinted so i'm not sure why that happened but it makes the center uh look not as good as it could because the stars are fairly neutral outside of there but then as soon as we get into this blue part the stars themselves all who should have white cores have blue cores it looks a little odd vince uh shot this image of orion with a nikon d3200 with a kit lens and this is 33 33 images at 1.3 seconds each stacked using dss to stack and photoshop in light room to process so it looks good vince you even got a little bit of the running man nebula in there and a bit of the overall shape of orion my two suggestions are see if you can color balance this a little bit more towards blue away from green and also the sky doesn't need to be quite this dark you can brighten it up a little bit and i think the picture will actually look better with a slightly brighter sky vlad captured the california nebula this was with a william optic zia 61 a canon t3i and a sky watch or az gti in ecu mode and vlad took about six hours of data from a portal aid sky using serial photoshop and noise exterminator to process vlad asked if there is a way to even out the background as he uh let's see probably i mean there's there's a lot of noise in there uh for six hours i would you could probably just darken the background too it looks a little bit um too blue maybe um so i need i feel like the background it's a little color balancing and a little bit of uh darkening um vlad also asked if he is extracting all he can from this data uh you know i think i think so there's not a huge amount you can do with the california nebula more than what you've done here um if unless you go with full narrowband filters uh but because it's very red uh generally um as you see here um so but you've pulled out a lot of the interesting structures already and also uh i think you've you've got all of the full shape of it too all the extended wispy bits so i think that all looks uh good if you can just sort of darken the background a bit and make it a little uh the background a little less noisy i think that'll finish the picture well okay widowmaker 895 captured the andromeda galaxy with a stock nikon d5300 uh 300 millimeter tear at 3s lens and a star adventurer mount this was processed in ciril graxpert and gimp and widowmaker 895 said his main issue was dealing with chromatic aberrations so let's take a look so i guess you did deal with them successfully though because i don't really see any um although the star field does look a little bit just sort of like all white stars there's not a huge amount of star color left um you said you would prefer a more natural look to the galaxy uh i guess a more natural look you wouldn't go this intense with the blues i'd say that's the main thing that looks unnatural about it um and it's also a little bit high key high contrast um so if you go with a slightly brighter sky background a slightly less bright andromeda and not quite this saturation on the blues that's gonna make it more natural will the snack captured the pleiades from a star adventurer tracker a samyang 135 lens and a canon 60d this is two hours from a portal seven sky and processed in ciril and photoshop and will the snack said his issue is weird blue dust away from the pleiades there actually is a lot of weird blue dust away from the pleiades in this area of the sky i've found that too so i wouldn't worry about that um let's zoom in a little bit my suggestion is your star field it looks a little strange it's like this small star seemed a little green which i'm not used to on canon cameras um i don't know if it's chromatic aberration or what but uh yeah just the general color of the small stars looks a little green let's see if we can fix it with camera raw filter or yeah i think camera camera raw filter can fix it um other than that i think uh probably just more data would help and uh keep going okay white check uh captured andromeda with an exos ixos to go to mount a modified can is canon 600d and a canon ef 75 to 300 millimeter kit lens and white check mentioned the stars are not the sharpest with this lens so he down sampled to keep the artifacts from being too obvious yeah that's a good strategy uh looks pretty sharp uh from here and i like your uh framing here with the tall vertical crop with the andromeda the jaunty angle that looks really nice and also i like the level of saturation in the image uh so i usually don't show two images but white check sent in two and i just had something interesting to say about uh this one so this one uh white check took with the 18 to 55 uh millimeter kit lens which has never been my favorite lens in terms of astrophotography because it's it's very soft and low contrast and i i think the reason uh this one looks a lot more over processed compared to this one is because you were trying to sort of fix some of those problems with the lens but what i would do instead for a shot like the one you have here is just take your 75 to 300 at 75 millimeters and do a mosaic of this same area you could probably do it in three panels and your milky way shot will be much much better much sharper much more interesting star field with the 75 to 300 even if you put in the same amount of time and just do it as a mosaic so that's my suggestion lemesh captured the dark shark nebula with an asi 294 mm zwo filters an aryan serious mount and an aryan 203 millimeter f 3.9 newtonian and this was shot from a portal three sky processed in pics insight so this is really awesome lemesh i am a great admirer of deep integrations of dark nebulae close up like this uh that's sort of one of my favorite kinds of things when it comes to astrophotography the only thing that jumped out of me as a suggestion is uh i don't know if this is just me but if we look in this corner and this corner right here and right here you have two bright corners while these corners are dark and it just looks odd to me somehow like um if i know that it's just the natural dust but it's just too bad that the natural dust doesn't extend this way rather than like this and this because it looks sort of like overcorrection of flats or something so i think what i would do and i'm not saying you should do this because it probably just is my little pet peeve is i would crop at least one of these out and maybe both of them do something like that just because it keeps drawing my eye away from the main focus of the shark okay zachery captured the Pleiades with a stock nikon d7100 star adventurer gti and a ryan ed80cf refractor and this is shot from portal five and is processed with serral star net gimp and topaz denoise and zachery mentions he's struggling with star trailing and wonders if he should get auto guiding so this is a star adventurer gti with an a ryan ed millimeter refractor so yes i would say the gti is okay for your scope weight uh but the focal length you're thinking you know at that focal length i think you definitely want auto guiding um but despite your sort of issues with star trailing it's not too noticeable in this one and you really have to zoom in to see that there's a little up and down star trailing and i don't think it really affected critical sharpness at all i also really like this uh framing we sort of i talked about this framing being nice earlier with one of the other critiques okay and this image comes from zachery p from texas who was randomly selected as the winner of our camera giveaway so congrats again to zachery zachery captured this image the rosette nebula with a stock canon t6i a star adventurer tracker and an sv bony sv 48p telescope and so my main suggestions with this one are to check out serral for background extraction because it looks a little uneven and there's a fair amount you know of gradient in the bottom and on the right and then i would just go darker with the edit in general so you have some room on the left here and i would just go i would go down something like that i think would look better okay enjoy the new camera zachery i'll get that out to you very soon here tomorrow zafar captured the ryan belt and sword with a canon 550 d a canon 80 to 200 millimeter zoom lens and all on a star adventurer tracker this was processed with deep sky stacker and photoshop and zafar said they he had issues with sharpness and focus um so let's zoom in and take a look yeah that's uh i can see what you mean that's definitely out of focus one way you can tell uh is often looking at some of the stars you see how they have sort of dark cores whenever you see that you know you're out of focus the other sort of giveaway is there should be even more small dim stars in this kind of field so once you get used to what a star field should look like with that particular lens you'll start recognizing when you're pretty far out of focus um but the colors look good here so once you've figured out uh focus and you know you figured and you got that down i think you're uh going to take a really great shot or maybe you already have at this point okay zixen uh zixen took this single exposure uh of his family and the milky way of course and this was with this canon 60 astro modified and a rookie non 14 millimeter f2.8 lens zixen said he didn't want to take two photos because it wouldn't be as real to do that to you know do a sky replacement he wanted it all in one photo but then the problem is getting both his family and the milky way into sharp focus uh and you know you can put the family further away but then the family appears too small in the photo so let's take a look here the milky way looks in focus and your family looks in focus and i'm guessing what you did is you just cropped um and that's probably what i would do uh you know cropped in to get them uh bigger in the frame um i'm not sure if there's any real answer to your your problem um you're using the right kind of lens a wide angle lens with a small what's called the hyper focal distance where it's going to reach infinity focus is the right tool for the job so i think uh this is is about as good as you can and hope can hope for with that kind of uh constraint of trying to get something in focus in the foreground and in infinity so very nice photo i think you've done a nice job with that i guess the only thing i would suggest i mean this is uh sort of silly but if you have brighter colors for the family they'll stand out more i think the the hand with the pointing is quite good but the three of the family members seem to be wearing black jackets so then they get a little bit lost in the foreground uh so if you had a little bit brighter colors i think that might work even better okay zamenco captured andromeda with an evo star 72 ed a star adventurer tracker and a cannon 600 d this is two hours 14 minutes from a portal for sky and zamenco asks if the star trailing is from periodic error from the tracker uh so a 72 millimeter refractor on a star adventurer probably yeah that is a lot to for it to handle and so there's two possibilities it could be that the star tracker can handle that focal length uh and you just need a better polar alignment or the other possibility is the periodic error is too much for it to handle that focal length and you would need auto guiding to correct it in any case i would probably suggest you do get auto guiding if you want to stick with that setup because uh i think you're going to have star trailing uh probably a lot with that kind of setup unless you get the auto guiding as far as the processing uh i feel the stars look a little bit too over sharpened for my taste i'd prefer a natural more natural star profile with a fuzzy halo uh but the galaxy uh looks quite good um so i think i would just work on the star processing for this one okay and zool uh zool is a 16 year old astrophotographer who recently got started took this photo of andromeda with a nikon d 3500 on a stationary tripod untracked the images 600 photos stacked at four seconds each and was processed with gimp i think it looks quite nice zool and uh if we zoom in it looks like you have a little bit of star trailing so i think four seconds might have been a little too long if you want to avoid that now there's tradeoffs to having a little star trailing your signal to noise ratio will be a little better but you'll um see sort of some lost detail in the deep sky object because there's a little bit of blur there um the other thing i'd say about a star field with star trailing is it does actually help to see star color and you have a very nice colorful star field there because the the pixels of the star are spread across more pixels um but generally i i like to avoid star trailing and untracked so i would maybe drop it down uh to two seconds or something to avoid this and i think if you get the same amount of time uh so you took 600 photos if you did 1200 photos two seconds each i think you would get a similar uh result uh in terms of signal to noise but the photo would just be a little bit sharper but your colors are quite good and i think that means that you have a nice dark sky to work under so i really hope that uh you can keep going with astrophotography and i'll see more from you in the next critique okay that's it for the 150k subscribers critique video we got through 360 hopefully in 12 hours and thank you for all of your patience uh in waiting for this to come out and for sending in all of these beautiful photos i really enjoyed looking at each and every one and i hope you all continue in your astrophotography journeys till next time clear skies this has been nico carver nebula photos